More m101-4/5 minutiae

[nolemmings]

Wow, thanks Leon. There’s a lot to unpack there, but I do see where Buck Barker notes the seven photo changes, even though he incorrectly states they represent different photos of the same player.

He should not feel bad about not wandering into the F&B store as a four year-old in the Fall of 1915, as the cards would not have been there at that time anyway. I feel a bit sad he regrets that his parents found him–must have been a tough childhood

Curiously, Barker reports that as of 1971, the M101-4 and M101-5 cards had no set identification and were blank-backed. He states that these were not checklisted until Orem did so in the 1950s. He does quote an ad from TSN in October 1916, but stumbles in his logic, for he says this stood as “proof” that m101-5 was issued in 1916– the numbers of the players available in the ad match up with the same numbers from m101-5--yet elsewhere he claims that m101-5 was issued in 1915 and m101-4 the following year. In any event, I still find it odd that the two Mendelsohn-issued cards with advertising that are now most commonly found–Sporting New and Famous & Barr, were either unknown or just discovered as of 1971, while some of the others had been known for more than a decade (three decades in the case of Standard Biscuit).

Barker says it’s a “funny thing” that Sporting News ignored the Federal League but used photos of players in their Fed uniforms, many of whom he identifies. What I find “funny” (in the peculiar sense) is that if Barker would have been paying attention, he would have noticed that several of these players were captioned with teams they did not join until 1916–after the Fed league folded and the reason why there were no Fed players–and that therefore there was no set from 1915 as he had claimed.

There are a couple more nuggets in this article, and I appreciate your finding and posting it.