1958 Sport Fan Who's Who Directory of Collectors

[trdcrdkid]

From 1955 to 1960, Bob Jaspersen, editor-publisher of Sport Fan, published an annual directory of sports collectors, called the Sport Fan Who's Who. People would send in their name, address, age, occupation, collecting interests, and any other relevant information (including the estimated value of their collection), and Jaspersen made an alphabetical listing, supplemented with lots of ads. I have the 1958 and 1959 editions, and below I've scanned all the directory pages from the 1958 edition. (These are only about half the pages in the volume, the rest being ads.) The entries in the 1959 edition are significantly shorter, I guess because Jaspersen began cracking down on the length, so that edition's directory is about 2/3 the length of this one. It does include some people that are not in this one, like Lee Allen and John D. Wagner, so maybe I'll scan it too another time.

I find this kind of stuff interesting, not only to see what these people were interested in collecting, but their occupations and ages. There are some names here that are pretty well known even today, like Lionel Carter; others that I see all the time in hobby publications of the 1950s and 1960s, as writers and/or dealers; and some that, I gather, are still active today, like Jeff Morey and Bob Thing.