Several of my recent hobby history posts have been about the history of specific set, or the hobby's knowledge of specific sets. This time I thought it might be fun to take a snapshot of the hobby as it was at a specific moment of the past, as seen through hobby publications. So, today we're going to go back in time exactly 50 years, to July 1967.
It was not a particularly good moment for the organized hobby of card/sports collecting. After nice growth in the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s that saw some excellent research and the launches of several new hobby publications, by 1967 most of these publications had ceased operating or were in danger of doing so, usually for financial reasons by also sometimes for personal reasons, because they were mostly one- or two-person operations with shoestring budgets. Specifically:
* Sport Fan had ceased publication in 1961 due to the health problems of publisher Bob Jaspersen, though it would start up again in 1970.
* Two dealer-run hobby publications, Gordon Taylor's Card Comments and Woody Gelman's The Card Collector, had stopped in 1961 and 1964 respectively (see my post about them here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=233392), and a pair of collector-run publications, Sports Gazette and Collector's Digest, had folded after April 1965 and August 1966 respectively.
* A couple of others, The Sports Collector and Sports Line, each lasted a half-dozen issues in the first half of the 1960s but were long gone by 1967.
* The Sport Hobbyist, which had been launched by Charles Brooks in 1956 and published some good research in the following years, ceased publication after November 1964, though co-publisher Frank Nagy eventually continued running his mail auctions under the name "Frank's Auction Corner", sometimes with short articles accompanying them. (See below.)
* The Sports Trader, which was launched in September 1964 by Richard Burns, thrived briefly in the mid-1960s as the undisputed leader among hobby publications, at one point exceeding 70 pages in length. But Burns had to suspend publication for several months when his National Guard unit was called up, and an attempt to shift from a mimeographed format to a typeset publication on newsprint in 1966 proved to be financially disastrous. After the May 1967 issue (the last on newsprint), The Sports Trader went back on hiatus for several months, and would not restart until September.
Of the handful of card-collecting publications that were around in July 1967, the oldest and most widely circulated by far was Card Collector's Bulletin, which had been around continuously since 1939, under the editorship of Charles Bray since 1949. It devoted a lot of space to postcards and non-sport cards, but it still had a respectable amount of baseball card content by such writers as Buck Barker and Lionel Carter. In the June 1, 1967 issue, the lead article was Barker's "Two Can Live Cheaper Than One", about ballpark postcards of parks that housed two teams in different leagues (such as St. Louis's Sportsman's Park). On the front page of the August 1, 1967 issue (scanned below), Barker had an article about playing cards, along with an interview by Fanny Troyer with artist Jerry Clapsaddle. On the inside, though, there were plenty of ads by baseball card collectors, some of which I've scanned. There's a full-page ad by Elwood Scharf, with his wantlist of Exhibit cards and other baseball sets; wantlists by Tom Collier and Wirt Gammon; and a full-page ad by Frank Nagy, offering his 30-card set of "Sport Hobbyist Famous Baseball Cards" (black-and-white reprints of famous cards, arguably the first reprints) and lots and sets of cards for $8 apiece or two for $15. This issue also has want ads by John England, Charles Blazina, and Goodwin Goldfaden, and an ad by James Lowe for his postcard journal, "Deltiology".
But 17 of the issue's 28 pages were taken up by the auction, with 917 lots, and another two pages were taken up with the prices realized from the previous auction. About half of the lots in the auction were postcards, but there were some baseball cards. I've scanned below the two pages with most of the baseball cards, with Bray's estimated price for each lot. I looked at the prices realized in the following issue, and they're mostly not too different from the estimates, though some of the lots and sets went for more (mostly those in nice condition), and some (mostly those in worse shape) went for significantly less. Lot 518, a mint set of 1951 Topps Redbacks went for the estimate of $8.00; lot 515, a mint lot of 317 1951 Bowman baseball (7 short of the set) went for $28.00, below the estimate of $47.55; lots 508 through 511 of mostly mint T206s (NL, AL, SL, and minor league) went for $35.25, $29.50, $36.00, and $17.25, the first three of which were above the estimates. A mint set of 1954 Topps baseball (lot 537) went for $12.00, well under the estimate of $30. Similarly, lots 550-554, mint sets of 1958 Topps, 1957 Topps, 1959 Topps, 1955 Topps, and 1955 Bowman baseball went for $11.25, $14.50, $13.50, $9.75, and $9.00, well under the estimates. Of interest are the T205 short prints (lots 529, 530, 531), all of which went for more than the estimates. Vaughan, Karger, and Kleinow in poor condition went for $6.10, twice the estimate of $3.00; Joss in Ex went for $1.75; and Bresnahan mouth open went for $2.25, the latter two above the estimates of $1.00.
Above I mentioned Frank Nagy and his Frank's Auction Corner. I don't have the issue that was out in July 1967, but below is the first page of issue #4, which was mailed in May 1967, with an auction ending date of June 20, 1967. As you can see from the first paragraph, Nagy worked at Detroit Edison, and his job often didn't leave him enough time for hobby activities around this time. (The riots that hit Detroit that summer undoubtedly didn't help.) Here he gives the addresses of some hobby card publications, including the above-mentioned Sports Trader plus two discussed below, George Martin and Steve Mitchell, publishers of The Ballcard Collector and Sports Collectors' Journal. I'm not sure what publications Al Wick and Raymond Dow were putting out; maybe auctions similar to Nagy's?
I haven't scanned any pages of the auction itself, which has 1176 lots, the bulk of which are programs, publications, books, photos, autographs, and other memorabilia from all different sports, with no estimated prices. There are about 100 sets of recent non-sports cards and many lots of non-sport cards going back to the 1930s, including a lot of 112 Horrors of War cards. As far as sports cards, Nagy had most of the post-1954 baseball, football, basketball, and hockey sets, and about 80 non-set lots of sports cards, mostly postwar but including some strip cards, a couple of lots of T206s and T205s with back damage from scrapbook removal, and some 1939-41 Play Balls. There are no estimated prices and I don't have prices realized, so I don't know what Nagy was getting for these.
Of the publishers listed by Nagy, George Martin had launched The Ballcard Collector in September 1966. With The Sports Trader on temporary hiatus after a period of erratic publication, The Ballcard Collector stepped into the void over the course of 1967 to become the top sports card publication. Below is the cover of the July 1967 issue and the inside front cover, with an article on card companies by Fred J. Taylor and a couple of ads.
After this there is an article on Japanese baseball cards by Mel Bailey and one on boxing memorabilia by Elliott Harvith, neither of which I've scanned here. (Elliott is still active in the hobby; I just bought something from him on eBay a couple of months ago.) But I scanned each of the next nine pages, because there's so much interesting stuff in them, both the articles and the ads. There are errors and variations articles by both Bill Haber and Irv Lerner (whose copy of Ballcard Collector this is); and a nice article on W603 Sports Exchange photos by Ray Medeiros, who is still around and one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet. (I have Ray's 1947-1950 copies of Sports Exchange Trading Post, from which I've posted some articles here.)
Of particular interest is the two-page "Egan's Alley", in which Rich Egan explains why he hasn't been writing hobby articles lately. Starting in the spring of 1965, Egan had done a bunch of great research on card sets and published it in various hobby publications, mainly in The Sports Trader; in early 1966 he had published a booklet on T206, and he had started making ambitious plans to compile a new sports card catalog. Leon has a lot of Egan's papers from this period, some of which he posted in this thread back in 2011:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=144460). Egan eventually did publish the section on early candy and gum cards from his proposed catalog as a separate booklet in 1969, but he never finished the whole thing, and gradually drifted away from the hobby in the 1970s and 1980s before selling his collection in 2004 through Mastro. I will probably do a separate post on Egan one of these days.
