The first time I actually saw a picture of the Beatles was in Newsweek magazine. The picture was of John Lennon and it was captioned “Top Cat.” The Grade 5 teacher brought a record to school and played it for us and we all laughed at the singing. (I can admit that now!) Of course after “The Ed Sullivan Show” I became an instant fan (probably because my father said, “Look at those dirty Beatles!) and wanted to have Beatle-everything.
The first thing to hit the stores in my small town were the teen magazines. I bought everyone I could with my paper route money. But then came the bubble gum cards. Yes, instead of baseball heroes and hockey guys you could buy a pack of tasteless gum and get the Beatles in black-and-white. These were available in early 1964 and showed the moptops in various poses and outfits that foreshadowed The Monkees. I guess the idea was to show them as funny and lovable - in old fashion bathing suits with big sun hats, e.g.
I had a pile of them in 1964. And unlike a lot of my baseball and hockey cards I never put the coddled pieces of cardboard in the spokes of my bicycle and never handled them with dirty hands. In fact you could still smell the bubble gum on them up until my mother consigned them to the place where my remaining images of Gordie Howe and Roger Maris went - the city dump. My mother was not sentimental about anything except for the lock of baby hair tape in a book somewhere.
I found out later that there were 5 series of the cards. The first three were black-and-white and numbered 1 through 64. The fourth also had 64 cards and was in a crude coloration. By the fifth series the guys were starting to relax and the posing was at a minimum. This was a 60-card, colored series called “Diary Card Series” and had a lot of shots of them in France.
No, I don’t even have the scent of bubble gum let alone one card left.
Stumble it!