REFLECTIONS of YOUTH

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

In another Thread, us "Old Timers" have been referred to as
the "gators" or "dinosaurs" of the hobby. Well, after my 2nd
tour of 30 years in this hobby, I prefer being a dinosaur. A
Tyranosaurus Rex....indeed, a T-Rex....in fact I am thinking
of changing my ebay handle from TEDZAN to T-REX.

My 1st tour collecting BB cards started as a 9 year old with 1947
Homog. Bond Bread cards. However,the gum cards that my
most clear recollections are from is when I was tearing open
all those Red, White & Blue wax packs in 1949 containing
1949 Leafs or 1949 Bowmans.

In the fall of 1952 I opened my last pack of BB cards as a youth.
I was trying to complete my Topps set and when I opened
a 5 cent pack and saw Mantle (with other Hi#s) that was
it for me. I was 14 and girls were the new challenge for me.

Everytime I acquire a certain Bowman or Leaf or Topps card
from that era, I experience a "flashback" to my youth. It is
a great euphoric feeling that keeps me young. You see, I stay
forever young, thanks to this great hobby. And, thanks to my
dear Aunt who saved all my Base Ball cards when I was away in
the Air Force. And, I was fortunate enough to trade '50s cards
into pre-WWII and pre-WWI and 19th Century cards.

That's my story....let's hear yours....you "dinosaurs ?

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Posted By: barry arnold

One of my students asked me recently what it's like to be elderly.
I was hoping it was a rhetorical question but given TREX TED's
post, I'm probably fooling myself.

I'd rather be a dinosaur than elderly any day----even an herbivore.

I started collecting cards in the sixties as a little leaguer, pony
leaguer, and 'also ran.'
I had enough 'sense' to put the Mantle's, Berra's, Mays', Aaron's,
Musial's, Clemente's in the front part of my baseball cap to keep it
standing up straight. The Dalrymple's,Groat's,Stuart's,Hunt's,etc.
went in bicycle spokes to make that wonderful noise that brings 'flashbacks' that TREX TED refers to.

In the 70's I studied. And grew hair.

In 1980 i reached some measure of enlightenment and began collecting
t210's,205's,206's due to an inheritance. I married soon after and sold
most of my shinies in a mall so we could buy furniture.
I became an academic and thought that something was more interesting
than the T cards.

Then i became a dinosaur or elderly and realized T 206 was synonymous
with nirvana or nirvikalpa samadhi or just plain fun.

tbarry

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Posted By: barrysloate

The first pack I ever bought was a 1958 Topps, and I distinctly remember a Ted Williams All-Star in the pack. I was six years old and didn't know what an All-Star was, but the card looked different than all the others in the pack. My biggest year of pack buying was 1960.

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Barry Arnold

Your stories of cards in your bike spokes and particularly
having the good sense to save the star cards of your youth
is so true. We flipped them, but didn't distinguish between
the regular players and the stars. We also scaled them to-
wards our front door stups. When one got a "leaner", then
we would get excited in our attempts to knock it down. If
we couldn't the "leaner" kid would get all the cards laying
on the sidewalk. I still have my "flipping-worn" Stan Musial,
Joe DiMaggio, Honus Wagner, etc. from the 1949 LEAF set.
Although, we did pay respect to Babe Ruth, who had died the
previous year's summer. We did not flip the Ruth cards.

Incidently Barry......what is a "herbivore" ?

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Posted By: barrysloate

A plant eating animal.

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Posted By: identify7

I do not remember the rules, and perhaps they were regional. But it seems to me that when you knocked a leaner down, the leaner still won if it wound up on top of your card, independent of which was closer to the (plus I thought it was spelled) stoop.

In any case - the collecting and flipping of cards had the unexpected variable that the unknown and unwanted "rookie" cards turned out to be among the most valuable.

When the dust settled, and decades past, I wound up with the following originally unknown and unwanted rookies: '54 Aaron, 2x '55 Clemente, 3x '54 Kaline, '60 McCovey, '57 Robinson, perhaps some others.

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Posted By: Patrick McMenemy

Ted:

Your response certainly brought me back to my early years growing up a diehard Red Sox fan 45 minutes west of Boston in Worcester, MA. The tradition of flipping, leaners, and putting cards in bike spokes was still going strong in the mid to late 60's.

Of course, I have vivid memories of booing everytime I pulled a "stink'in" Yankee card from a Topps pack. The Yankees were saved for the bike spokes.

Not only did we play the "leaner" and "flipping" games at lunchtime in the schoolyard, but since I had a twin, we also played and practiced our skill at home as well.

Some of my most vivid memories include trading a handful of Mickey Mantle cards for a Ken "The Hawk" Harrelson. I also rembember the day, I won huge pile from the school bully....it included a older card I had never seen before...a Topps 1954 Mantle.

I also remember using a tiny transitor radio with an ear plug in school to listen to the 1967 World Series. I think every other boy in school had one as well.

When the Red Sox won the World Series against the Cardinal last year, the heartache a 7 year old boy suffered back in 1967 was finally gone.



Patrick

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Posted By: JudgeDred (Fred)

Anyone want to flip a few N172s?

I was feeling a bit older the other night when I attended an Eagles concert. It was a great concert but I think most of the crowd was tired by 10PM...

Back in the day... the local store only carried a few boxes of Topps and if you didn't get there early enough in the week they'd all be gone and you'd have to wait for the following week to get a few packs.

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Posted By: Glenn

"I won huge pile from the school bully....it included a older card I had never seen before...a Topps 1954 Mantle."

I don't think any of us have ever seen one either.

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Gil

Growing up in Hillside, NJ, the owner of the "leaner" card, if knocked
down, would have to give up all the cards on the pavement to the guy
who knocked it down with his card. And, believe me there were some very
heated arguments amongst us 10 year old kids back then over this contest.

OK, you caught me being "stup"..id; you are correct....it is really a stoop.

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Posted By: identify7

I was not sure about the spelling.

**********************************

What if a second flipper also got a leaner?

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Posted By: jay behrens

I remember the fist pack of cards my mom ever bought me as a kid. We were on our way back home from Minneapolis and stopped off in St Cloud (half way between The Cities and home). I don't remember why I wanted that pack of cards, but I ended up with it. I clearly remember 4 cards in the pack, Larry Czonka, Jerrel Wilson, Jan Stenarud and Gale Sayers. That winter bought a few basketball cards and I will always remember Artis Gilmore's huge afro. Bought my first baseball cards that following spring, but don't remember who was in those first packs. The cards were so drab comapred to the football cards.

Jay

If you can sue a band for making you want to commit suicide, can I sue Barry Manilow for turning me into a wuss in the 70s?

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Posted By: Chad

But we used the cards to create our wiffle ball teams--we had to pretend to be each guy in our card lineup--and we played this game where you divided the cards up randomly and then had a "stat" battle, usually the batting average. If your guy had a higher batting average, you won. Guys with 30 at bats and a .400 average were gods in this game. I remember see ing my first Fleer pack in 1981 and being blown away. What the hell is THIS, I wondered... I had never seen any non-Topps cards, vintage or otherwise at the time.


--Chad

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Posted By: barry arnold

Great stuff TREX Ted and others.

since we're really telling our stories, let me tell you 2 ways we won
baseball cards down here in West Florida.
Believe it or not, when i was in elementary school, we had little plastic baseball players (like those green army men of old)that we would name
Aparicio,Kubek,Boog Powell,Dick Groat,etc., stand them up, shoot
them with marbles, and get a card if we knocked the most down.
Thinking about my doing the marble thing does sound dinosauresque.
Like a li'l rascals episode.

As i look back on it, the next 'sport' even seems more odd. During my
little league years, we'd have ping pong championships; one of use would
usually be the Yankees, the other the Dodgers. Whoever won the game got--
guess what--a baseball card. I still remember Amalflitano (sp?);
I remember winning it, because none of us could say the name---
now i can't even spell it.

I guess no matter what we were doing back then, we wanted a CARD.
At least some things never change as we grown older.

great fun, TREX Ted.

tbarry

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Posted By: barrysloate

I distinctly remember this- being at a friend's house around 1960 and looking at his brother's old baseball cards, which happened to be 1952 Topps. He kept them in numerical order, and he seemed to have most of the set, but when I got past #300 he had maybe one out of every ten cards. My first indoctrination to those tough high numbers! I knew something was odd, but my 8 year old mind couldn't figure why he was missing so many at the end of the run.

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Posted By: Travis Jensen

I'm 26 years old and strictly collect vintage (pre '60). Most of the older guys are surprised to see that a guy my age is into vintage cards.

I opened my first pack of cards in '86. I really didn't get too serious into collecting until '87. I ripped open an ungodly amount of '87 Topps hoping for Conseco and McGwire rookies, which I think at the time booked for a couple dollars each, give or take. That same year I found an entire trunk of tobacco cards in someone’s trash (maybe 2,000+ cards), flipped through them, and walked away, leaving the cards behind. Unless someone came along after me and scooped them up, the cards are probably decomposing somewhere in the Denver dump.

I stopped collecting in ’91 and didn’t pick it back up until ‘01. I focused my new collection exclusively on vintage (pre: ’70). I always liked vintage cards when I was younger, but could never afford them. My first vintage purchase was a ’61 Topps Mantle. From there things just sort of took off. I was obsessed and spent close to 200K from ’01 to ’05.

This past summer I sold my entire collection and bought a house. I didn’t think about cards for many months after that.

Two weeks ago I started feeling the itch again. I went on a spree and bought a handful of cards. It looks like I’m back in again. These are my most recent purchases (only two of the six are pre-war):

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Gil

Two leaners required a 3rd kid to break the tie. If this third guy
knocked down one of the "leaners", then he would split the winning
cards with the winner. Of course such a situation would degenerate
into a squabble over "taking sides". If this persisted then someone
would suggest a game of Stick Ball; and, instantly the card scaling
contest would cease and ball playing would start.

Fortunately, this scenerio you posed occured very infrequently.

.....T-Rex Ted.....

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Posted By: jay behrens

Zach is the one person that can probably relate closest to my experiecne with the hobby after I got really serious about it. By the time I had moved to CA in 1983 I fully into the punk and New Wave scene. This wasn't a good thing when going to shows since most dealers wouldn't give you the time of day when you asked to looked at their tobacco cards and 19c century cards. Fortunately, Mark Macrae looked beyond this and let me look thru his wondeful inventory and shared lots of info with me. I ended up walking away with some t206s, t205s and life long friend in the hobby.

Jay

If you can sue a band for making you want to commit suicide, can I sue Barry Manilow for turning me into a wuss in the 70s?

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Posted By: identify7

T-Rex: we had this "being on top" concept in our flipping rules. The only way to beat the first leaner was to knock it down + have it not land on your card, or have the second leaner partially covering the first.

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Posted By: joe maples

I guess I am one of the "oldtimers", Here are copies of SCD 1976 and 1979. I had older ones, but kept these because of the covers. The 1979 copy has a price guide. Old Judge $8.00, E107 Williams $11.00, N28 $20.00 and so on. Nice prices eh. Also Wirt Gammon articles. Can't load the pics right now.

Joe

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

GLENN

There is a 1954 Topps Mantle that was printed in the insert in the
second issue of Sports Illustrated, Aug 23, 1954. This insert was
was produced by Topps specifically for the magazine and includes
a sheet of 27 NY Yankees. Fifteen are the identical ones that were
in the '54 Topps set and 12 who were not (in B/W).

And, an enterprising collector from the greater Philadelphia area
reprinted this Mantle in card form back in the early '80s. When I
find my copy of it I will post it.

TRIVIA Quiz for those who are familiar with this SI #2 insert....
Who is missing from this sheet of 27 Yankees ?

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Posted By: Patrick McMenemy

Glen:

Thanks for correcting me. The card I mentioned winning was a 1954 BOWMAN Mickey Mantle.



Patrick

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Patrick Mc

I remember the 1967 series well, even though I am a Yankee
fan. I've met Jim Lonborg, and boy he pitched almost as well
as Bob Gibson in that Series. It could have gone either way.

There is a great book on the 1967 Red Sox....The Impossible
Dream. If you don't have it, it behooves to acquire it, you
will love reading it.

As a Yankee fan, I had mixed feelings on who I wanted to win.
Your team had acquired Elston Howard and the Cardinals had
Roger Maris. That was tough to take for a Yankee fan.

Anyhow, 37 years later the Red Sox were vindicated.
And, exactly 100 years after the McGraw "hex" of 1904 your
Red Sox won it.

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

announced he was about to faint. "Why?" "Because the new baseball cards are out." "Oh. So why should you faint?" "I don;'t know,. Just feel like it."



My first purchase--for Chris, I said to myself...

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Jay

I might add to your post....I first met Mark at the Willow Grove (PA)
Show, I think in 1981, and we have been great friends ever since. I
have travelled West (as far as Hawaii) to share tables at shows with
him and he has traveled East to do the same with me.

Yes, we love to have our "flashbacks" to our youth when we acquire
certain BB cards.
But, an even greater aspect of this hobby is all the tremendous life-
time friends we have made across the the country.

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Joe Maples

Being a Detroit guy, I am sure you're familiar with one of
the greatest "Oldtimers" in the hobby....Frank Nagy. I've
many neat anectdotes regarding Frank when I subscribed to
his monthly mail auction throughout the '80s. And, I was
wondering if you had also; and, did you ever meet him ?

T-Rex Ted

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Posted By: William Heitman

I met Frank through the mail in the early sixties. He began producing a series of cards that were reprints, in B & W, of some of his favorite cards. He called it the Sport Hobbysit Famous Card Series. The First 5 were done in 1963--T206 Wagner, T212 Henley, San Francisco, C46 Simmons, Rochester, M116 Mathewson, M101-5 Jack Berry. In 1964 he added T204 Brown, D322 Webb, S74 Criger, N.Y. Amer. and he moved from Wade St. in Detroit to 25th St. in Detroit. In 1965, he completed the series of 20 cards with R333 Cuyler, R319 #106, T205 McGraw, E107 Joss, W502 Sisler, N29 Ewing, E90 Bender, E104 Mullin, E95 Merkle, E121 Schang, N28 Keefe and E120 Ruel. The Sport Hobbyist advertised in the American Card Catalog which was published in 1960 I had already had contact with many of the people who advertised in it, but the next few years, I set out to contact every one of them that I, or my Father, didn't already know. That search took me to The Sport Hobbyist in Dorsey, Illinios and somehow led me to Frank Nagy, who I corresponded with from that time on and who I met up with maybe 10 to 12 times. The first ten years or so, we traded cards back and forth through the mail. And then the auctions started coming and "trading" with him kind of stopped, but not altogether. One thing that really drove me crazy with him was his "about mint" grade for cards. I remember one time talking to him on the phone and asking about this grade. His response was pretty typically Frank--Well, it looks mint but it's probably not." By the way, he sold those Sport Hobbyist Cards for 60 cents each, more than was charged for most T206s back then.

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Posted By: joe maples

Hi Ted, yes I met Frank Nagy in the late 70's at Plymouth Michigan shows run by The Toerpes (spelling). He was always very friendly and helpful. He and Bill Mastro were attached at the hip as they say. I bought several items from Frank. I know when I bought some S74 silks he saw that they were all Detroit players and said too bad, collecting Detroit will be expensive with Ty Cobb on the team. Oddly enough I never bought anything in his monthly auctions. This was the big annual show every year in the Detroit area. So I saw Frank and many other collectors once a year. Another story, I just sold some Heilbroner Yearbooks that were from Briggs Stadium from the 1930's to Jay Barry who lives in Las Vegas. I knew Jay from his ads in SCD in the 70's and 80's. He lived in Oak Park Mi. I emailed him to verify if he was the same person, he is, small world.

Happy collecting

Joe

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Posted By: Jay Miller

I also dealt with Frank Nagy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I can echo what Ted said about Frank refunding some money if he thought you were paying too much for an item. He also had a catch line when he was trying to entice you to purchase an item. He used to say "it will add class to your collection". I remember asking Frank in the early 1990s why he never had any Old Judge in his auctions. He said he used to have some but they weren't in high demand so he would throw in a few free ones with every purchase. He used up his supply by giving them away. Times have changed just a little.

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Posted By: Mark Macrae

Read Teddy Z's post today and it brought back some great memories of Frank Nagy...I started buying from his auctions in the 70's... The great 3 page handwritten notes telling me I bid too high or too low...... and Bill H is right ....The current hobbyists would go crazy with his grading system.....a couple dozen grades over Excellent ......... Near Mint, About mint, Excellent plus,Almost Ex-Mt,etc..... I also remember his string tied, hand wrapped packages...Almost like he worked at a butcher shop....... And the smoke....Frank had to have been a chain smoker....After traveling 3 days across country those packages could still set off a smoke detector. I knew if I had a package from Frank in my post office box BEFORE I opened the box up...... All in all ,Absolutely one of the best ever collector-friendly guys to deal with of all-time....Every so often I'll get a group of early cards and recognize his distinct handwriting on the back side. Frank might be gone, but his hobby legacy will live on...

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Posted By: barrysloate

Jay- With regard to what Nagy said about Old Judges, I clearly remember even in the early and mid-90's being afraid to buy large groups of them because I didn't think I would be able to sell them. I would often run sales with listings for Old Judges and they would do rather poorly, at a time when my T205 and T206 would invariably sell out.

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Mark and Jay

Your recollections bring back more memories of Frank Nagy.
Now, I don't recall getting any Old Judge "freebies" from
Frank. But, I do recall opening up the solidly strung pack-
age from him every month and looking over the cards he sent
that always were in nicer condition than he had advertised.
And, usually finding an additional card or two that I wasn't
expecting. Sometimes it would be a '30s or '40s BB card and
then other times it would be a card from a Non-Sports issue
from those years. One time he got me interested in the Dick
Tracy series from that era.

It's a strange world, here we are praising Frank; and, mean-
while Bill Mastro is conducting an auction including Frank's
collection.

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Posted By: gary nuchereno

In 1978 at the Plymouth Michigan show I bought cards from Bill Heitman up in
his hotel room.He had 3 0r 4 pages of each Ruth from the 1933 Goudey set. I
wound up buying a Clark Griffith Cracker Jack from him. It was at the end of the show and when we left we had spent damn near every dollar we had on us. I also met Lew Lipsett for the first time and one of the two friends I was with built an entire T207 set in two days(lowgrade but complete for around 1k give or take a few hundred) As a 13 year old I would take the dollar my parents gave me for
the church collection and spend it on Fleer 1961 Basketball cards. I had over 30 sets which I sold for a few dollars each in the early 1970's.

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Posted By: Ted Zanidakis

Gary N.

The Dec. Philly Show is around the corner and if I recall you are from
the Buffalo, NY area. Will, you be at this Show ?....And, are you the
guy who several shows ago asked me about the 1904 Buffalo Team Photo
that I have ?

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Posted By: Josh Adams

Thanks everyone for sharing these stories. As a relatively young collector (27 yrs old) it is great to hear these personal accounts of dealings with Nagy and other pioneers of the hobby. It's one thing to see the "Nagy Collection" on Mastronet, but it really makes it "real" to hear great stories such as these.


Again, thanks.


Josh

Go Go White Sox
2005 World Series Champions!