1971 West Coast and Detroit shows (and early hobby publicity) in Ballcard Collector

[trdcrdkid]

The October 1971 issue of The Ballcard Collector (#68) had back-to-back articles about the third annual West Coast Sports Collectors' Convention and the second annual Midwest Sports Collectors' Convention (the Detroit show), both of which took place the weekend of August 20-22, 1971. The article about the West Coast show is written by Jim Nowell, who hosted it in his house (!), and includes an interesting overview of 11 major card dealers as discussed by the attendees. The article about the Detroit show is written by Mike Anderson, who had a table there. (Both Nowell and Anderson regularly wrote for Ballcard Collector and other hobby publications.) The Anderson article on the Detroit show (then the biggest card show in the country) mentions a Wall Street Journal article that had appeared before the convention, and several TV crews who showed up. That WSJ article featured Dick Reuss, also a regular contributor to Ballcard Collector, and two issues later, in the second November 1971 issue (#70), Reuss wrote about his experiences with that article and the media onslaught it caused. I've posted all three of these articles below.

These articles, just like the others I've posted about shows of the early '70s, are an interesting snapshot of a time when the hobby was about to undergo big changes, though in 1971 many of those changes were barely perceptible. The media attention that so discombobulated Reuss was a pretty new thing for baseball card collectors, and it was only going to get more intense in the coming years.