how collecting has changed
Money, of course, but I've been in and out of this since I was a child. What I remember best about, say, 1958, is that you couldn't find people who did this.
Conrad Anderson, who sold autographs; George Husby, cards; and Goody Goldfadden, who sold EVERYTHING, advertised thru TSN and Baseball Digest, but that was it.
There were hobby papers, like The Sport Hobbyist (that was Charles Brooks in Detroit), but they mostly looked like they were printed on the grade school mimeograph machine and you never knew when they were going to come out.
You started having regional conventions in the mid 1970s and the hobby papers got better and actually came out on time.
And with big money, serious auction houses became involved.
I think about those weird old guys who started all of this 90 years ago and wonder how they ever found one another.
You can find more information from five minutes of looking at Net54 than you could have discovered in ten years of nosing around in 1965 or '70.
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