What's most interesting to me about these articles is Heitman's estimation of the relative scarcity of the different back brands. Buck Barker's 1962 article in The Sport Hobbyist, which I posted here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217680, is the earliest article I've seen that addresses the subject. Barker mentions Piedmont, Sweet Caporal, Polar Bear, and Old Mill as the most common brands; calls Sovereign, Cycle, American Beauty, Tolstoi, and Hindu "fairly common"; says EPDG is "not rare", but that Ty Cobb, Lenox, Uzit, and Carolina Brights are rare. He later singles out Ty Cobb as the back that one collector would pay $5 for, so he presumably considered it the rarest. This is not too far off from what we now know based on population reports, market prices, etc. It's obvious to anyone who has spent any time with T206s that Piedmont and Sweet Caporal are the most common backs by far, and Polar Bear and Old Mill are not too hard to find. I think Sovereign would now be considered more common than those two, especially if you combined the 150-350-460 series, and Hindu is tougher than the others in Barker's middle group (where EPDG belongs), but overall Barker wasn't too far off.
In the 1978 article, Heitman correctly says that Ty Cobb is the rarest back brand, followed by Uzit, Hindu, Drum, Lenox, Cycle, Broadleaf, Carolina Brights, American Beauty, EPDG, Tolstoi, Sovereign, Old Mill, Polar Bear, and Piedmont/Sweet Caporal. His four most common are the same as Barker's, and his estimate of Sovereign, Tolstoi, EPDG, and American Beauty as the next toughest is pretty good. But I have no idea why he has Hindu as being tougher than Drum and Lenox (!), or Cycle as being tougher than Broadleaf and Carolina Brights (!). In the 1979 article where he estimates the premium for each brand, he groups Cycle with AB, EPDG, Tolstoi, and Sovereign, which is closer to present reality (though Sovereign now commands much less of a premium than the others), but he still groups Hindu with Drum and Lenox at a 150% premium, more than Broadleaf and Carolina Brights, and less than only Uzit and Ty Cobb. The only thing I can think is that he was somehow thinking of red Hindu, which he mentioned in "The Monster", but in that book he distinguished clearly between brown and red Hindu, correctly recognizing the latter as much scarcer. It sounds like Frank knows Heitman, so maybe he can ask him.
Finally, here is Bill Heitman's first known appearance in a hobby publication, in the April 1961 issue of Card Comments (volume 3, no. 9), when he and his brother Jim, ages 11 and 15 respetively, were profiled as "Collectors of the Month".
03-07-2016, 08:05 PM
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