70-year-old Darwin Day has had a rough year after his brother died of cancer earlier on in 2016. That prompted him to start cleaning out his suburban Dallas house, and the lifelong baseball fan found a complete collection of cards from the 1957 and 1958 seasons. And he also noticed this on the back of the cards too:
“WIN THESE SWELL PRIZES IN THE 4TH BAZOOKA BASEBALL CONTEST”
In the fine print, it never said there was a timeframe to enter the contest. So the enterprising Day decided to take a chance despite the 59-year gap between the contest beginning and the submission
“I was struck by the fact it didn’t have a year listed on the card,” he said to the Dallas Morning News. “It was a simpler time. You didn’t need a team of lawyers to do everything back then.”
He won, and the company sent him a Louisville Slugger glove as a prize.
“What did he get, those special X-ray glasses?” asked John Gilman, a friend of Day’s who joins him at Rangers games as well as at The Summit senior activity center in Grand Prairie.
“No, it’s a a Louisville Slugger glove,” Day said, as he showed the glove to a crowd of onlookers this week at The Summit.
“In a way, I did it in memory of my brother,” Day said. “His obit said he was a jokester.”
Because Day was tasked with cleaning out his brother’s house in Virginia after he passed away, he was able and motivated to clean his own house and find the collection of cards as well as the contest offer too.
“It was such a consuming job that it made me think that maybe I ought to clean out my own house,” he said. “So I did that, and I came across these cards.”
Day had a choice of three prizes after winning the contest, all exactly the same as they were in 1957 (though not 1957 era products): a chemistry lab, microscope or a glove. Other cards offered prizes that were certainly big deals in 1957, but wouldn’t quite get a young baseball fans adrenaline going in 2016: a “3-speed phonograph — a record player, in other words, or a “personal superhot AC-DC radio”.
“I thought, ‘Where in the world can you find a vacuum-tube radio or a three-speed phonograph?'” Day said.
Day is a newly minted Texas Rangers fan and leads tours of Globe Life Park while giving out Topps baseball cards to kids who answer baseball trivia questions correctly. So for the lifelong baseball fan Day, taking a chance on the dated but still ongoing baseball contest was an easy choice.
“When I found those cards and saw those contests, I said, ‘I just have to do this and see what happens.'”
