1971 MILK DUDS BUD HARRELSON
We children of the ’70s needed to have something on which to spend our hard-earned dimes when it was not baseball-card season.
My personal choice was to visit the local Ha-Cha and Park Island stationery stores and load up on my favorite candies: Bazooka Big Buddy, Spree (the smaller tablets in a paper package), Razzles (because through some order of witchcraft, first it was a candy, and then it was a gum), and Milk Duds.
Milk Duds were introduced in 1926– the “Duds” part of the name was derived from the inability of the original manufacturer to form perfect round pellets of chocolate-coated caramel.
They were produced under the Holloway name until 1986, when Leaf purchased the business. Nestle then bought out Leaf in 1996, and changed the recipe in 2008, replacing real cocoa butter with a series of cheaper oils. So, yuck…
In 1971, Holloway issued a set of 69 fully licensed sepia-colored player cards on the backs of Milk Duds boxes. The blank-backed cards measured 2.5” x 3.5” when cut from the box, but a large number can still be found today in complete-box form, like this Bud Harrelson specimen. (I suspect that a fairly sizable cache of these unused boxes made it out of the Holloway factory and into the hands of the nascent collecting community.)
The majority of the photos in the set were presented in portrait format, but the following players were pictured in a landscape layout: Johnny Bench, Willie Davis, Felix Millan, Pete Rose, and Bobby Tolan. I’ll leave it to the conspiracy theorists among you to imagine why there is a preponderance of Cincinnati Reds on that list…
There were three basic variations of captions below the italicized player names. Some cards, like the Harrelson, indicated the player’s status as a member of the 1970 All-Star team; other cards contained the player’s position and team affiliation; the third variety listed a somewhat arcane and random statistic (e.g., 619 lifetime RBIs for the aforementioned Willie Davis).
Finally, there were three spelling errors in the set, all of which went uncorrected: Mel Stottlemyre (“Stottlemyer”), Claude Osteen (“Claud”), and Glenn Beckert (“Glen”).
I remember having a couple of these, although I cut them away from the box. Don’t have them anymore but in hindsight I do not regret the decision to make it a more traditional size.
Bud Harrelson was my favorite player when I was a kid. Don’t recall the Milk Dud packages.
Harrelson made the All-Star team in 1970 and 1971. Were these Milk Dud cards based on the 1970 or 1971 All Star Game?
Thanks for the comment, Bill. These cards represent players who appeared in the 1970 AS Game.