After hunting, fishing and horse racing, baseball was king. The first professional sport with which the common man could identify, by the 1870’s baseball was everywhere. Big cities had teams, small towns sported teams, ethnic groups fielded teams, businesses sponsored teams, and every boy child who could hit or throw hard had aspirations of fame and travel. In summer, everyone played. In winter, old men sat around stoves in their local cigar emporium and talked about feats and misses, heroes and goats.
No surprise that baseball would have a cigar box presence.
Baseball Themed Boxes
A National Cigar Museum Exhibit
© Tony Hyman
Players smoked cigars too. c1910
[10358]
And stood guard outside their favorite smoke shop.
[10288]
An 1874 tour of England by the Boston Red Stockings & Philadelphia Athletics was immortalized on a SHORTSTOP cigar box. The label became a stock offering in the Harris & Sons catalog. Cigars made in Jamestown, NY, Fact. 21, 27th Dist. [0811]
“The stuff in the box is 50¢ each, just like it says,” proclaimed the antique dealer, forever notorious for her insensitive vandalization of one of the great
baseball boxes of the 1880’s. Cigars by JH Lucke
Fact. 567 in Cincinnati. [0821]
Cigar maker A.F. “Tony” Boehme of Quincy, IL, loved basball and used this label featuring a female head in a ball. Fact. 262, 8th Illinois. 1902
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A few years later he changed his label to a more modern and more conventional baseball scene.
[0838]
Tony Boehm wasn’t the only baseball fan to love this particular label by L.E. Neuman.
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Top brand for CRACK TEAM suggests the brand was created to honor a particular local team.
[0837]
Not entirely conventional, the top brand
on Boehme’s 1908 offering gives us baseball
loving amphibians. There’s an inner with
this same illustration.
[0839]
Long before Budweiser’s talking frogs, the cigar industry had clever amphibians who smoked, waved flags and played baseball. Fact. 2, 26th NY 1880.
[5583]
So-called tramp art was rarely made by tramps. They were usually by home woodworkers or prisoners and based on soft-wooded ubiquitous cigar boxes, No longer in the NCM collection.
[6592]
This twin pyramid pedestal piece was built on a box by John Huerth, Fact. 101, 1st Wisconsin, honoring the Green Bay baseball club.
Traded to another collector. [6593]
The 1908 Cobleskill, NY, town baseball team with all the players identified. Cigars made in Harry Kelso’s Fact. 519, 14th Dist., located in Cobleskill.
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Kelso’s factory in 1908, the year of the box at left. One of these folks rolled those cigars. Photo purchased the same day as the box in two different antique stores about two miles apart.
[0890]
Full size label on a small box means some players are missing. Local baseball team sponsored by a patent medicine, the name of which appears to be a real photo print hand lettered on the negative.
[0834]
Widely reproduced photo of Babe Ruth as it first appeared in the newspapers. Ruth is allegedly rolling cigars, “learning a new craft.” a publicity gimmick as part of contract negotiations to get $20,000 for the 1920 season. Nov. 9, 1919. [10365]
In the 1930’s, Chicago Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett
became a spokesman for Evansville Indiana’s H.Fendrich Co.’s big seller.
[3839]
Hall of Famer Joe Tinker appeared on cigar boxes for a couple decades. This one dates from the late 1920’s. Only the crossed bats give away his occupation. Cigars made in Fact. 712 1st PA
by D. Kaltreider, Red Lion. [0870]
The most common modern baseball box honors another Hall of Fame player. Stock label with photo insert. Made for about 20 years in 40’s and 50’s by Erlinda Cigar Co., Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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