[JimStinson]

In a previous thread I had mentioned about buying Ralph Winnie's autograph collection, Ralph was one of the "Old time collectors" as was Bill Zekus. I had first heard about Bill when assembling my "list" of good guys to deal with and guys to avoid when it came to autographs. Doug Averitt had told me when I first started collecting to ask around and assemble a list of reputable autograph people to deal with and then put all the lists together and then deal with the five that overlapped the most. It was as good an idea then as it is today. Well in the early to mid 1980's there were not that many baseball autograph dealers it was mostly a close knitt network of guys that mostly collected and traded autographs. Bill Zekus name ended up on the list. Bill started collecting in the early 1950's. He was in the insurance business and was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He lived in Fishkill New York. Most of his collecting was done in person at Ebbets field and at the Cooperstown induction weekends. And at some of the very first baseball card shows held in NYC where the average attendence on any given weekend might have been 20 people.
Bill was to later tell me stories of the in-person signing habits of "Dem Bums" back in the 1950's "Furillo was Nasty , Billy Loes was a flake Campy was a sweetheart, Jackie could be a little moody but always signed...etc" , Hall of Fame weekend he'd tell me about sitting up till the wee hours of the morning at the big hotel there in Cooperstown where the players used to stay hanging out in the lobby and listening to Satchel Paige and Casey Stengel. Or of the time two brothers walked into the show in downtown New York to sell their collection of autographed 1933 Goudey cards that they had collected in person in the 1930's when they were kids. Bill said that only four of the at that time less than a dozen people at the show had any interest (or money..smile) so they all agreed to just split the collection four ways and were shocked when the brothers started wheeling in handtrucks full of boxes of signed cards that they had packed in their station wagon, "If that happened today" he quibbed "Everyone in the room would have ripped each other to pieces".
I finally got to meet Bill Zekus when he moved to New Port Richey Florida and I was then living in Ocala, The main focus of his autograph collection was anyone who had played for the Dodgers and any Hall of Fame or possible future Hall of famers. I can't remember exactly but I think he had the autograph of every single player who had ever appeared on a Dodgers roster except for 6 or 7. Every other weekend I'd drive over to his house and he'd haul out a box of his duplicates , and I'd go through it and make a stack of the names I needed. He'd say "Make me an offer" , I always managed to spend between $1,000-$2,000 which was alot of money for autographs back then. Heck you could buy a Ty Cobb check for $35.00. I'd always ask him to bring out another box to go through and he would smile and say "Leave something for next time". You could see though that he didn;t have the same collecting fever that he used to. Several miles up the road a baseball card shop called "Talkin Baseball" had opened up and the owner a guy named Vince Antonucci who would one day be featured on "America's Most Wanted" quickly struck up a partnership with Ted Williams and somehow managed to convince Bill Zekus to let him sell his collection for him. Bill kept his Dodgers autographs and Vince got everything else. According to Bill he recieved a very small portion of the agreed upon sum, Williams and Vince split up their business arrangement with Ted Eventually spending millions of dollars in legal fees to recoup his loses. Zekus didn't talk alot about it and I didn;t ask. Around 1991, I had already moved west and got a phone call one day and Bill asked me if I wanted to buy the rest of his collection. I realized then that I had no idea of the size or scope of that portion of his collection that remained. For one week from 8 am until 6 pm I poured over what he had and eventually struck a deal. Once boxed it amounted to 400 POUNDS of autographed paper. It remains to this day the largest collection I've ever purchased all at one time.
Afterwards I tried to stay in touch but Bill's hobby changed to assembling model cars and he disliked talking about autographs "Too Commercial" he'd say. A few years ago I ended up in New Port Richey Florida and figured I'd give a call and hopefully drop in, His name was still in the directory and his wife answered the phone. She remembered my weekly visits , Bill had passed away several years earlier she said. "Those Lucky Strikes" he used to smoke finally caught up with him, she told me.
In my early collecting days I would always initial the reverse of an item so I could remember where it came from. Today if you ever come across the initials B.Z. in pencil on the back of an autograph, I was the one that put it there.