Type Card Reflections 2017

[darwinbulldog]

There are three types I've examined pretty thoroughly for the first time this year and would like to post about. The first is mostly a recapitulation of a post I made here in August. The other two are new information.

1) The W575-1 Henry Johnson + Howard P Boyer stamp (one example known), which I already posted about back in August

2) The Kings Theatre back (found on both W573 and W575-1)

3) The W572 Garrety Dry Cleaners back

[darwinbulldog]

The usual Henry Johnson stamp reads as follows:

Henry A. Johnson,
Wholesale Confectioner,
1827 Bay St., Alameda
Phone Alameda 2785 W.

The other stamp replicates this format from everything we can see. Here's what I can make out and, in bold, what I have extrapolated to be the most likely missing text (after more time and effort than I would care to admit but which will become apparent if you continue reading on for some reason).

Howard P. Boyer,
Wholesale Candy,
??2 Thirty-Ninth St., Piedmont
Phone Piedmont 6149 W.

If each line is centered, there are three missing characters after the "BO," which gives this list of reasonable surnames, in order of descending frequency in the U.S. census:

Bowen
Boone
Booth
Boyer
Boyle
Boggs
Boyce
Bower
Bonds

When you search for each of these names, the only one that returns a clean result from Google is a current listing for a Howard P. Boyer who lives in Sacramento (i.e., also in Northern California, like the confectionery companies). Maybe that doesn't mean much, but it's enough for me to guess that Boyer is at least slightly more likely than any one of the other names on the list. The others are certainly possible, but Howard P. Boyer is my educated guess/working title for the type card type.

39th Street in Piedmont is quite short compared to most of the other numbered streets and seems always to have been this way from old maps of the area. It only runs up to about 1100, so the address here probably had only 3 digits.

The word Piedmont at the end of the line is assumed based on 1) amount of missing text we can extrapolate from the centering and 2) the format of the Henry Johnson stamp.

The placement of the presumptive P in Phone on the bottom line neatly lines up below the W in Wholesale, and the 9 in the address ends below a spot between the presumptive D and Y in Candy, leaving one missing character which should be either an E or a W (N and S are less likely but possible) to fall below the presumed comma. I don't know how their telephone exchange listings worked in the 1920s, but if you look at a map (or many maps as I have now), you'll see both that the Henry Johnson address is in fact located on the western half of the town of Alameda (distinct from the town of Alameda Island which actually occupies the same island) and that the entirety of 39th Street is on the western outskirts of Piedmont, so I'm guessing the missing character is a W.

And if anybody ever finds another one of these stamps we can see if I earned a passing grade for the detective work.

[darwinbulldog]

Thank you to Mike Frohme for sending these through the mail and allowing me to examine them in hand. Here, from that examination, is my assessment.
It appears to me that the cards are essentially rebacked (or extra-backed really). My guess is there was just one collector who glued a bunch of his cards onto some movie tickets, in 1925 presumably. Then someone cut them down to the length and width of the baseball cards, possibly many years later (or maybe the same day, who knows?). In any case I see two distinct card stock textures and shades between the baseball front and the theatre back and would guess that one would see just the regular E/W back on there if the ticket could be safely removed. The separate cardstock is most noticeable where the baseball card is heavily creased to the point of tearing. The theatre ticket stock, it is worth noting, is in solid condition and suggests that the baseball cards were already in rough shape when they were adhered to the tickets. I do not regard this as a back variation that should be cataloged but more a curiosity as a window onto something an old collector did with his cards once upon a time.

[darwinbulldog]

Three of these (all common players) showed up in Cincinnati earlier this year as part of an old collection purchased by a local card dealer. Here’s what I discovered before deciding to purchase the one that was listed on eBay. Garrety Dry Cleaners and Tailors ran an ad in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1930, so story checks out so far. I looked up the old Cincinnati telephone exchanges and found, lo and behold, the switchboard corresponding to the “CHerry 6332” exchange was in fact located in downtown Cincinnati just one mile from the 414 E. 5th St. address printed on the card. So what we’re dealing with here is either an extraordinarily well executed fake/fantasy card or a legitimate pre-war type card rarity.

With that information, I decided to purchase the card pictured, and once I had it in hand and examined it under magnification this confirmed my suspicion that it is a legitimate type. I bought one more of them (Chas. Hollocher), and another board member, who can identify himself if he wishes, bought the last one.

Garrety Dry Cleaners and Tailors, by the way, seems to have remained in business until the 1960s when all the property on the block was bought up by Procter & Gamble for their headquarters building – which is still there today.

[h2oya311]

Glenn - awesome detective work and great post. I have nothing to contribute to this thread, but I love reading about these discoveries and the research put in to classify these type cards! Cool stuff!

[darwinbulldog]

Thank you, Derek. Here's Hollocher, who led the league in G, PA, AB, H, and TB as a rookie then retired before he ever reached the 1000 hit plateau. Odd thing about the pencil notation in the border is he played 751 games at SS and 0 games at RF. Why write on your cards if you're not going to get it right? Cliff Heathcote was patrolling RF in Wrigley at the time. Same initials as Charlie Hollocher. Coincidence, or is that what threw off the card vandal? Beats me.

[Leon]

Thank you, Derek. Here's Hollocher, who led the league in G, PA, AB, H, and TB as a rookie then retired before he ever reached the 1000 hit plateau. Odd thing about the pencil notation in the border is he played 751 games at SS and 0 games at RF. Why write on your cards if you're not going to get it right? Cliff Heathcote was patrolling RF in Wrigley at the time. Same initials as Charlie Hollocher. Coincidence, or is that what threw off the card vandal? Beats me.

Nice work. Love the type cards. Maybe the notation was kids playing a game with them and assigning a field to them? Who knows on that...