Net54baseball.com Forums - 1969: The dawn of card conventions

In the late 1960s, baseball card collecting as an organized hobby, and sports collecting more broadly, was growing rapidly, as shown by the proliferation of new hobby periodicals. Sport Trader (founded 1964) was the oldest, and it was joined by The Ballcard Collector (1966), Sport Collector's Journal (1967), Sports Collectors' News (February 1968), The Trader Speaks (November 1968), and Sports Advertiser's Journal (1969). But it was not until 1969 that collectors started gathering together in substantial groups to buy, sell, trade, and talk about cards -- which quickly led, within a few years, to major card shows that were open to the public. The following three brief articles from the pages of Sports Collectors' News in 1968-69 illustrate the dawn of the first real card conventions.

The first article, from the November 1968 SCN, is Fred Taylor's "Baseball Hobbyists' News" column, in which he discusses hobby trends. He mentions that "We have had a successful convention of sports collectors, national or local", but from the context it's pretty clear that he meant to write "We have NOT had a successful convention", because he immediately goes on to state that the record for most collectors in one place is five or six, at an attempted convention in Chicago around 1957. (I may post later about that attempted Chicago convention, which Charles Brooks wrote about at the time.) Of course, collectors had visited each other's homes before, and there had been small local gatherings such as the Philadelphia gatherings that Charles Bray wrote about in 1955 in Card Collector's Bulletin (which I posted here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218325), but as Taylor states, there had not been organized conventions for collectors.

That changed in 1969. I'm not certain which was the first of the numerous collecting conventions to take place that year, but the most prominent was the first annual West Coast Sports Collectors Convention, held on August 23, 1969 at the home of collector Jim Nowell, and organized by Nowell and Edward Broder. The second article below is a press release about that convention which appeared in the July 1969 Sports Collectors' News. At the time of that release, "nearly 20 collectors from as far as Michigan" had said they would attend, and the organizers printed up a program with a map, agenda, names and addresses of the participants, and "other timely information".

In the September-October 1969 Sports Collectors' News, editor Mike Bondarenko wrote an editorial declaring "This is the era of the convention", a development of which he heartily approved. (That's the third article below.) Bondarenko says that this trend has developed "just within the last year or so", and that he now has a hard time keeping up with the reports from all the conventions. The major conventions, presumably including Nowell and Broder's West Coast one, were "attended by a dozen or more collectors"! That seems ridiculously small to us now, but as Taylor's article from less than a year earlier had indicated, no collectors' gathering of anywhere near that size had happened before.

The following year saw a further proliferation of card conventions, including the legendary gathering at Mike Aronstein's house in March 1970 (which I posted an article about here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthr...23#post1499423) and the first Mid-Atlantic and Midwest (Detroit) conventions in 1970, which I posted about in this thread: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218560. There was also a Southern Sports Collectors Convention in St. Petersburg, Florida in June 1970, for which an announcement appears on the same page as Bondarenko's editorial below. The West Coast, Aronstein, and Mid-Atlantic conventions were all held at people's houses, which necessarily limited the number of participants and closed them off to outsiders. But the organizers of the St. Petersburg and Detroit conventions rented hotel rooms for several days and had celebrity guests, including sportswriter Fred Lieb in St. Petersburg and Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, who publicized the Detroit show on the radio. That publicity led to 25 or so members of the general public who just dropped in, in addition to the 40 advance registrations and 15-20 attendees who registered and paid at the door. (For convenience, I'm reposting Lloyd Toerpe's description of that first Detroit convention from the October 1970 Trader Speaks, which I originally posted in the other thread above.) Of course, this became the model for the card conventions that would proliferate and grow exponentially over the next few years, and for most of the 1970s the Detroit convention was the biggest in the country, until the first National in 1980. But it all started in 1969, the year of the convention.

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