Standard Catalog Update #26B : Checklist Complete!

Thanks to a tip from Larry Serota, we now have a complete checklist for the 1955 Wilson Meats baseball tips booklets. The subject was first raised on this blog on Sept. 18, if you want to read more in-depth on the issue.

Larry clued us in that Booklet #2, "Batting and Fielding Secrets by Ted Williams" was being offered in the current (closing Nov. 3) auction by Andy Madec Sportscards, where it carries a minimum bid of $200.

With T.W. revealed as the "author" of Booklet #2, the checklist stands complete: #1 Bob Feller, #2 Ted Williams, #3 Harvey Kueen, #4 Sammy White.

It will be interesting to watch the bidding on the Williams booklet, as it is a caree-contemporary piece of memorabilia that is associated with the issuer one of his scarcest and most popular baseball cards and is, in itself, extremely rare.

Tales of T212 #13 : S.S. Flannagan

Back in the early 1980s I thought I'd combine my interests in minor league baseball and vintage baseball cards by assembling a collection of the Obak cigarette cards that were distributed on the West Coast in 1909, 1910 and 1911.I didn't realize it then, but those cards are so much rarer than most of the contemporary T206 cards from "Back East" that putting together complete sets of the Obak could take decades to accomplish -- and that's if a guy had more money than God to buy the cards when they became available.At about the time I started my Obak collection I also started researching the players who appeared in the sets. Over the course of several long Wisconsin winters I pored over microfilms of The Sporting News and The Sporting Life from the period several years before to several years after the Obak cards circulated, making prodigious notes on 3x5 file cards for each player in the set.I gave up trying to collect the T212s (that's the catalog number Jefferson Burdick assigned the three sets in the pioneering American Card Catalog in 1939), long ago, and have since sold off all my Obaks, one-by-one, first on eBay, then on the Net 54 baseball card forum. As I was selling each card, I included interesting tidbits about each player from my notes. The bidders seemed to like learning a little bit about these guys on the cards, so I thought I'd now begin sharing their stories here.

"Flannagan," The Mystery Beaver

This player who appeared only in the 1910 Obak set, with his name misspelled as "Flannagan" is one of the few whom I never definitively identified in my years of Obak research. It was only years later, as I began actually writing this series, that I found out who he was from the SABR Minor Leagues database.

My early notecard on Flannagan offered as possibilities James F. or Edward J., who had played the outfield and pitched, respectively, for the 1909 Vancouver Beavers of the Northwestern League. Neither played there in 1910. Since it is my impression that Obak made few, if any, errors such as producing a card for a player who wasn't on a particular team in the year the card was issued, I wasn't comfortable designating the card-guy Flanagan as either James or Edward.

S.S. Flanagan (his full name is not recorded by SABR, nor any biographical details), played for Vancouver in both 1908 and 1910. He is not shown as playing anywhere in organized baseball in 1909. He had batted .351 for the Beavers in 1908, but his a career low of .209 in 1910 and was demoted to the Class D Union Assn. at Boise for 1911.

He rebounded at Boise and hit .342. That earned him a call back to Class B play with Decatur of the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League for the remainder of his known pro career (1912-1915).

1954 Vern Law : Update to 09/06 post

Back on Sept. 6, I posted an entry about the 1954 Topps Vern Law card.

The back of the card has a line for the previous season's stats that was supposed to read "IN MILITARY SERVICE," but the I in IN is missing.

I just noticed that when Sports Illustrated reprinted (on thin, glossy, magazine stock) some cards from the '54T set, they corrected that error.

Just though you'd like to know.

Standard Catalog Update #31 : 1960 Carling Beer Indians

It's probably been more than 10 years since we added the 1955-61 Carling Beer Cleveland Indians premium pictures to the Standard Catalog. I'm embarrassed now to admit that I don't remember who provided the checklists and photocopies for the first listings.

The premiums all share a similar format. They are 8-1/2" x 12," blank-backed, printed on semi-gloss thin cardboard stock. Pictures are almost all posed action shots. The wide borders at bottom have advertising for Black Label beer. The premiums were probably distributed as over-the-counter handouts where the beer was sold.

A small alphanumeric designation with a "DBL" (most years) or "LB" (1961) prefix in the lower-right corner allows us to differentiate between years of issue.

Initially we checklisted 11 players for 1956, 10 each in 1956-58, six in 1959 and 10 in 1961. I always found in curious that there were no 1969 Carling Indians premiums. No premium with a suffix higher than "L" is known, and in only one year (1958) is a picture known with suffix "I" or "J." This probably indicates that for most years the issue was complete at 10 pictures.

Now, thanks to collector Glen Van Aken, we have a start at a 1960 checklist. He sent a scan of Bubba Phillips, who had been traded from the Tigers to Cleveland for 1960. The Phillips premium has the number DBL 247E (as opposed to DBL420 in 1961). Unlike earlier Carling issues, which had a line of type at bottom listing the brands regional brewery locations, the 1960 premium lists only Cleveland. That format was continued in 1961.

We'd be especially happy to hear from you if you can add any pictures to our checklists for this issue.

Standard Catalog Update #24A : Green Harrington's

An update is in order to our Standard Catalog Update #24 blog posting of Sept. 15.

That post concerned a 1928 Harrington's card of Earl Smith that went to auction Oct. 2.

The auction closed without the card meeting a reported reserve of $40,000. The minimum bid had been pegged at $10,000, and by the time the auction closed, three bids had been placed, but the Heritage web site does not specify how high the bids went.

The card is now available on the Heritage web site at $47,800, with a notation that lower offers will be considered.

How did y'all pay for YOUR football cards?

The cabbage moths never came this year.

I don't know whether it was due to global warming or to the freakishly cold, dry summer we had here in northcentral Wisconsin. (I so love the irony of that.) I just know that driving home after work at this time of year, the fields should be full of the little black-speckled moths, but that there aren't any.

I also know that if this had happened 50 years ago, it would have put a major dent in my football card buying.

Back in the late 1950s and very early 1960s when I was a pre-teen living in Fond du Lac, Wis., the arrival of the cabbage moths in the fields on the western end of the city and the arrival of the year's first football cards on the shelves of the mom-and-pop grocery stores in the neighborhood coincided with the beginning of the school year.

By that time the card collectors in my neighborhood -- that meant just about everyone, except girls and queers -- were pretty much done with baseball cards for the year (except for the all-star cards in the high-number series), and unless there was a particularly cool or gory non-sports set such as Space, Mars Attacks or Civil War News, all of our attention was turned to football cards.

For a number of those years, I financed my football card purchases with cabbage moths. It wasn't a direct batrer system, you understand, there was a middle man.

At that time and place, the western edge of the city was defined by the multi-lane Highway 41 that ran north and south between the Michigan border and (or so we were told, but never really believed) Miami, Fla. Between the last street in our neighborhood and Hwy. 41 was a stretch of prarie-like fields and the "West Side Ditch." The Ditch was a wide man-made gully, perhaps 15 feet across at the top and narrowing to three or four feet at the bottom. It was there to direct the occasional heavy rainfall or winter ice melt from the storm sewer system to Lake Winnebago.

Nearly dry for most of the year, the Ditch was a good place for kids to get away from the prying eyes of parents, nosy neighbors and cops, to play army or doctor, to smoke, to look at dirty magazines and just hang out. The Ditch was also a natural attraction for cabbage moths, perhaps because of the residual rills and puddles of water at the bottom, or perhaps because it offered a refuge from the autumn wind, or perhaps because its plant life was high on the moths' menu.

We didn't think much about why the moths were there in the early autumn, we just knew that they WERE there and that just a couple of blocks away, there was a guy who would pay cash for them . . . cash that could be converted into football cards.

If I ever knew the moth man's name, I've long since forgotten it, or blocked it from my memory. All the kids in the neighborhood knew his house, though, and that he paid a penny apiece for cabbage moths. White or yellow, it didn't matter, and he wasn't too picky about whether they were alive or dead. We never knew for sure what he did with the moths he bought. It was rumored that he was a science professor at the college in Oshkosh, so maybe he used them as lab specimens or in research.

The guy also paid a nickel apiece for frogs, but they were the bounty of the older kids, and if one of them caught us with more than one frog in our possession within a couple of blocks of the Ditch, we were subject to the Indian grass torture or a hinder-binder, and the loss of our frogs.

For kids our age, in that time, a penny apiece for cabbage moths was good money. On a Saturday afternoon you could easily net 20-30 of them in an hour or so, and that translated to a thick stack of wax packs.

While it seemed like easy money, chasing the moths up and down the slopes of the Ditch must have been harder work than I remember. When I'd take my mason jar of moths to the "professor's" house, he'd always invite me in for a glass of his special punch.

I recall that the punch tasted a good deal like normal Hawaiian Punch, but there was some sort of thicker, sweeter taste there that I could never identify, but which sometimes springs to mind even today when I'm enjoying a fruity cocktail.

I'd drink the punch while he counted the flittering moths through the glass of the jar. I always had a pretty good idea how many moths I'd brought, and he never tried to short me on the payment. If anything, he seemed to always round up to the nearest nickel.

After a little while, the moth-chasing and the warmth of his sun-drenched living room (even with the shades drawn) frequently compelled me to stretch out on the couch and lay my head on a pillow.

Those must not have been particularly restful naps, though. I must have tossed and turned a lot. I recall that frequently I'd wake up with my t-shirt on backwards or inside-out and . . . wait! . . . what?

Standard Catalog Update #26A : Worth a picture

As noted in a comment to Standard Catalog Update #26 on Sept. 18, through the courtesy of a reader we are able to add one to the checklist of 1955 Wilson Mets Baseball Booklets.

Though he didn't leave his name, the fellow who submitted the scan of Bob Feller's Pointers on Pitching booklet was Rick Payne, an Ohio collector.

And, hey, on the internet it doesn't cost anything to post a picture, so . . . why not?