Question for Mr. Binder

[Archive]

Posted By: Dave Hornish

This thread brings back memories. By way of background, I was the price researcher for Current Card Prices (CCP) when it was first published. I had met Richie Schawaroch, the guy who ended up publishing it when he had a card stand at the old Nassau County Farmers Market (that market was a fabulous place by the way and I spent a good part of my formative years there). I bought a lot of cards from Richie in the early 80's and eventually he came to the conclusion he could beat out CPU at their own game and basically hired me on a part time basis to help. I forget if this was before or after the lawsuit but believe it was around the same time. Richie had definitely heard the suit was going to be filed through the hobby grapevine on Long Island before it actually happened and everyone knew CPU had just cribbed their checklists.

I helped with some of the checklists for CCP and ended up doing mailings, collating, runs to the printer and all the stuff you do with a monthly magazine. I think we were shipping 12,000 copies by the end of the first 6 months. When the CPU stopped publishing, we though we had it made then Beckett announced they were going to publish their own monthly magazine. I remember we looked at the first issue of Beckett and wondered what the point was with the two columns of pricing.

At the same time, I spent an entire, non-stop caffeine fueled weekend creating and pricing the lists that ended up in the first edition of the Football version of CCP. I was supposed to be granted partial ownership of that quarterly magazine but Richie reneged. I was pretty pissed at the time and that was the end of my realtionship with Richie. I recall I was screwed out of a bunch of money by him too but c'est la vie. I probably worked on the first 15 or so issues of CCP. Still have copies around here somewhere of the issues I worked on.

It's too bad Beckett came along as I was hoping to go to an alphabetical version of the checklists, figuring it made more sense than numerical ordering. I still think it makes more sense but it doesn't matter in the age of the digital checklist. Well I can laugh at it now, the whole experience. After it ended I graduated college and had to enter the real world for a while.....

Dave