The Allen Ginter Project : Card #27 N12 Fruits

I just got three more of these in the mail and the set is getting really close to completion. I still have some older cards I received two months ago I still don't have writeups for yet, so it looks like my new box of Heritage will be opened ssssslllllooooooowwwwwwlllllyyy again to get some posts out of my draft folder. Here's the first of the three, from the set N12 Fruits.

I got damn lucky when I stumbled on this card. First of all, I hate this set. It's entirely too cute for my tastes and some of the cards frankly disgust me. The cutesy wootsy little girl with her face smeared with huckleberries puts me into a diabetic shock. These cards are also scarce and expensive. They are from a later series put out after the merger of all the major cigarette companies as you can tell from the line "Branch of the American Tobacco Company" on the back. The thing about a monopoly is that without competition, there's no more need for innovative promotions to get people to buy your product over the competitor. Mainly because there IS no competitor. After the merger a few more sets came out here and there, but not nearly as many as before. That's why there are virtually no major baseball card sets until Teddy Roosevelt starting busting trusts resulting in the card renaissance of 1909. That's right, T.R. is indirectly responsible for the T206 set. That's one of the reasons why he's my favorite president, and he should be yours too. Teddy Roosevelt for President in '08! So what if I'm 100 years too late, a guy can dream...

Onto the card. The story behind this one is kind of neat and I actually believe it this time. I got it from Nodak Nook (I don't know what the heck that means either) who got it from Grandma's estate. Yeah right, another grandma story. This one has a bit of authenticity to it though, the cards were supposedly nailed to grandma's trunk. That's right, nailed. You can see it better on the back then the front, but there are two definite nail holes in this thing. All the rest of the cards they had for sale were nailed in a similar fashion, so I'm going to guess that the story's legit. Not even my hyper-cynicism could see someone nailing cards to the wall for a story to help sell some cards. The card is also one of the least obnoxious in the set. No cute little girls mugging for the camera, just someone in some sort of native dress holding a strange little fruit called a sour sop. I've never head of it before, it's apparently used mostly for juice and ice cream. I can be a bit of a sour sop myself so this is an appropriate card for the set. Got a good deal on it too, 5 bucks plus shipping. I also won another card from this seller (coming soon) so combined shipping even. Not bad for a card that I had only previously seen slabbed and costing much more than my price range.


I had some difficulty deciding on my mandatory weird pop culture reference for this set. I thought maybe showcasing the best song from the Kennedy's best album, but I figured that was a little hardcore for such a bucolic set. Comedy seems like a better bet. There's always Mitch Hedberg from Dr. Katz, but there's only one or two fruit jokes in the set. Eddie Izzard has a good bit on supermarket fruit, and I stumbled across a classic Spike Milligan bit I'd never seen before while searching for all this stuff. But no, that was a bit too silly. This set while saccharine sweet, has a dark side to it. To some, it may as well be the N3 Arms of All Nations set. These cute little girls are actually deadly assassins! That's why we must all learn to defend ourselves from the dangers of fresh fruit!