Terrific interview with Michael anad Andrew -- and a nostalgic "reconnect" to my first tentative foray into the hobby.
In 1975 I was a teenaged hockey collector on Vancouver Island, specializing in programs, media guides and magazines. My other great passion was writing about sports. I was determined to become a real-life Oscar Madison, but who was going to give an untried kid a break? After reading Michael's call for editorial contributions in the debut issue of Collectors Quarterly (Winter '75), I sent him a 600-word article on how to start a program/magazine collection. Three weeks later I received a "notice of acceptance" from CQ -- along with a personal note from Michael saying how much he enjoyed my story, and inviting me to send more. When the article was published in issue No. 3 (Summer '76) -- prominently positioned between Ed Broder's feature on Japanese baseball cards and Bob Solon's analysis of variations in the Kellogg 3D sets -- I was over the moon.
That first byline in CQ launched a career course that over the past 50 years has seen my work appear in dozens of publications in Canada and the US, as well as a 10 -year stint in Beijing as lead sports columnist for the largest English-language newspaper in Asia. In between, I've found time to author seven books and still feed my passion for collecting programs and magazines -- although my focus long ago switched from hockey to boxing.
And it was all because a ballsy young New Yorker took a chance on creating one of our hobby's best publications of the 1970s. Thanks, Mike.
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