http://tinyurl.com/yny8zh

I learned to play chess with my cousin on a set like that back in '85
(we were 10 years old and the set belonged to our grandmother). A few
months later when I entered the 5th grade, my teacher was also the
chess coach and he had a bunch of sets like that kicking around the
room for kids to play during breaks and such (he had a wooden Drueke
set that we could only use when playing against him).

Whitman Publishing Company also supplied those exact pieces, and you
could get them in a set that included a folding dark brown and buff
colored board which went great with those pieces -
http://tinyurl.com/ykaenx. That was what my grandmother had, and me and
my cousin wanted a set just like it, but by '85, at least around here,
they were nowhere to be found. The only thing we could find in every
store we looked in was those damnable Pressman sets with the tiny, ugly
pieces (they were Staunton, but a bad rendition of Staunton) and the
same type of folding red and black checkerboard as comes in cheap
checkers sets. I noticed that those are still being sold to this day -
http://www.pressmantoy.com/ChessCheckersBk.html

It is a shame that you can't get those Milton Bradley / Whitman pieces
new in any old store anymore. They were dirt cheap (being hollow
plastic and all) and had a reasonable size (3 1/8" king). The design
was also a very good rendition of Staunton (the knights are
particularly well done), resulting in excellent playability on the
cheap. I don't know how many times over the years that I have been here
or there (usually around the holidays), and the subject of chess comes
up and no one has a set. So someone says, "Well let's just go to the
store and get a cheap set.", and all you can find are those gawdawful
tiny Pressman sets which border on being unplayable.