38. Some Mysteries Surrounding Armour Coins Solved ??

There have been some key questions that have lingered for many of us who started seriously collecting Armour coins around the time EBay came into being in the late 1990s. Some of those questions were answered a few weeks ago when I stumbled onto 2 articles that were written in 1989 and 1998 by someone named Richard Clothier.

The first article by Clothier was in the TAMS Journal (Tokens and medals Journal ) in Feb of 1989 entitled "Armour Baseball Tokens"
 Clothier describes how Ken Uran at Kenly plastics in Clinton Indiana approached the sausage division of Armour with a plan to insert plastic baseball tokens into their hot dog packs. The deal was signed and Kenly acquired the necessary players permissions and got the permission of the food and drug administration to insert these plastic coins near the food.

Clothier claims that the (24) 1955 players were produced in (23) color variations. He claims there were 16 color variations in 1959 and states that "some new color variations occurred in 1960 but they were more limited than the 1955 run" . More on this later.........

So the coins were produced at one factory (that's all they had) and delivered to he Armour packaging factories from one source. All of he colors were made in the same plant. In fact he states that "many of the odd colors were created accidentally during the change in production run from one standard color to another"

I completely disagree with this statement no matter who made it. As I showed a few blogs ago these colors come from red, yellow, navy blue, black and white. Since here were no white coins in any year or back coins in 1959 or 1960, the addition of these colors was intentional not accidental. Accidental produced the swirled coins but did not produce gold or silver or tan. More than likely that was the factory workers having fun making new colors.

Many of us have wondered why there were no coins in 1956, 1957 and 1958...Well Clothier claims the Armour advertising agency convinced Armour not to do the same give-a-way two years in a row. By 1959 however, he claims the grocery outlets convinced them to issue more coins.

Interestingly, Clothier adds that a 1961 set was planned, but had to be scrapped because changes in the hot dog packaging equipment made it "impossible to meet FDA requirements"

One more line in the article really opened my eyes "Incredible as it may seem, Kenly produced more plastic baseball tokens for Armour in 1955 then the United States mint did dimes."  The claim is that Kenly produced 40,000,000 that's right 40 million coins per year for Armour. Several of us have wondered whether that made any sense at all. Well, the population of the US in 1955 was around 100 million and if we assume 4 persons per household that's 25 million families. Armour was without doubt a national company so they had access to all of them. If the give-a-way lasted 10 weeks in he summer that's 4 million families a week that needed to buy a pack of hot dogs or roughly 1 out of 6 families in the US. Don't know about you, but we had hot dogs and Campbells pork & beans night once a week in our house.

When Clothier wrote his second article in 1998 in "Fun Money"..  In this article he states "There are about 600 uniquely different Armour coins when you consider all players, all years and all color variations" (download a copy here: http://s88204154.onlinehome.us/apms/warehouse/FM10.pdf )

Not sure where he got the 600 number from at all. There are far more than that. If we take the original (24) players from 1955 and the claimed 23 colors that's  552 unique coins all by itself without 1959 and 1960. If Clothier knew about any players NOT being made in any specific colors he did not share that in either article.

He claims the most common of all the coins are the 1959 aaron group (aaron, ashburn, blasingame, cerv, fox, malzone, robinson, sievers, skinner and triandos) in the common colors (red, navy blue, royal blue, green and orange). I would tend to agree.

Clothier offers that the common colors of each year ".. far outnumber he scarcer colors such as gold, black, silver, tan, pink, cream, two-tone, off white and see through" In the article Clothier claims that "...a collector named Doug Stultz wrote to me with more information about the coins."
I checked with Doug and he does not recall the article or ever contacting Richard Clothier                        (WHO SAYS FAKE NEWS HASN'T BEEN AROUND FOREVER ?)

So lets assume Clothier came across the now infamous Stultz article in Feb 1987 Sports Collectors Digest. Doug never mentioned how many colors existed from each year and while he did list colors he had seen for each year, did not then, and does not now, agree with ever having seen coins that were "two-tone, off white or see through".....but....., from the names Clothier gives the colors in his 1998 article many of them match what Doug described in 1987.

When several of us tried to track down the current status of Kenly plastics we found that it had mysteriously burned to the ground in 1961 and is currently listed as a EPA toxic waste site. Can it really be a coincidence that the year the Armour contract was canceled the plant mysteriously burns to the ground ??

THE TERRE HAUTE TRIBUNE __ -3 FINAL EDITION Vol. CXXXIV—No. 143. Terre Haute, Ind., Saturday, October 21, 1961.

 

FIRE LEVELS PLASTICS FIRM

Kenly Co. Factory Is Total Loss .....The blaze was discovered in the northeast corner of the warehouse about 3:35 a.m. and, when firemen arrived a few minutes later, “was all afire inside and ready to fall in,” according to Assistant Chief John Dolan. Rapid spread of the flames was attributed to the chemical nature of the plastic materials which, according to firemen, “burns more rapidly as heat becomes more intense.” ...... The loss was estimated at more than $200,000, all machinery, stored finished products and the nine-year- old building being lost

So here is the totally unsubstantiated Kenly plastics rumor that I have just started. Kenly was ready to produce the 1961 armour coin set and in fact was developing prototypes in the fall of 1960 (the molds have to be ready to go if your making 40 million of anything) When they were informed by Armour that the FDA had put a hold on the deal they realized that this would bankrupt them. They then hired one of Tony " big tuna" Accardo's men in Chicago to come down and torch the facility. Before burning his factory to the ground for the insurance money, some of the Kenly production workers brought home buckets full of the 1961 armour coins for their kids but these, as of yet, have not turned up in the sports hobby. .....just kidding.......


NOW....back to the issue of how many different 1955 coins there are...

1998 Clothier Color List for 1955 Armour Coins

[with best guess 2018 equivalent names in ( ) ]

 

common -medium rare (10): Dk Blue (navy), Aqua, light green (pale grn), red, orange, yellow (lemon yellow), black, dk red, pale yellow (pale chalky yellow), bright yellow

rare (12): lime green, pale orange, pale red, baby blue (sky blue ?), royal blue (azure ?), golden yellow (dk yellow), cream, pink, gold, tan, silver, burnt orange, dk green

Here is my up to date list of 1955 colors with the proviso that a color is not official till there are at least 3-5 confirmed pieces of the exact same color (must be dead nuts on the same)

2018  ArmourPhil Color List for 1955 Armour Coins

common -medium rare (10): dark red, red, orange, chalky pale yellow, lemon yellow, dark yellow, pale green, aqua, navy blue, black
rare (12): dk red - trans, pale orange, peach, dk green, lime green, azure blue, sky blue, Wisconsin blue, tan, yellow/grn, gold, silver

Even if we conclude that either cream or pink are what we now call peach that still leaves several of his colors unaccounted for. Your thoughts on this or other Armour issues, as always, are welcomed .......