Back in February 2025, I published an article titled The Enigmatic Cincinnati Reds Burger Beer Sets, where I explored the different Reds photo series often lumped under the Burger Beer brand. I broke them into two main groups: those that explicitly mention Burger Beer and those that don’t but are typically assumed to be part of the Burger promotions due to similarities in design and distribution.
Of all the series, the one issued between 1960 and 1964 was the most questionable to me.
As I wrote then:
This series is the most suspect to me; with so many acknowledged variations, it’s hard to believe they were all associated with Burger Beer. But they share the same large (8-1/2″ x 11″) format with white borders. Many of the photos were reissued year after year with cropping changes and aren’t usually listed separately in the checklist, so any checklist is likely incomplete and only grouped based on format. Lemke wrote that they all have two lines of type on the front, the player’s name and team, with blank backs. Some players have up to six different poses. He also noted that it might be feasible for a dedicated Reds collector, who has all the cards or photos, to break the set down into its component parts based on player selection and uniform to date them. A decade ago, the checklist stood at 57 player/pose combinations.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that back in April, collector Moe Ryan had left a comment on the piece that changes everything. To summarize, Moe explained that they were definitely a Burger Beer release. When he was a kid several stores in the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area had window displays with this series of cards. The displays featured a large picture of Crosley Field in the middle, accompanied by cards on either side. Most of the time, they were stapled to the display, but sometimes they had slits for all four corners for the photo to slide into.
After reading Moe’s comment, I emailed him for more details. He graciously followed up and even provided a photo of one of these displays, courtesy of Mark Fugate, owner of A Sports Gallery.
The display clearly shows the 1960–64 style photos surrounding a large center image of Crosley Field. It’s exactly as Moe explained. He said he remembered them vividly from his childhood and had no doubt they were distributed as a Burger Beer Promotion, so he didn’t think someone had pasted new cards onto an old sheet.
You can see that the Waite Hoyt card on the display has text under his name, while the 1958-59 copy did not.
Moe added that these displays still appear at major card shows in the Cincinnati area, where they’re usually priced between $1,000 and $1,500.
That price range speaks to their regional popularity and scarcity. And for those of us who doubted the Burger Beer link due to the lack of branding in the photos themselves, this physical display, along with Moe’s firsthand memory, fills in that gap. I think the 1960–64 series can now be comfortably grouped with the rest of the Burger Beer Reds issues, and the variations which once cast doubt can now be seen as evidence of a long-running, evolving local promotion. Special thanks to Moe Ryan and Mark Fugate.
Happy Collecting!
P.S. Here are a pair of photos showing the stapled cards on either side of the display.
Be First to Comment