1976 Mastro auction
 

Here's an auction by Bill Mastro from the October 15, 1976 Sports Collector's Digest. I'm not sure whether this was his first auction of this size; I'm thinking probably not, because he had been active in the hobby for a while then, and always had sale ads in SCD around then. I wonder where that Uzit Tinker is now; there can't be too many of them out there.

http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...60223_0001.jpg

OK, I knew I posted too soon, because the previous issue of SCD (9/30/76) had another auction by Mastro. In the issue before that (9/15/76), he had been selling a T206 set, minus, Wagner, Plank, and Magie, for $900. And in the issue before that (8/30/76), he wrote a column about his friendship with veteran collector Frank Nagy, whose daughter Mastro almost married. Our boy was all over SCD in the mid-70s, as I think I've mentioned before.

http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...60223_0002.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...60223_0003.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...60223_0004.jpg

do you think mastro was looking to marry for the cards?

Well, he did joke that that might be the only way he would get a T206 Wagner, so maybe... :rolleyes: But then he bought a Wagner for $1500 in 1973 and at one point had two of them, so that probably caused him to lose interest in Nagy's daughter...

In retrospect you can almost feel the greed festering.

yup!

I had the opposite impression, of someone who really loved cards and the personal friendships that seemed more prevalent in a face-to-face era.

I'd often operated under an assumption that at one time (closer to their playing careers) Mays was revered as much as Mantle. Looking at the pricing on their cards, it appears to be true. Somewhere after price guides took off, Mays started dropping behind Mantle.
I feel that one day, it may pick back up.

You've got to wonder, was shilling on his mind during the 70s? :( I know I'm no the only person to think about that.

Satisfaction Guaranteed!!

oops, accidental double post

Well, Mastro says in the above article that he met Frank Nagy at the second annual Detroit convention, which was in 1971. And in Mike Anderson's account of that convention in The Ballcard Collector, which I posted here (http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218371), Anderson mentions Irv Lerner shilling his own lots in the nightly auction to drive the prices higher. So Mastro definitely had a front-row seat at an early instance of shilling, whether or not he got the idea there.

And in response to some of the other posts in this thread, I don't think it does much good to view Mastro as a one-dimensional villain, incapable of positive human emotion. I'm sure he did love collecting and the cards themselves, and I have no reason to doubt that his friendship with Nagy and affection for his family was genuine. But Mastro does describe himself in the article as "a little rich kid from Jersey", and he obviously had quite a bit of money to throw around given that he set a new record by spending $1500 for a Wagner at the age of 19 (see here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217776). So money was always a big part of collecting for him, and when the amounts of money grew exponentially in later years, the lure of cash obviously seduced him into doing bad stuff.

I had one... back around 2001.
I was told by a Dear Friend
That He believed that it came from Black Mass,
"I think BM needs a new nickname ":rolleyes:

I sold it on the BST...
So, a Net54'er was Mr. Tinker's Next Collector Protector!

+1--I'm sure he loved the cards. We're all such a complex mixture bottled into one being.

Happy collecting,

Larry