What Was The Hobby Like Back In The Day?

[whitehse]

Originally Posted by lumberjack

Someone mentioned Dr. Beckett's first price guide. He would set up at shows in Michigan after the guide came out. I once heard him tell a collector that he was afraid that the guide would become not so much a guide, but a bottom line for what a card would sell for and this is what happened. Nobody, nobody would sell a card for less than what his guide listed as its price.
lumberjack

I remember being at a mall show in suburban Chicago around the mid-90s and being set up to a husband and wife team who had been hobby dealers for decades. She had a man sitting at her table going through the quarter cards who looked vaguely familiar but I could not place him. He moved on to my table and bought a few cheap cards and kept moving but it wasn't until later when I asked the wife of the dealer team next to me who that man was and she casually mentioned it was Dr. Beckett. She had known him from the beginning and were good friends and to say I was shocked was an understatement. In a world where his name was synonymous with baseball cards and likely helped to push ahead the card boom, he was just a quite and totally unassuming man who was still collecting like the rest of us. Of course, this was after he sold the business so there was no conflict of interest at that point.