1971 Los Angeles convention

[trdcrdkid]

In a previous post (here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218371) I posted an article from The Ballcard Collector about the third annual West Coast Sports Collectors Convention, held August 20-22, 1971. Like the previous two West Coast conventions, it was held at the home of Jim Nowell, and attended by a relatively small number of collectors (25) who gathered mainly to talk cards, buy/sell/trade amongst themselves, and get to know each other. This was also the model used by Crawford Foxwell for his first few Mid-Atlantic Sports Collectors Conventions, and by Mike Aronstein for his 1970 convention -- a small gathering at someone's house, of advanced collectors coming together for fellowship and trading.

The previous month, Ed Broder, co-organizer with Nowell of those early West Coast conventions (and apparently a Net54 member!), organized a show that was much more like what we now think of as card shows -- he rented a large room at a hotel, publicized the show through newspapers and TV, and opened it to the general public. This was the same basic model used by the organizers of the Midwest Sports Collectors Convention (the Detroit show), which soon became the largest show in the hobby. Broder's show, which took place July 11, 1971, attracted 130 people. Jim Nowell wrote a two-page account of the show in the August 1971 Ballcard Collector (#66), including some editorializing about the differences between the two types of conventions. Another attendee, Mike Thomas, who Nowell called "one of the up and coming collectors", wrote about the show in the August 1971 issue of the publication he edited, The Sport Collector's Gazette. Both of those articles are below, giving two slightly different perspectives on one of the earliest "modern" card shows in Southern California.