NonSports Forum

Net54baseball.com
Welcome to Net54baseball.com. These forums are devoted to both Pre- and Post- war baseball cards and vintage memorabilia, as well as other sports. There is a separate section for Buying, Selling and Trading - the B/S/T area!! If you write anything concerning a person or company your full name needs to be in your post or obtainable from it. . Contact the moderator at leon@net54baseball.com should you have any questions or concerns. When you click on links to eBay on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network. Enjoy!
Net54baseball.com
Net54baseball.com
ebay GSB
T206s on eBay
Babe Ruth Cards on eBay
t206 Ty Cobb on eBay
Ty Cobb Cards on eBay
Lou Gehrig Cards on eBay
Baseball T201-T217 on eBay
Baseball E90-E107 on eBay
T205 Cards on eBay
Baseball Postcards on eBay
Goudey Cards on eBay
Baseball Memorabilia on eBay
Baseball Exhibit Cards on eBay
Baseball Strip Cards on eBay
Baseball Baking Cards on eBay
Sporting News Cards on eBay
Play Ball Cards on eBay
Joe DiMaggio Cards on eBay
Mickey Mantle Cards on eBay
Bowman 1951-1955 on eBay
Football Cards on eBay

Go Back   Net54baseball.com Forums > Net54baseball Main Forum - WWII & Older Baseball Cards > Net54baseball Vintage (WWII & Older) Baseball Cards & New Member Introductions

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old 07-22-2017, 10:34 PM
trdcrdkid's Avatar
trdcrdkid trdcrdkid is offline
David Kathman
member
 
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 1,554
Default Hobby history: The hobby 50 years ago, July 1967

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.









Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old 07-22-2017, 10:35 PM
trdcrdkid's Avatar
trdcrdkid trdcrdkid is offline
David Kathman
member
 
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 1,554
Default

The last of the hobby publishers mentioned by Nagy was Steve Mitchell, who had actually not yet launched his publication at the time Nagy was writing. Steve, who is a member of this board and another extremely nice guy, graduated from high school in the spring of 1967 and decided to launch his own hobby publication to compete with The Ballcard Collector. He called it Sports Collectors' Journal, and launched it in July 1967, almost exactly 50 years ago. Below is the front page, with Mitchell's editorial and the list of four writers he had recruited, two of whom appeared in the debut issue.



Below I've posted the next five pages of the issue, including a full-page want list from Gene Lebo (who started out co-publishing The Ballcard Collector with George Martin) and articles by Mike Wheat and Mike Bondarenko. I didn't scan the full-page ads by Frank Nagy and George Martin (Nagy's has the same content as his Card Collector's Bulletin ad posted above), but I did scan the Mail Bag, with encouraging letters that Mitchell had received from people he wrote to for help. Sports Collector's Journal would keep going for two years, publishing some quality material, before Steve was forced to suspend publication in 1969 when he was drafted. He attempted a brief revival in 1971-72 before becoming one of the founders of Sports Scoop, a great publication that unfortunately lasted less than two years in 1973-74.

July 1967 was a low point for the hobby in many ways, but things were going to get better, of course. In 1968, two long-running hobby publications made their debut: in March, Mike Bondarenko launched Sports Collectors' News, which lasted for the next decade (except for a three-year break from 1970-73), and in November Dan Dischley started The Trader Speaks, which he would publish for almost 15 years before selling it in August 1983. Of course, the early 1970s saw a major boom in the hobby after the doldrums of the 1960s, as baby boomers started getting enough money to try to recapture their youth through baseball cards. (It's more complicated than that, but demographics play a major role in any explanation.)






Reply With Quote
  #3  
Old 07-22-2017, 11:32 PM
KCRfan1 KCRfan1 is offline
Lou Simcoe
L0u Sim.coe
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Olathe KS
Posts: 1,712
Default

This is wonderful information and a great read! Thanks for posting!!!!
__________________
My new found obsession the t206!
Reply With Quote
  #4  
Old 07-23-2017, 06:40 AM
Jason's Avatar
Jason Jason is offline
Jason Wells
Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Richmond,Va
Posts: 2,682
Default

Great information as always David. What I got from the post was how eager they were to help each other any way they could.
Reply With Quote
  #5  
Old 07-23-2017, 06:58 AM
Leon's Avatar
Leon Leon is online now
Leon
peasant/forum owner
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: near Dallas
Posts: 34,198
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason View Post
Great information as always David. What I got from the post was how eager they were to help each other any way they could.
And that still goes on today with a lot of collectors.

Great stuff, thanks for posting it David.
__________________
Leon Luckey
Reply With Quote
  #6  
Old 07-23-2017, 06:59 AM
TCMA's Avatar
TCMA TCMA is offline
Andrew Aronstein
Member
 
Join Date: May 2014
Location: Peekskill, NY
Posts: 1,010
Default

"Bill Harbers errors and variations."
__________________
Visit TCMA Ltd. on Facebook!
Reply With Quote
  #7  
Old 07-23-2017, 08:08 AM
ALR-bishop ALR-bishop is offline
Al Richter
Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: San Antonio
Posts: 8,946
Default 1967



Last edited by ALR-bishop; 07-23-2017 at 08:11 AM.
Reply With Quote
  #8  
Old 07-23-2017, 08:33 AM
Nick55 Nick55 is offline
Nick J@yj@ck
member
 
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Fairfax, VA
Posts: 38
Default There are many similarities....

Thanks for posting the various publications from 1967. What I find most fascinating is there are many similarities in the hobby today to what the hobby was like in 1967. For instance, note the comment from one of the readers about the concern for kids being priced out of the hobby by the "card companies" charging a premium for certain cards. Note also the concern by one of the editors regarding false ads, with the inference that people are getting ripped off. On the positive side, I love the passion from many of the readers in 1967 on the hobby in general and how they are willing to help each other out. We see that today, of course. It's also interesting how message boards like this one have in essence replaced these old publications in many ways.

I tend to think collecting certain sets was easier back then in 1967 in terms of affordability, but I'm not as so convinced that is the case. Note in the publication shown in the latest post from Bishop that buying a complete set of 1952 Topps baseball would cost one about $175 ($35 for lower series, $90 for the high series, and by extrapolation, about $50 for the middle series). In today's dollars, that's over $1,200. That's certainly alot of money for a kid, but also for an adult making the median U.S. salary.

Anyway, that's just a few random thoughts. Thanks again for posting the articles.
Reply With Quote
  #9  
Old 07-23-2017, 03:41 PM
Den*nis O*Brien Den*nis O*Brien is offline
Den*nis O*Brien
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Northern Wisconsin
Posts: 493
Default A Big "Thank You"....

....to the OP for sharing this terrific reading material. I was interested in the Sell/Buy ads placed by Don Steinbach.
Reply With Quote
Reply



Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is On

Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Hobby history: More on the hobby in 1979 trdcrdkid Net54baseball Vintage (WWII & Older) Baseball Cards & New Member Introductions 1 06-30-2017 11:23 PM
Hobby history: The hobby in 1979 trdcrdkid Net54baseball Vintage (WWII & Older) Baseball Cards & New Member Introductions 6 06-27-2017 11:07 AM
Hobby history: Card dealers of the 1960s: James T. Elder (+ hobby drama, 1968-69) trdcrdkid Net54baseball Vintage (WWII & Older) Baseball Cards & New Member Introductions 12 03-08-2017 05:23 PM
New years in the hobby. GrayGhost Net54baseball Sports (Primarily) Vintage Memorabilia Forum incl. Game Used 3 01-01-2014 03:31 PM
The next five years- what do you see for the future of the hobby? sesop Net54baseball Vintage (WWII & Older) Baseball Cards & New Member Introductions 48 10-21-2012 09:11 PM


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 12:25 PM.


ebay GSB