Mary Lou Gula knows it’s going to be a long day.
Since starting her job on the floor of the Topps factory fourteen years ago, she’s worked on every part of the baseball card manufacturing process: card cutting, general help, the DF line, day coding. She even played Santa at the company Christmas party.
The two-story factory sprawls among the hills of Duryea, outside Scranton in eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country. Duryea has long been a town of miners and factory workers, first from the silk and cigar industries and now baseball cards. These 2.5-inch-by-3.5-inch slices of cardboard, initially included as giveaways in packs of cigarettes in the 1880s, have produced a collecting craze across the country. By 1992 sales will reach $1.5 billion, and soon after that, a confluence of forces—oversaturation of product, waning interest in baseball, the advent of the internet—will burst the bubble, sending baseball cards back to the dugout. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Right now, in late 1985, Topps is the flagship, and Duryea the flagship’s home.
The DF line, where Mary Lou is scheduled today, is especially grueling. No one even knows what the D and F stand for—they just know that the process of cracking twenty-five-pound loaves of cold pink bubblegum into individual sticks, loading them into the chutes of the DF machine, and stacking the finished packs of cards in boxes, all at a breakneck pace, mean sore feet and an achy back by the time happy hour rolls around.
Lowering herself into her car to drive the two blocks to the factory, Mary Lou’s mind jumps ahead eight hours, when she and her coworkers will clock out, walk through the factory doors, and make a critical decision for happy hour: turn right and walk half a mile to Town Tavern, or turn left and go half a mile to Litzi’s Lounge. Litzi’s will cash their checks at the bar, and, being a Thursday, it’s also payday. While Mary Lou has the masochistic habit of working doubles (can’t argue with the pay!), today she has first shift, the prime shift, and will be off by 3:30 p.m.
Arriving a few minutes early, Mary Lou pushes open the double doors of the factory. The scent of sugar immediately assaults her nostrils, sending a pang through her jaw. In another part of the building known as Hell’s Kitchen, latex, wax, rosin, calcium, and sugar are all mixed together in giant cauldrons to make one-ton batches of the famous bubblegum.
She waves to the security guard and walks down the long hallway of administrative offices, a tunnel of calm before emerging into the chaos of the open factory floor. A small but sturdy woman, she steels herself for the grind of the next eight hours. Yet a smile creeps across her face. This is, literally, her family: twelve of her relatives work here. It’s tough work, yeah, but it’s a collective struggle. When she was pregnant with each of her now-teenage kids, she worked right up until the day they were born.
Just like the players on the cards she manufactures, Mary Lou wears a uniform, except hers is stained with sugar instead of grass. Snapping the buttons on her knee-length white smock, the red italicized lettering of the Topps logo emblazoned in front, she thinks about hitting her target of 170 packs per minute, near the maximum capacity of a DF machine. She pulls on her red Topps baseball hat and walks from the locker room onto the cavernous factory floor, where she finds her post and greets Mona, her partner for the day.
Six weeks from now, these cards will sit under millions of Christmas trees, fifteen players per pack wrapped in red-white-and-blue wax paper, a slice of Americana and source of instant delight to the kids who will tear them open, hoping for a hometown player or superstar.
Mona stands at one end of the DF machine, one of twenty on the factory floor, and switches it on. It hums to life.
“Is it three thirty yet?” she asks as Mary Lou positions herself at the other end, ready to load.
“We’re hitting 170 packs today,” Mary Lou replies, glancing at the meter that measures their productivity.
She grabs a small pile of cards, feeding them into the machine’s A chute, and in a blur of muscle memory and coordination loads a stick of gum in the B chute almost simultaneously.
The machine combines all the elements of the pack—cards, sticks of gum, and special inserts—into a little stack and then pushes it onto an elevator, where a machine folds a sheet of wax paper around it. A heater melts the wax to seal the pack, which then slides along the conveyor to Mona, who places it in a box to be packed for shipment to the world.
As the wax paper wraps around that first set of cards, Mary Lou has no way of knowing that that pack holds any more significance than the thousands of others she has fed into DF machines over the years. She has no idea that rather than being unwrapped under a Christmas tree six weeks from now, it will remain sealed in storage, a forgotten time capsule waiting to be excavated. She has no idea that almost thirty years later, a sports archaeologist with a penchant for underdogs will come along and discover that time capsule, open it up, and then set off on a daring adventure to track down every player inside.
And she has no idea that one day she will meet that sports archaeologist in a smoky casino near Duryea and that that archaeologist will be me.