From the 1970s through the 1990s, it seemed like you could find your favorite baseball stars on food product packaging everywhere you looked: supermarkets, corner stores, restaurants, and beyond. This past year, in an effort to capture a little more nostalgia, I set a goal to expand my own collection of these "food-issue" cards. In this series I'll show the specific examples I've acquired, and share a little bit of history about the food or beverage sponsor as well.
Previous entries can be found here.
It's November in the early 1990s, and it's been quite a weekend. You're excited about the Thanksgiving break that's coming up, and after school on Friday you headed to dad and stepmom's house to stay over. On Saturday morning you watched some cartoons and then went out to the driving range to whack some golf balls, which is always fun. Now it's Saturday night, and dad and stepmom are going out to dinner. By themselves.
Oh, to be a kid with a few hours of freedom, a TV, a Nintendo Entertainment System, and some food in the fridge.
The night starts out well. You take your plate of food out of the refrigerator, set it on the counter, and then go back in for the real star:
Stepmom bought a six-pack of Yoo-Hoo!
Glass bottles, twist-top, and everything. Oh, yes.
You tear one bottle out of the cardboard wrap and bring it with your dinner into the living room, where you power on the television encased in its big, furniture-like wooden cabinet, and eat your dinner to the sights and sounds of American Gladiators.
It's not long before you clean your plate, finish the Yoo-Hoo, and bring your dishes to the sink. Life is good, and you decide to go back into the fridge for a second Yoo-Hoo. I mean, The Eliminator challenge is coming up. If there's any time to drink a second bottle, it's while watching a Gladiator fire tennis balls out of an air cannon at contestants who are scampering through an obstacle course below.
Well, the battle ends in spectacular finish, as usual, and now you flip through the channels with gusto. (They've got cable TV here.) Soon you're on your third bottle of Yoo-Hoo.
Meanwhile, dad and stepmom have enjoyed a nice dinner, and after a little more conversation and relaxation, they start heading home. It's pretty late in the evening when they arrive and open the kitchen door. It's fairly dark inside, but they notice that the television in the living room is still on, so they walk through the kitchen to have a closer look.
And there you are.
On the floor. Face down. Sleeping hard. Three empty Yoo-Hoo bottles lined up next to each other on the fireplace hearth.
"You know it's rough when you've had a three-Yoo-Hoo night." stepmom exclaims.
Dad laughs under his breath.
The next thing you remember is waking up Sunday morning in your bed upstairs. You're not sure how you got there, but when you get out of bed and groggily walk downstairs, both dad and stepmom are sitting at the kitchen table, eagerly awaiting your arrival with smirks on their faces. You tell yourself that you'll just have to take the ribbing that's about to come.
What makes that ribbing a little easier is that the six-pack of Yoo-Hoo has revealed a bonus.
A set of baseball cards!
After the jokes subside, dad points out a special offer printed on the side of the six-pack: You can send away for a cello pack containing the entire 20-card set. (You must have missed it during your wild night.)
And if that Willie McCovey card up there is any indication, the set's going to be a good one. What an image. The smile. The sunshine. Blue sky. Bat and glove. Green grass. Stirrup socks. The pose. It's just all-around great. Doesn't matter that the Giants logos have been airbrushed out.
Here's the card back:
I like the alternating columns of red and blue text. It really helps you track the particular stat you want to track. (Actually, why haven't more trading cards utilized this design?) As for the rest of it, I think the yellow border works—not only because it's pretty thin and unobtrusive, but also because it's Yoo-Hoo's main color.
So let's get to the company now.
The Yoo-Hoo brand has been around since 1928, when a man named Natale Oivieri, a bottler of orange and raspberry sodas, thought to add some chocolate syrup to milk and bottle that, too. Over the next two or three decades, the drink became quite popular, and more bottling plants were opened.
Then, in 1960, the drink made its first baseball connection, when Yogi Berra became an official spokesman. Berra would appear in many of Yoo-Hoo's television commercials and print advertisements, along with other Yankee superstars like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. (There's a 5-card set of Yoo-Hoo Yankees cards from this era—distributed in the New York area with the purchase of a six-pack.)
I think the recipe for Yoo-Hoo at that time was a little more palatable. The formula that I remember from the 1990s consisted of water, corn syrup, whey, cocoa, and dry milk powder, which doesn't sound that appealing now. But back then, it sure was a treat.
Here's a commercial some of you might remember:
Good times there, friends. Good times.
Postscript
So far, this smorgasbord series has consisted of fictional stories featuring a young, card-collecting protagonist who is excited about various food-issue cards of the 1970s and '80s. The "three-Yoo-Hoo night" account that appears above, however, is different.
It actually happened.
To me.
In my card-collecting youth.
It's the first time in the series that one of the featured food-issue cards has brought back such a specific memory from those days. The only fictional part of the story involves the set of trading cards. My actual experience probably occurred two or three years before the 1993 Yoo-Hoo set appeared.
In other words, after my wild night, I took the good-natured poking from my dad and stepmom without the bonus of the baseball cards. I'm happy to have that McCovey card in my collection now, though.
So how about you readers and collectors?
Have you ever had a Yoo-Hoo? Think you might add one or two of the 1993 Yoo-Hoo cards to your collection?
Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!
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