In my post the other day entitled "1969: The dawn of card conventions" (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218969), I posted some articles from Sports Collectors' News in 1968-69 concerning the then-new phenomenon of sports collecting "conventions", which at that point were basically just gatherings of a dozen or two collectors at someone's house. I then mentioned that in 1970, the number of such conventions started to proliferate, with some of them (the Midwest convention in Detroit, the Southern convention in St. Petersburg, Florida) starting to look more like modern card conventions -- held at a hotel, with celebrity guests, and the public invited to drop in.
The last article I included in that post was an editorial by Mike Bondarenko in the September-October 1969 Sports Collectors' News (actually published in November), in which he called conventions "the newest 'in' thing among sports collectors" and declared it "the era of the convention". Unfortunately, that turned out to be the last issue of Sports Collectors' News published until 1973, so Bondarenko wasn't able to report directly on the conventions that exploded in popularity over the next few years (though the same page as the editorial I posted included an announcement of the St. Petersburg convention already being planned by Irving Becker for the following June.) However, Dan Dischley, publisher of The Trader Speaks, was still around, and over the course of 1970 he did a pretty good job of reporting on the collecting conventions that popped up, either directly (in the case of Mike Aronstein's gathering) or through reports by others. I've posted these below.
First, in the February 1970 TTS, Dischley mentioned four conventions being planned for 1970, all of which I've mentioned in previous posts: Mike Aronstein's in New York state, Irving Becker's in Florida, Crawford Foxwell's Mid-Atlantic convention in Maryland, and Jim Nowell's second West Coast convention, the only one that was not a debut. Then in the April 1970 issue, Dischley reported on the March 15 convention at Mike Aronstein's house, which he had attended. I previously posted the account of that convention from The Ballcard Collector (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthr...23#post1499423), apparently written by an anonymous companion of Dennis Graye, who flew in from Detroit and stayed at Dischley's house the night before. In Dischley's account he mentions Graye staying at his house, but makes no mention of a companion, so I have to conclude that Graye wrote the Ballcard Collector article himself, from the perspective of his imaginary friend (or something).
I didn't post it below, but on the page following Dischley's account of the Aronstein convention is an announcement that the Mid-Atlantic Sports Collectors Convention would be April 25 and 26 at Crawford Foxwell's house in Cambridge, Maryland. In the May 1970 issue, Dischley passed along Foxwell's report of his successful convention, listing the names of the 14 collectors who attended, and also mentioned Irving Becker's upcoming Southern Collectors Convention in Florida. Then in the June 1970 issue, Dischley reprinted an article about the gathering that had appeared in the Cambridge, Maryland Daily Banner, and included a photo of nine of the attendees. I previously posted Foxwell's own account of his 1970 convention from The Ballcard Collector (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218560) and Dischley's account of Foxwell's 1971 convention (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showpos...1&postcount=14).
In the September 1970 TTS, Dischley passed along a report of Becker's Southern Sports Collectors Convention at a Howard Johnson's in St. Petersburg, Florida, attended by 12 collectors (listed), plus 15-20 members of the general public who stopped by due to the publicity in the local newspapers. He also mentions that the second West Coast Convention at Jim Nowell's house had gone well, with 28 collectors attending from as far away as Philadelphia. I can't find any longer accounts of either convention (some might have appeared in issues of Ballcard Collector that I don't have), but I posted an account of the 1971 West Coast show from Ballcard Collector in this thread:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218371.
Finally there was the first Midwest Sports Collectors Convention in Detroit, and Lloyd Toerpe's account of it that appeared in the October 1970 Trader Speaks. I've already posted that in a couple of different threads, but for completeness' sake I've reposted it below.
