One of the best things about picking up collections of vintage memorabilia is ending up with products which are unique and scarce.
One of the hardest things about picking up collections of vintage memorabilia is figuring out what they heck you have your hands on because it can be so scarce and unique!
Enter the 1950s era Tom’s Peanuts Mini Baseball Pennants.
I recently bought a collection which included a bunch of memorabilia, ticket stubs, programs, and autographs which dated back to 1906. One of the pieces was a lot of 17 of these Tom’s Peanuts Mini Pennants. I didn’t know much about them at all, so I began researching the interwebs to try to find what exactly I had.
These were the 17 Tom’s Mini Pennants in my collection.
I started with an eBay search and it turned out just a couple results. One listing had identified these as “1958 Tom’s Peanuts Pennants” and included 16 teams, and it was also titled as a complete set. I compared the pennants to the ones in my collection and found a couple differences.
His had a San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers pennant, while my set had those teams still representing New York and Brooklyn. I also had both a Philadelphia Athletics and Kansas City Athletics pennant.
So it seems there were at least 19 different flags produced at some point. I reached out to see if anyone on Twitter had any more details about this product, and it seems there isn’t a whole lot known. Thanks to Mark and Cliff for providing their insight. It seems the consensus is that they were released as both product premiums as well as from direct orders found in magazine ads.
In addition to the MLB pennants, it seems there are also some collegiate teams represented. Currently, there is a Northwestern and Minnesota flag titled as a Tom’s Pennant, but there are several other listings of other Universities which label them as 1930s gum ball pennants but have pretty much the exact design as these 1950s pennants.
I could not find a definitive checklist or write up for the product, so hopefully we can continue to build this post out as we learn more! If you have any additional detail, pass it along so we can make this the definitive resource for Tom’s Peanut Mini Pennants!
I’ll close this out by posting a couple pictures from Jaragco’s eBay listing. He shows pics of the San Francisco and Los Angeles flags along with the original packaging they were received in!
16 Tom’s Peanuts Mini Pennants, including the San Francisco and Los Angeles variation
Tom’s Peanuts Mini Pennants Original Packaging