O-Pee-Chee
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O-Pee-Chee was a 20th-century Canadian company that produced candy, and later trading cards. It was started in London, Ontario in 1911 by two brothers, John and Duncan McDermid. The name was taken from Opechee, the robin's name in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem The Song of Hiawatha.
Like a number of candy companies in the U.S., O-Pee-Chee got into the business of selling sports cards with bubblegum, producing cards of ice hockey players as early as 1933. It continued making hockey cards into the early years of World War II and briefly tried a 40-card set of baseball cards in 1937.
After the war, O-Pee-Chee got back into the trading card industry by making arrangements with Topps, a leading U.S. maker of trading cards, for a license to print and distribute Topps products in Canada. This began in 1965 with baseball cards, with the O-Pee-Chee cards simply a rebranded version of the Topps design and marked "Printed in Canada" on the back. In 1968, the license was extended to hockey, and O-Pee-Chee also began producing cards for Canadian football, something Topps had been doing earlier. Similarly, O-Pee-Chee periodically distributed other Topps-originated products, usually editorial trading cards such as Wacky Packages.
Following the inception of the Montreal Expos franchise, in 1970 O-Pee-Chee began adding French-language text to the backs of its baseball cards. The practice of making bilingual cards had already been established for hockey. While O-Pee-Chee baseball sets were typically smaller than their Topps counterparts, its hockey sets for the Canadian market were larger. O-Pee-Chee also occasionally produced independent card sets of particular interest to Canadian collectors, such as one for the 1973 centennial of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The 1994 baseball strike and the accompanying damage to the baseball card industry hit O-Pee-Chee particularly hard. The company first announced that it would get out of the card business and refocus its efforts on candy. Then in 1996, it was bought up by Nestlé.
Topps obtained the rights to use the O-Pee-Chee company name and briefly kept it alive, shortened to OPC, as a subsidiary brand for sports cards. However, the departure of the Expos for Washington, D.C. and the 2004-05 NHL lockout took away much of the motivation for a separate Canadian brand and caused Topps to give up its license to make hockey cards altogether.
External links
- [O-Pee-Chee Central] collectors site
- [Tribute to O-Pee-Chee baseball cards]
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