I am appealing to the Interwebs for help in solving what has become a family mystery. Unlike most Jewish family stories, this doesn’t involve food, potential injury or Florida; this is about a bobblehead doll. The very first bobblehead doll, in particular.
During 1960 and 1961, a series of 15 bobble heads were made representing 12 Major League Teams and 3 Pacific Coast League teams. They are made of a (now) brittle plaster or soft clay/ceramic mixture, much denser and more poorly weighted than today’s acrylic bobbles. Some time during the last 1960s, an aunt (I think) gave this Minnesota Twins bobble to me as a gift, and I’ve had it since. It sat on a shelf for the better part of 15 years, then in a drawer, and has remarkably few dings or chips.
I have no idea how it ended up with my family. I have four theories: (1) someone visited the Twin Cities in 1961 and got this as a stadium give-away, which seems unlikely for a variety of reasons; (2) a visitor from Minnesota brought this as a gift for one of my cousins, and my aunt gave it to me after it sat on his (or her) shelf for half a decade, which is somewhat less unlikely but still requires more Jewish geography than Google Maps would support or (3) they were sold in other Major League Ballparks, and a cousin bought it on a summer outing, with it ending up in my hands much in the manner of my previous idea or (4) the distributor or manufacturer tried to leverage local Topps distribution and left a sample in my grandfather’s general store (the source of my pasteboard empire in the day), and my uncle (who worked in, and later owned the store) brought it home, where my aunt passed it along to me.
Option (4) makes the most sense, as my sole recollection of the bobble is getting it at that particular aunt’s house, and nobody (that I know of) had family west of the Delaware River, let alone the Big Muddy. If we were getting in the car to visit, it was a trip to the deli and perhaps the beach, but not a baseball game in Minneapolis.
If you, gentle reader, know any of the backstory of the 1960-1961 colored base bobble heads, leave a comment. I’m looking for data on how they were distributed or sold, how a Twin ended up on the right coast, and clues to a reasonable chain of possession that ended above my desk, where all of my sports memories have lived for decades.
