Night Owl Cards

I haven't always been thrilled by miniature versions of baseball cards. Sure, the 1975 Topps minis were a first love that flourishes to this day. But there have been times when I thought I was getting cheated by smaller cards. The example that has stayed with me all these years has to do with Kellogg's 3-D cards of the 1970s and early 1980s. For a collector in the '70s, Kellogg's was the only real alternative to Topps, not that we thought of it in those terms. Kellogg's cards were simply cool, strangely weird cards that you could pull directly out of the box of cereal that sat on the kitchen table. No need to go to a store at all -- well, mom had to go to the store, I guess. Nobody had invented a way for cereal boxes to magically appear on the table yet. Our only hope for accessing non-Topps cards were through buying the right kind of cereal. It was a pain-staking process. Hostess cards were already out of the question, because "that kind of junk"...