1958: the first sports collectors' convention, hosted by Lionel Carter

[trdcrdkid]

On Wednesday, July 9, 1958, Lionel Carter and his wife Irma hosted a gathering of seven sports collectors, including Lionel himself, at their home in Evanston, Illinois. The purpose was to get together to talk, trade, display their collections, and go to a Cubs-Pirates game at Wrigley Field the following day. Depending on your definition, it was arguably the first-ever sports collectors' convention, two years after Bob Jaspersen's failed attempt to organize a convention in Chicago with the help of Carter and John Sullivan. (I wrote about that failed 1956 convention, including Jaspersen's many articles about it in Sport Fan, here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=221393.)

In contrast to Jaspersen's planned convention, which involved renting a venue, charging table fees, and awarding door prizes, Carter's get-together was an invitation-only affair for advanced collectors he already knew. He invited a total of 10 people besides himself, but Jefferson Burdick, Preston Orem, Elwood Scharf, and James McLean couldn't come. The seven who did come were Carter himself; Charles Bray, editor of Card Collector's Bulletin; Bill Leonard, Chicago Tribune writer and 19th-century baseball collector; Buck Barker, who came from St. Louis; Bob Wilson; Bob Solon of Oak Park, a longtime hobby writer and part-time dealer; and program collector John Sullivan, who had helped Carter with the local arrangements for the failed 1956 convention. The July-August 1958 Sport Fan has an article by Bob Jaspersen (which I posted last night here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=227451) about the Carters' visit to the Jaspersens, and Lionel Carter's plans for his get-together.

This convention of Carter's was apparently a success for the attendees, but it would be more than a decade before the next such convention would be held, on August 23, 1969 in Brea, California at the home of Jim Nowell, using Carter's invitation-only model. (My post about that 1969 convention is here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=221671.) As in so many other ways, Carter was ahead of his time. He made an unsuccessful attempt to organize another convention in Chicago in 1965 (see below), but as far as I know it didn't pan out. When conventions successfully took hold in the 1970s, Carter was an early and enthusiastic attendee.

That 1958 mini-convention seems to have been mostly forgotten, but not entirely. In an article in the November 1968 Sports Collectors News (which I posted in this thread: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218969), Fred Taylor lamented the lack of sports collecting conventions and gave a confused description of Carter's 1958 get-together, which he may have been conflating with Jasperson's abortive 1956 show. (As I mentioned in the original post, from the context Taylor obviously meant "We have *not* had a successful convention of sports collectors"):



In 2006 George Vrechek interviewed Bob Solon for Sports Collectors' Digest, and among much else Solon provided some reminiscences of the 1958 Carter convention. His memory played some tricks on him -- he thought the event was in September rather than July, and that there were only 4 people there rather than 7 -- but he remembered some interesting details. Here is the relevant paragraph of the article, which you can read in full here: http://oldbaseball.com/refs/Bob_Solon.pdf.



Finally, and most accurately, another of the attendees, Buck Barker (under the pseudonym "Red Byrd") did a nice writeup about the Carter convention almost immediately for the September-October 1958 Sport Fan, from which I got the above information about it. I doubt that many people have read Barker's account in the last 58 years, but here it is. Sounds like a fun time was had by all. Following that, as a bonus, is Carter's short item from the August 1, 1965 Card Collector's Bulletin about his attempt at another convention, which apparently came to naught; not until 1973 did the Chicagoland Collectors' Association have the first of their many shows.