Posted By:
ty_cobbWhen I look at the new Mastro catalog, really the
only important page is Bill Mastro's story on Frank
Nagy.
What a 'colllector' does today is mostly capitalism,
and ignores any tenet of real collecting that Frank
Nagy not only used for himself, but was a mentor to others.
The T215 Pirate is the perfect example. I'll collect
it 'if' its American and there is associated monetary gain.
I don't need it if its foreign.
Someone else can do all the crap work of actually
researching it, but as it suits me monetarily I
don't need to spend the hours and will simply
sit back and spend about 5 minutes twisting someone
else's logic to suit mine so I can make a profit.
I swear, some days I'm convinced I'm living in a
New Dark Ages, and I wish my observations of how
people are was confined to baseball cards, but
even in the workplace today there is little evidence
of rational thought. And who cares about truth when
there's money to be made.
Ok, back to T215. Lets use our imagination for once
and forget about baseball. It is not always the right
'window' from which to view cartophilic research.
The 'Red Cross' factory exists in New Jersey because
that is where Pierre Lorillard's tobacco factory was.
http://www.jerseycityhistory.net/warehousenomination.html
Wills was the largest stakeholder in the UK tobacco
consortium opposing the American Dukes bid to take
over the UK market. Not a whole lot of reason to provide
baseball cards overseas, they couldn't care less.
But they didn't do the tobacco card printing.That was
done by another member of the UK group opposing the US
cartel. The printers were Mardon, Son, and Hall of the UK.
Because we are so wrapped up in baseball cards over here
no one has bothered to actually spend the time to figure out
who did the printing in the US, and because it requires
no research its easy just to suppose it happens at
each factory as printed on the back of the card.
The volume of knowledge that passed when Wharton-Tigar
passed is lost but to a few of his contemporaries.
Did he know the T215s were not printed in the UK?
Without question he had some quantity of the cards
and did the releveant research. Is it him that makes
the de facto statement "issued for US servicemen overseas" ?
Doubtless he had some factory correspondence to prove such...