A Hair Off Square   custom cards

So as a huge Kansas City Royals fan and an enormous nerd I collect most Royals memorabilia. This includes the obvious, baseball cards but goes far beyond to magazines, programs, bats, autographs, posters and so on. One of the absolute coolest things I have stumbled across are dinner placemats from the late 1970’s.

These were the golden years of the Royals franchise, yeah there was 1985 but the late 70’s were the golden age. They featured usually 7 Royals players per placemat and they were given away once a week at Pizza Hut restaurants in 1978 and 1979. They had a plain ornate design on the back like you would normally see on a dinner placemat and the Royals players on the other side. Each year featured a set of 4 placemats, making a total of 8 placemats. The pictures of the Royals were drawings. They were done by acclaimed portrait artist John Boyd Martin. Martin has also done all of the Royals hall of fame plaques I believe. The hall of fame plaques are oil paintings, these Royals are more line drawings in full color and they are simply striking. They are extremely good. You can view Martin’s other artwork at his website here.

I have labored through garage sales, auctions and the halls of countless antique malls to put together a collection of these placemats. I am happy to say on October 14th I completed a full set of 8 of them for my brother. Now to work on my own set… but that is another subject. These were released before I was even born, so any information on them has been passed on to me. I have dug into the history of the Royals to seek these out and provide information on them.

The bottom line is that there is barely a sniff of these things on the entire internet. No pictures, no mentions, none available on ebay auctions, they are just damn hard to find. My goal is to rectify this. I am attempting to write a thorough article on them to provide a background on these endlessly cool pieces. I will post a good picture of each of the eight here on my site, the first of which is below. I will detail them providing any information that I can. I strongly encourage anybody with additional information to provide it to me so it will be publicly available.

Here is the first of the eight:

Kansas City Royals placemat: left to right: Frank White, Darrell Porter, Hal McRae, Al Hrabosky, Fred Patek, Whitey Herzog. All drawings by John Boyd Martin.