Photo of 5 Guys with a Wagner in the 70's
 

Hi Guys:

Going through some old photos. Found this shot from an early Detroit show in the mid 70's. All of us had a Wagner, thus the reason for the photo..

L-R Top Bill Mastro, Frank Nagy, Bill Haber ( for those that don't know, he wrote the backs of Topps cards back then)

Kneeling Mike Aronstein and yours truly. No comments about the hair please!! :>)

Also a Polariod SX-70 photo that is starting to crack of my Wagner with the rest of my set. Back then we put our cards on those sticky album pages with the plastic on top. UGH!!

Anyone else have some old photos?

Fred

:eek:

This is one of the best posts on here in quite sometime. Thanks for sharing, I can bet you there are still collections out there in the same binders and sheets.

The hobby had to be so much fun then, finds could be had, deals could be worked and novel idea you had shows and the stuff at the shows was for sale vs. a giant auction preview.

Thanks again!

Cheers,

John

P.S. Fred do you still have your Wagner of not do you know where it ended up?

Wagner
 

Hi John:

My Wagner went to Halper along with the rest of my collection at the time including my favorite cards of Konstanty, Stanky and Roberts from the Current All Stars.

It was Halper's first Wagner.

I never saw it again until 2012 when it showed up here:

http://www.goodwinandco.com/the-%E2%...-lot19548.aspx

I kinow it was mine by the faint crease in the upper right corner. Anyone know who consigned it to this auction?

Quite an increase in price from 1973 when I bought it for a then second highest price paid of $1100 to 2012 when it sold for 1.2M!!

Fred

Fred, that's such a great story. Konstanty, Stanky and Roberts too boot huh? So you liked easy stuff to collect. :)

Again just amazing.

Cheers,

John

Very cool post!!

I remember seeing my first Wagner at the rare book room of the New York Public Library. My dad Hank worked (actually still works) for the press so he got us special credentials to view the collection, which was donated by Burdick. The collection was stunning ... so many early period cards pasted into a book including OJs, Mayos, T206s and other series.

I was also surprised by the lack of security. It was basically here's the book would you like to sit in a closed room unattended for an unlimited period of time to view it?

Sadly several of the cards, I believe including the Wagner, disappeared from the original collection - although I'm told that the bulk of it is still intact.

Best,
Scott

Great picture! When I saw the post title and then that the pic was from Detroit I was hoping to see collector Jim Hamon in there. I used to marvel at the picture of his Wagner card he had up in his Detroit area store.

Thank you for sharing. I'll agree with John it has been a while that we have had an interesting post. Those were the good old days when collecting was still for the most part collecting :)
You had a very nice Wagner back then.
Thank you for sharing it with us, great post.

"Kneeling Mike Aronstein and yours truly. No comments about the hair please!! :>)"

Hey, no comments about the hair but look at those pants!!! :p Just kidding, thanks for sharing this.

1 wedding ring visible...hence reinforcing the vintage card collector demographic...and the early 70's were well before the processed food epidemic causing rampant obesity!

"Hey Mike, what are you wearing to the convention today?"
"Great, me too!!"
Great pic and story , thanks for sharing

Really cool post. Thanks for sharing. :)

Oldschool cool. Thanks for sharing!

Awesome post!!!

Agreed. Love anything from the 70's. Cool post.

I remember having some pants similar to those you are wearing. Along with my Traxx K mart sneakers and my Planet of the Apes belt.

1972
 

I remember ordering the 1972 Topps Baseball set through the Sport Hobbyist.
When I received the set there was an issue of the old Sport Hobbyist with a article about the Detroit show, I wanted to go so bad but I was only 15, being from Connecticut my parents would've never let me go, included with the sport hobbyist was a couple of the diamond matchbooks from the 1930's, I still have the set, the sport Hobbyist and the matchbooks. I'll always remember the picture of Frank Nagy in his basement with I think a viceroy cigarette in his mouth.

john-

Great post! Thanks for sharing.
JimB

Best post since long time here. Really catch my attention. I enjoy saw old picture of cards and collector and also ready story of the old time wagner purchase.

thanks for sharing these pic and this story.

I hope all of your wagners are still working fine. :D

Nagy and mastro is now out of thr hobby....

you are still in the hobby but didn t still have your wagner..

anyone know for the 2 other collector if they are still in the hobby and if they still own their wagner ?

Jim Hamon had/has a great collection, have not talked to him years. A great guy.


Bought many Detroit cards from Mastro and Nagy at those early shows.


Joe.

Ha Great Post. You look Great Fred!

Ricky Y

Whoa. :eek:

Great photos -- thanks for sharing!

Nelson,
Both Nagy and Haber are deceased. Haber died tragically of an asthma attack, as, I believe, did Mastro's original auction partner Don Steinbach, another legendary collector. As for Pete Ullman's wedding ring observation, I know both Nagy and Haber were married.

Yeah, both Nagy and Haber were married as was Aronstein. He had one of the very early hobby get togethers at his home in late 69 early 70 that I attended. He gave us all a small uncut sheet of a TCMA issue and we all signed them and we each got one. Still have it, Irv lerner, Dennis Graye, Tom Collier, Mike Aronstein, Bill Mastro, Crawford Foxwell, Bill Zekus, Bob and Mike Jasperson, Bruce Yeko, Dan Dischley, Bill Himmelman, Jim MacAllister among others attended.

Later I attended a few of Crawford Foxwell's similar get togethers at his place in MD.

Don't know if Mike still has his Wagner. That's where mine came from. We were at a convention in Cincinnati that Mike did not attend. He turned up the Wagner in Long Island, the guy would not sell it to him, but let him call the convention and auction it off there. I sold my entire table at the show, had just gotten my tax refund, won the auction for $1100!

We drove straight back to L.I. to pick it up after the show.

Fred

Fred

Thx a lot fred for all these memories

Thanks
 

Fred,
Thanks for showing and sharing with us some of your private memories.
It's great to hear someone who has such good memories and, at least it sounds like, little regrets of his involvement in our hobby. Thanks for putting a face with a name on Mr. Nagy for me. I own a few of his e98s now.
Take care,
Tim Kindler

Cool post! Thanks for sharing with us all!

Hey FredL

Those pants were "HAPPENING"!!

Picked up lots of chicks wearing them. NOT!

Fred

Cool thread. Ron Hammon passed away too....I think about 15 20 yrs now. The wags he had displayed in his store "Great American Pastime", was one I was very familiar with, (he didn't own it though).....seems to have vanished from the hobby scene. When Ron had his "Tally Hall" store I bought a whole book of 52 topps hi#s for 5 bucks a piece. They were actually placed back to back in pages. He was cool and had a collection that was staggering.....I was so envious that he had the little glendale salesman booklet that I needed for years. As I recall Ron was a retired Det. cop and had a third shop part owned by the fire commissioner. Ron's son was big into cards too...dont know what happened to him. Great picture.

nice story david
thanks

opps ! Hammons first name was Jim......my bad. dave:o

this post is by far...
 

extremely cool....wow.....I was collecting in the late 70's and my dream was/still is to own one......

I really enjoyed this thread

Me too.

I don't own a Wagner even though I was around the hobby in the 70s. Guess I just didn't try hard enough to convince my parents to spend a few thousand on one card. My bad.


When I was 14 I put a classified ad in The Trader Speaks and have saved all of my correspondence to this day. Here's a note from Mr. Nagy where he mentions the importance of condition and how he has many Goudeys and old cards in excellent and mint conditions....

Peter

Thanks for showing the letter. Postmark looks like 1973 on your letter. I was 9 then and wouldn't have known how to place an ad.

Living in Miami, Florida, there was not the baseball card collecting that you find up north US. I got the Sports Hobbyist couple of times, but my lack of funds and overall being inept, didn't lead me in that direction. My dream was collecting Topps Baseball and Laughlin cards in mid and late 1970's. Settled for the 7-11 or the "tobacco shop" for getting new stuff.

Either way, love insight to what went on in the 70's collecting of prewar.

Peter....
 

Thanks again on that Howard....:) I still saved the peeled back!! card is sick.....my parents were thinking about it(wagner) when I was a kid......I didn't get there, but one day I will:D

Ron was Jim's son. I talked to Jim in 2002 when I moved back to Michigan from Vegas. So, if he passed must have been in the last 12 years.

Joe

Great pictures, and a great thread! :eek: Thank you, Fred!

Fred

Here is a photo of me in elementary school in 1974. At this time of my life I was dreaming. Prewar was a bit off. I hate to think of what pants I was wearing then, hidden by the table.

This was my project on dinosaurs for school science fair.

I give you credit for posting that photo, Joe. :)

While we're on the subject of crazy pants (circa Christmas 1977, but that was a bad ASS shirt, you have to admit!)....

Chuck- I'm watching Empire Strikes Back right now! it's on Spike TV. epic flick.

Fred- awesome pics. thanks for sharing.

PS- T-shirt spells Vader wrong, interesting.

Haha! Never noticed that, Michael. :) I wish I still had it!

Cool....an error card...oh, uh, I mean an error shirt......The Vadar variation

I think I had the same pants. I was 6 at the time.

In 1973 my dad was 11. :D

First, OP, thanks for sharing that is an awesome story of the times.

Wonkaticket - I am here to tell you no truer words have ever been spoken. There is still a lot of cards out there to be found. And rare ones...

Whew.. when i clicked on this..i imagined 5 guys hanging in their underwear smoking fat cigars. Awesome piece of americana.

Woh Alex, glad you added the smiley face.

So I see your dad is older than me.

He is.

This is the best thread I've seen in quite a while. Really enjoyed it, thanks!

Do you ever wish you would've held onto it and then sold it now? Not sure what you sold it for originally but dang...1.2 million off of an $1100 investment. That would've been a helluva payout.

How many kids in the '70s even cared about tobacco cards? All I cared about was finding Tigers players in my Topps packs. If I had somehow stumbled upon a Wagner, I would have traded it straight up for a 1979 Aurelio Rodriguez without batting an eye.

http://img.beckett.com/images/items_...6077/front.jpg

Hi Jeff:

At the time I sold my collection to Halper he was just coming into the hobby and was paying three times what anyone else was paying. The fact that at the time I was living about 20 minutes from him enabled him to visit and make it easy to move the collection.

Also I was soon to be married and wanted to start a business down the line. All of the above helped in my decision to sell.

Sure I have thought about it over the years. However the way I look at it is, if I held onto the Wagner I would have been baseball card "rich" and cash "poor".

I took the $$ I got from the collection and eventually turned it into a business that supported my family and me through the years, allowed me to own my own home mortgage free, put two kids through college loan free and have a net worth now north of what the Wagner sold for.

I would have not been able to start the business without the money I got for the collection. So, in the long run I think I came out OK.

BUT it sure would be nice to have my collection back, and as mentioned Wagner was not even my favorite card, nor were the tobacco cards. I know that is heresy here on Net 54!! I was REALLY into Topps stuff, test sets etc., odd ball issues and regionals.

Fred

Boy, does THAT hit close to home.

Sell when you can, not when you have to.:)

What a great thread

FRED M. : I KNOW YOU HAVE NO NEED FOR ANYONE TO EXPRESS THIS TO YOU, BUT AFTER READING YOUR VERY MOVING REFLECTION OF YOUR PAST, I AM REMINDED OF THE WORDS AND SPIRIT OF THE KNIGHT FROM "INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE"-----------"YOU HAVE CHOSEN.....WISELY."

SALUTE. ---Brian Powell

Enjoyable thread. Thanks for sharing Fred.

In about '73, when we were in 7th grade, some friends and I placed ads in The Trader Speaks and a new magazine called Sports Collectors Digest, offering something like 50 '71 Topps for a T206, or 75 '70 Topps for a T205, etc.
We thought we might get one or two, but the first week we got blitzed with T205's and T206's. We had to go thru the neighborhood and put signs up at school offering to buy collections just to fill the demand. All worked out fine, and we each ended up with about 150 T206's each and about 50-60 T205's. But it was a bit stressful the first few weeks filling the orders.

I love your story Anthony, that's entrepreneurship at its best! I can picture you and your friends scrambling to meet the demand, that's great.

RC