Anyone who has ever sorted through a lifetime’s worth of belongings knows it can be a monumental task. Darwin Day had to go through his brother’s things following his death and then decided to get his own house in order. In that process, he uncovered his childhood baseball card collection: hundreds of cards from the 1957 and 1958 Topps sets.
Among the ordinary pictures of players was one of the Bazooka contest cards that were inserted into packs in ’57. Youngsters were encouraged to guess the scores of a game played on a certain day. Those who submitted correct entries received one of three prizes. Winning was a bit of a long shot since you had to guess the exact score of the game but after looking over the rules, the 70-year-old Texas resident decided to have some fun.
The contest card, it seemed, had no printed deadline. At the time, Topps likely ignored or returned cards submitted after the games were played that season but Day decided to look up the scores of the games and send his card in—59 years later.
One Topps executive got a kick out of Day’s story, which he included in his submission, and a couple of weeks later, his prize arrived. Read about it in the Dallas Morning News.
One side note…if his card was in really nice shape, it was likely worth more by itself than what he got in return.
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