GERMANSVILLE, LEHIGH COUNTY, Pa. — Christopher Sipos didn't expect to find what was on the kitchen counter when he got home from work last week.
But there it was.
“Yia Yia’s stuff,” said the Germansville man of his late-grandmother and former Whitehall resident Ninette Sipos' things his parents had dug out.
An early 1900s trading card, with a victorious red-breasted grosbeak, dinner caught, on the front. Around it, a white ribbon still tied in a bow.
“I believe it was just as she had kept it, possibly a gift from my grandfather, but probably just the way she stored it,”
There were more. Many more, and each featured a different bird, on a branch, in flight, or doing something special to that species.
“I thought it was from the 1960s. It looked more about what they were. Then I saw they were made until 1976. The copyright date on the card is 1915,” said Sipos, of Germansville.
When Sipos was a little boy and the phone would ring, chances were high that it was his grandmother, calling to tell him she had just seen another beautiful bird.
“She would always be calling, telling me, ‘you just missed an indigo bunting, or ‘you missed a male and female cardinal, it was great!” said the 19-year-old from Germansville.
Looking on the back of the card, Sipos found out its interesting history.
The cards were produced by the Church & Dwight Company, 27 Cedar Street, New York, New York and were sold at grocery stores inside of baking soda packages.
They were part of a series “Useful Birds of America” revealing that the cards were a set of 30 “sent on receipt of six cents in coin or stamps.”
Each card featured a different bird on the front and details, for example, its coloring, location, habitat, and who its enemy birds are.
At the bottom of each card's flip side in all capital letters is: FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, DO NOT DESTROY THE BIRDS.
The artist responsible for the beautiful intricately detailed images on the 2x3-inch trading cards was Louis Agassiz Fuertes, a naturalist painter and ornithologist from Ithaca, New York who went on to teach at Cornell University.
Fuertes was also a conservationist, thus the plight of the trading cards.
The Church & Dwight company website, features a brief synopsis of the campaign, and explains that, “due to their incredible popularity, over the next five decades many other promotional materials were created around the same theme. And, today, they are considered prized collectibles.”
Chris Sipos honors his Yia Yia in many ways now that he's a grown-up.
For one thing, he has a birdcall app, Merlin, on phone
“It's the only way I can learn bird sounds.”
He keeps what he calls a life list — how many bird species he’s seen.
“I just hit 160 the other day.”
What was it?
“A ruddy duck, around the Fogelsville quarry.
Her whole life she liked birds. Has an extensive collection of Lenox birds, kept in a display case from when I was a little kid.
“There are, like, 80 of them.”
Chris Sipos had already cherished his grandmother and the love of birds she instilled in him. He is a member of the Lehigh Valley Audubon Society, takes in nature, birds and their pleasing sounds on his many cycling excursions, and joins in on as many bird walks as he can fit into his schedule. He even helped clean up the beach at Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Anything for the birds.
Discovering the cards so close to Mother's Day made him cherish her memory even more.
He says Yia Yia Ninette Sipos liked cardinals and Carolina wrens, but the beautiful truth is, she liked all birds, and everyone she loved knew it. And they loved her — and still do — for it.
“Even on her headstone, we have three birds, which signifies the three grandchildren — I'm pretty sure they're cardinals,” he said.
Chris Sipos is the youngest of the three.
