T206 variations

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Posted By: William Heitman

It seems to me that I was born collecting T206. I was stricken with polio when I was two (1951) and was quite sickly as a young boy. My family had so many teachers in it and they sent me books. My Mom was a junior high school counselor and teacher and my Dad was a college professor, who collected cards maniacally. The result was that I learned to read before I was in kindergarten. I was sick at home the first half of First Grade and what I did at home was read the backs of these wonderful little pen and ink drawings of baseball players that my Dad was just getting, Callahan Hall of Fame cards. So I was interested most of all in "Old Timers" and that lead me to Old Judges and T206. For the next 20 years, I corresponded with anyone who would tell me about T206's, Obaks, Caramel Cards, Old Judges and Gypsey Queens and anthing else from that era. Mostly I traded cards with these guys that my Dad knew--Burdick, Bray, Wagner, Gammon, Tannenbaum, Goldfaden, Wagner, Taylor and so many more. And I got my hands on thousands upon thousand of T206's. After I left school, I met Lew Lipset, who was just getting into the hobby and he aided my obsession greatly by sending me tons of T206. What I did with the cards was keep them in the order of the checklist published by Charles Bray and later by Richard Eagan and, within that I ordered them by Series 150, 350, 350-460 and Assorted and then alphabetically by the backs. In the late '70's I created a checklist using the same method. I used all of the notes I had taken over the years and the some 3500 different T206 I had accumulated over the years (with a big headstart from my Dad, I must admit) and laid it out in the same manner that The Monster's checklist is laid out, but without anything being blacked out. When I had checked off everything from what I had and the notes I had taken, I noticed that there were undeniable patterns in the checklist. I had already started researching the players and their careers. So I came to some conclusions and started blacking things out. I called Denny Eckes (rest his soul, he was just as responsbile for Beckett publications as my good friend Jim was) to talk about this checklist. He said he thought it could be a book, and, he would publish it if I provided him with all of the cards to be illustrated. I sent it all to him, and he took it from there. The published book has mistakes in it (and I'm not just talking about the Farrah cards that Denny put in without my approval), but my own checklist does not contain those errors. I hope to very soon go over the checklist item by item to find all of the errors. Anyway, that's how The Monster came about. From lots of collecting, accumulating and researching. No computers and no real place to go for information. I did, incidentally, write books on both T205 and T207 using the same methods--my method was reading, collecting and accumulating--but they were never published except in an issue of Baseball Hobby News, which published the T205 book in one of its issues. I hope The Monster has helped all of you in your pursuits of these cardboard treasures.