Hobby history: Tracking down 1949 Leaf baseball

[trdcrdkid]

Originally Posted by steve_a

Is there any evidence that the second series was ever distributed retail? Seems like all of the contemporary reports relate to the first series. Is it possible the SPs were just taken or given out from a printer? Also seems like the early SP accounts are from the mid-west while series 1 are from the east coast.

Ted's Old Cardboard article discusses the retail distribution of both series. I don't have it with me because I'm at work, but as I recall, the second series seems to have been distributed only in certain limited areas of the country. I'll look it up tonight if Ted doesn't reply before then.

I know of three people who collected the entire 49-card first series in 1949 but were unaware of the second series until years later: Lionel Carter (Illinois), Buck Barker (St. Louis), and Ted Z. (New Jersey). Larry Fritsch, who owned the 33 second-series cards that Carter wrote about in 1960, lived in Wisconsin and had been about 11 years old in 1949, so he may well have bought them at the store himself. Walter Corson, who owned eight second-series cards in 1956, was in Philadelphia, but he was in his 50s and buying and selling cards in bulk, so who knows where those cards originally came from. Corson was running an antiques/card shop in Philadelphia in 1949 (see my bio of him: http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=232220), so it's possible they came into his hands through that. The finders of the remaining short prints, James Elder and Goodwin Goldfaden, were dealers who presumably bought them from the original owners, so who knows where those cards originated.