Cards and Vintage Things: The Matchbook Dating Game

 Stealing a title concept from Nine Pockets. Or I could have stolen Baseball Card Breakdown's Ignorable Filler Post as my matchbook posts don't generate much interest. But the latest matchbook lot I bought gave me an idea for a new series that may make them more interesting. Or less.

I actually bought three different lots from one eBay seller.

One lot was Matchoramas. These are oversized matchbooks (30- or 40-strike books) from the 1960s and 1970s with full-color photography. This lot was all hotels. I love the ones with the interiors, it really feels like stepping into a 1960s hotel room.

Another lot was of various New York State matchbooks. Some fun Long Island ones there including a long-gone strip club from a town right near me. Also I wonder if a certain Watertown-based reader might know the Crystal Restaurant. Note the four digit phone number!

But the big draw was several "dated" lots. Unlike baseball cards matchbooks are rarely dated; often it is hard to guess even what decade it is from. Every matchbook in this lot had at least a year, if not an actual date. These ranged from the 1930s to the 1980s, with most in the 1960s. Some highlights: my first Horn & Hardart (Automat restaurants) matchbook; a shiny matchbook from 1942, 1967 and 1969 calendars, an old Bell telephone matchbook, local supermarket ShopRite and the Garden City Fire Department, and a Coca-Cola 100th anniversary.

The dated matchbooks also gave me an idea for this blog. I thought it would be fun to pair up matchbooks with a specific date during the baseball season with the local player who had the best game that day.

To start off, here is a matchbook that sort of fits in. This matchbook from O'Brien's Restaurant in Waverly, NY was not printed with a date but someone stamped the back "August 2, 1963". August 2, 1963 was a light news day; headlines were primarily about reactions to the Nuclear Test Ban and some civil rights protests in Alabama. Waverly is on the NY/Pennsylvania border about halfway between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. On that date the Phillies, Pirates and Yankees all lost. The only "local" team to win was the Mets, who won 3-1 in 11 innings in Milwaukee. I don't have a card of Joe Hicks, who got the game-winning hit, but perhaps more impressive was Galen Cisco, who pitched ten innings without allowing an earned run to get the victory.