Right.  But not just any old gum.  I’m talking bubble gum back around the late 1930s; early Forties.

Okay.  

One kind came in a flat wrapper and inside was a slab of gum and a cardboard card.

The most popular were baseball cards.  There would be a photo of a player on one side and some info about him on the other.

I see them sold today in packages of several — or many — cards.

Yeah.  I see that too.  But where’s the fun in that?  We looked forward to being surprised by what we’d find inside.

Sort of like the Dixie-cup tops.

Right. And we would trade them.  If some kid had two of, say, Pete Reiser, and I had maybe two of Ted Williams, we might trade cards.  That was part of the fun.

Makes sense.

Sure.  And we might flip cards.

What’s that?

Well, two kids would get together with a bunch of cards, and one would take odds and the other evens, and then we’d each, at the same time, flip a card so it rotated over and over and landed on the ground with either the picture side or the stats side facing up.  If both cards were the same, the evens kid picked up both of them.

If the two were opposite — one picture side and one typing side — the odds kid would pick them up.

You wouldn’t want to give up a card you really wanted, would you?

No.  We’d save them.  But we would take a chance with a lesser card and maybe get one we would really want.

That figures.

Okay.  We’re half-way through now.  There was another kind of prize — if you want to call it that — wrapped inside with bubble gum:  flip books.

What were they?

They were a way to hold moving images in your hand.  Remember, that was even before television.  The only moving images were on the big screen in a movie theater.

Flip books were a bound set of sequential photographs that, when you thumbed through them rapidly, they looked like movies right there in your hand.

The ones in the bubble-gum package were small and in black and white, but they were still fun.  Here’s one of Luke Appling.

I put them together to make a complete baseball sequence.  So when I flipped them I had Bob Feller pitching.

Then Joe Medwick swinging.

And finally Luke Appling fielding the ball.

I said a complete sequence.  Actually it wasn’t complete.  I never could get a flip book with a first baseman making the putout.  But it was close enough.

Okay.  Enough with the bubble gum.  Next time I’ll find something else to talk about.

See you then.