$500 for a pocket calculator?

Like many of you, the Great Recession hit me pretty hard. I had fully intended to be retired about this time (or at least as retired as I'll ever get), but when one-third of my retirement funds vanished into thin air, I had to replot my course.

I suspect I'm also like a lot of you in wondering whether we have seen the last or the worst of the recent financial problems. Now I understand why my parents, who lived through the Great Depression, remained frugal and fiscally wary to the end of their days; and they had the advantage of a defined pension plan, probably never (directly) owning a share of stock or a stake in a mutual fund.

Historians still debate how long the Depression would have lingered if a wartime economy had not intervened, but I'll bet that in the late 1930s and through the 1940s, most Americans would have rather slogged through another decade of Depression than the uncertainties of a world war.

In the midst of my personal pity party, it occurred to me that technology might be what pulls the world out of this latest downturn.

That thought struck when I was at the local dollar store and picked up a pocket calculator for $1. No batteries required. You'd have to be my age to realize what a bargain that seems.

As it happened, I was going through a copy of the September, 1973, Playboy a couple of days later and discovered empirical evidence of just how much of a bargain today's dollar calculators are.

As I've mentioned in this space in the past, I have a nostalgic interest in Playboy magazines of the 1950s-early 1970s, especially those issues that have the annual Pigskin Preview article on college football. Among the ads for Japanese import autos and checkered, bell-bottomed, Sansabelt slacks, and the nekkid pictures of Victoria Principal, there was an article reviewing the latest in then hi-tech calculators.

I was struck by the price of those models that seem upon casual perusal to be comparable to the calculator I had just bought for a buck. They were priced at about $100. A quick google search of the historical value of the dollar tells me that 100 of 1973's dollars is the equivalent of about $508 today, given the average annual 4.49% inflation rate.

That suggests to me that if left unfettered by big government, mankind's natural inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit may yet get us out of the current economic troubles through the application of technological breakthroughs in virtually every field of endeavor.

1967-style Red Sox Rockers custom card

My list of pending custom card projects is likely to outlive me. I've got dozens of baseball and football player photos squirrel away in files both physical and electronic. My custom card output has slowed some in the past year or two, probably averaging something less than one new card a month. And that doesn't include my "rehabilitation" projects, remaking some of my earlier cards from a time when my skills weren't as far along as they are now, or in cases where clearly superior player photos have become available.

But while my to-do list is seemingly perpetual, I can never seem to strictly adhere to it. Something frequently comes along that strikes a chord and I drop everything else to take it on.

That was the case a month six weeks back when I found on eBay a very sharp photo of the Red Sox outfield of 1967 -- Carl Yastrzemski, Reggie Smith and Tony Conigliaro. The image of that photo on a late-Sixties style multi-player feature card (a term I invented for a Baseball Cards magazine article in the early '80s) leapt to mind and I was hooked.

I was the successdul bidder on the photo and while I waited for it to arrive, I did my homework. I quickly determined that the format for the card should be 1967. That's the year Tony C. was beaned and he didn't play at all in 1968. The trio was back in the Fenway outfield for 1969, but I decided to go with the '67 style.

Putting the back together was a challenge because of the space limitations and the necessity of covering three players. As always, I printed out stats from the SABR data base, then tried to copy the spirit of Topps writers of that era, who were writing for 10-year old boys, not adult card collectors.

My original version of the card front had the "RED SOX ROCKERS" in red type, matching that on the Boston uniforms in the photos. When he viewed the prototype on my computer, SCD editor T.S. O'Connell, himself a baseball artist, pointed out the card title seemed hard to read, with the black-outlined red letters largely coming out from the navy blue sleeves.

My next choice was to go with a light blue, picked out of the sky in the photo, and that seems to have been a great improvement. Maybe the red letters caused the eye to strain too much towards the title in an effort to read it, but to me, the blue letters at bottom, along with the blue sky above, seem to better frame the players and allow the eye to be drawn to that central element. I hope you agree.

Since I no longer have use for the 8X10 color glossy photo of the players, I'll sell it to the first taker, along with one of my custom Red Sox Rockers cards, for $15 postpaid. You can email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com to claim it.

How I got into All-American customs

This is a column that I wrote for a recent issue of Sports Collectors Digest. That issue had a feature on the original Topps 1955 All-American football cards.

When editor T.S. O’Connell invited me to create a column for this issue of SCD in which the 1955 Topps All-American college football card set was going to be featured, I knew I had to participate.
It has probably been two years or more since my own “updates” to that set outpaced Topps’ original production.

As of now I have created 122 cards in that format. My homage to the ’55 AA set includes 121 different players (I created two different Troy Aikman cards, Oklahoma and UCLA) representing 73 different colleges.

Many of my custom card creations have been featured in these pages in the past seven years since I began making my own “cards that never were.”

Once I realized that modern technology had created the tools to allow me to fulfill my childhood ambition of making my own cards, it was virtually a no-brainer to begin with the 1955 All-American style.

That was one of my favorite bubblegum card sets as a kid, and provides one of my earliest childhood memories. I have a firm recollection of sitting on the floor of my kindergarten classroom opening a red-white-and-blue wax pack of All-Americans during afternoon recess while the rest of the kids were outside playing. I was inside while they were outside because health issues often limited my mobility, even as a four-year old.
I don’t remember who I got in that pack, but I do remember that the Army players were my favorites, probably due to a combination of the martial sword-and-rifle logo and the players’ gold helmets. (I have created three Army cards in my own series: Glenn Davis, who Topps did not include in 1955, probably because he was under contract to Bowman, a Glenn Davis-Doc Blanchard combination card titled “Mr. Outside & Mr. Inside,” and a card of quarterback Arnold Tucker, who directed the offense of those USMA powerhouse teams of the 1940s.)

When my card collecting interests were revived in the mid-1970s, the first football card set I wanted to reclaim was the All-Americans. By then, through the courtesy of Larry Fritsch’s checklist books, I knew that there were 100 cards in the set, including a Four Horsemen of Notre Dame card that I know I had never encountered in my childhood.

By about 1982 I had completed a set of the originals in what I recall as high-grade in those pre-slab days. I wrote a heavily illustrated article about the set for one of the early issues of Baseball Cards magazine, then sold the set.

Around 2003 when I began my card creation efforts, I began piecing together another set of the 1955s. I needed the originals so that I could copy school logos and the cartoons on the backs. This time I endeavored to put the set together in at least Ex-Mt condition, as certified by PSA, SGC and SCD, though I removed each card from its plastic tomb and inserted it into a binder after scanning.

During this process I discovered that while some of the cards in the set were merely expensive (Thorpe, Horsemen, Grange, Rockne, etc.), others were truly hard to find in Ex-Mt or better condition, usually due to centering issues. Such cards were among the last to find their way into my current set. Besides cards #1 Herman Hickman and #100 Fats Henry, they included #3 Ed Weir, #24 Ken Strong, #28 Mel Hein, and, the last card I added to my second set, #99 Don Whitmire.
I believe the only cards in my current set that aren’t Ex-Mt are the Whizzer White and Gaynell Tinsley error version, which I have in VG-Ex or EX.

Since beginning my custom cards hobby with the 1955 AA style I have expanded my repertoire of baseball and football cards to about two dozen formats, but I don’t think I’ll ever be “done” with my ’55s. While I have done nearly 125 cards in that design, I still haven’t completed what I have named by Second Series (I consider the Topps originals to be the First Series). I’ve left card #152 unmade. On the checklist cards I have created in a Fifties Topps format, that card is listed as Randy Moss. Long ago I acquired some nice images of Moss from his days at Marshall, but have delayed putting together his college card. I originally did so because I wasn’t sure he was going to be remembered for anything beyond his faux mooning of Packer fans in the end zone after a touchdown a few years back. Now, his legacy as one of the greats is assured, and I’m just waiting for his NFL career to end so that I can craft an appropriate biography for the back of his card.

I’m already 22 cards into a Third Series of All-Americans, and I don’t see a Fourth in the offing. My pace of All-American creations has slowed considerably from more than one per month when I first started to six or eight per year now.

My to-do list of All-Americans consists of cards for which I have appropriate photos and just the lack the impetus to see them through. Besides three of four of my existing cards that’s I’d like to someday “rehabilitate” by using more recently acquired superior photos, the Top 10 on my list of cards to add include former NFL greats Earl Campbell, Jack Ham, Franco Harris, Joe Perry, Ollie Matson and Ray Guy. Also on the drawing board are 1950s baseball stars Ted Kluszewski, Moose Skowron and Jackie Jensen, and actor Tommy Lee Jones.

I also maintain a wish list of players whose cards I’d like to do, but whose photos in college uniform have thus far eluded me.

The “most wanted” on that list is Donald Driver. My efforts to acquire a reproducible photo of the great Packers receiver and fan favorite in an Alcorn State uniform have been unavailing.
Two former NFL stars of whom I’d like good college pictures are Jim Taylor from LSU, and Rocky Bleier at Notre Dame.

Surprisingly elusive has been a photo of future baseball Hall of Famer Frank Thomas in an Auburn football uniform.

Actors Dean Cain, Carl Weathers, Woody Strode and Johnny Mack Brown all played college ball, but I haven’t yet been able to find football photos for them.

One player you’ve never heard of is a personal project of mine. I went to grade school and high school with Jim Bond in Fond du Lac, Wis. After high school he received a scholarship to Michigan State. When that signing was announced, the local paper ran a photo of Jim and some MSU dignitaries in which Bond is holding up a Spartans jersey with the number “007”. This was in 1969, at the height of the first popularity for Sean Connery James Bond movies. Bond injured his knee early on and didn’t have much of a college career, but it would be fun to do a card of someone from my old neighborhood.

As you can see from my wish list and checklists, my All-American series encompasses a wide variety of players from college stars to NFL and MLB stars, TV and movie actors, presidents, personal friends and relatives of friends, and even a few fictional characters. That’s part of the appeal of making you own card set, you get to create the line-up.

If any of the readers are able to provide or direct me to a good photo of any of these players, please contact me at scbcguy@yahoo.com, or write me at P.O. Box 8, Iola, WI 54945. I always offer to share my first printing with those who provide photos I need.

And, unlike many other custom card creators, I do actually print my cards, front and back, and cut them into single cards. I’ve done as few as six cards of a player (that’s how many fronts or backs in the classic Topps size of 3-3/4” x 2-5/8” I can fit onto a sheet of 8-1/2” x 11” label paper on which I print before sandwiching them to a cardboard core) to as many as perhaps two dozen.

There are currently only four complete sets of my custom All-American cards in existence. I maintain two sets, and two collectors have prevailed upon me to provide them with complete sets. Of the single cards, I have given away some and sold some.

Early on I found out it’s much easier to offer cards for sale than to explain to a dedicated Alabama fan why I can’t get him a Bart Starr college card because of the time and handwork involved in printing and cutting the cards.

While the occasional sales help keep me in special paper and printer ink, the real reason I make my All-Americans (and all my other custom cards) is to satisfy a deep creative urge that, as mentioned, has been with me since childhood. I relish the challenge of colorizing or otherwise revamping a photo to make it fit my format. And I greatly enjoy the research that goes into getting the 90 or so words I need to write the backs. I once spent an entire afternoon in the library scouring biographies of JFK to gather the details of his undistinguished football days at Harvard.

Ever since I sold most of my card collection to Alan Rosen in 1993, I haven’t been much of a card collector. I seldom buy a card these days for any purpose other than to provide a template for one of my customs. Making and sharing these cards has become my real hobby.

You can see color galleries of many of my All-American cards and most of my other football and baseball creations in my Photobucket albums at www.tinyurl.com/customcards.

Worch Cigar minor league checklist enhanced

As a result of a string of eBay auctions in late July and early August, we were able to add three players to the 1933-1935 Worch Cigar American Association premiums checklist.

The Worch premiums are often confusing to inexperienced collectors because the name of the sponsor appears nowhere on the 3-7/16" x 5-7/16" blank-backed black-and-white premiums. The postcard-sized player cards were evidently available by sending cigar bands to the company's address in Minneapolis. Many of the surviving cards have the original envelope in which they were mailed, thus establishing the issuer's identity.

Worch Cigar cards are divided into two types: major leaguers and minor leaguers. To date, 146 different players are known (many with two or more poses) among the major leaguers, which appear to have been issued in 1933. Typical prices on common major league players are $100 in Near Mint. Most Hall of Famers bring $300-400 in that condition, with the big guns like Gehrig and Ruth up to $2,000.

The minor league players, until recently, numbered 57, all from teams in the American Association circa 1933-1934. While the minor league checklist is heavy on Twin Cities' players from the Minneapolis Millers and St. Paul Saints, there are a smattering of players from the Columbus Redbirds, the Kansas City Blues and one or two other teams.

Recent book value on the minor leaguers has been about 50% of the major leaguers, with only one Hall of Famer, Dave Bancroft, manager of the 1933 Millers, known. Catalog values may have to be adjusted upwards, however, based on the recent sale of 10 cards in the eBay sales. All sold at prices at least 3X the book value.

The best sellers among the minor leaguers were three heretofore uncataloged players: Johnny Gill, Minneapolis (1934-1935), Marty McManus, St. Paul manager in 1935, and Monty Stratton, St. Paul (1935). Stratton, of course, was the subject of The Stratton Story, in which Jimmy Stewart portrayed the pitcher trying to return to professional baseball with a wooden leg after a hunting accident. In about NM condition, those cards brought $287, $227, and $320, respectively.

And so it goes in the endeavor of checklisting vintage minor league baseball cards.

'71T high-number proofs are 1/1

Some strange and wonderful things have emerged from the Topps Vault since much of the contents of the gum company's card archives began to be offered in eBay auctions some years back.

For various reasons, not all of the goodies are "catalogable" (there's that word again). One grouping that does seem worthy of inclusion in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, however, is what appears to be an early Topps trial of high-gloss coating on card fronts.

According to Buffao, N.Y., collector Mike Chauby, who brought these cards to our attention, the experiment was probably not a success because the cards in his possession show signs that the glossy coating was either applied unevenly or dried unevenly. This resulted in streaks, pock marks and other imperfections on the surface. As well, the cards' showed a proclivity to scratches on the glossy surface.

What is especially interesting in the Topps experiment is that they chose to try the glossy coating on high-number 1971 baseball cards. While it is impossible to know when the experiment was conducted, it is not unreasonable to presume it was contemporaneously with the issue of the high-number '71s, when a sheet of the cards would have been at hand. Topps did not release a true high-gloss finish card until its 1984 Tiffany baseball set.

Beginning on June 16, 2008, and continuing throughout July of that year, Topps offered a handful of the glossy '71 high numbers every couple of days in its eBay auctions. Each card was sealed in a thick plastic slab and each card had a Topps hologram attached to a back corner, guaranteeing authenticity. Some purists might decry the placing of a sticker directly onto the card back, rather than on the holder, but in reality, it would not be at all difficult to fake these cards by applying a glossy coat to the front of "regular" '71T high numbers.

Each of the test cards is known in only one example, but it is not known how many of the 108 cards in Topps' Sixth Series of 1971 (#644-752) were involved in the experiment. The gloss coat may have been applied to a full sheet of 132 cards (in which case there would be two examples of some), or it may have been done working with a half-sheet of 66 cards. It is known that some of surviving test cards are among the series' short-prints.

Classifying these glossy '71T high numbers is problematic. They are not really a test issue in the sense that term is usually applied. Test issues were usually released for public sale in limited quantities and markets. They are also not strictly speaking proof cards because they are completely printed, front and back. The hobby has never really embraced the term experimental issue, but that probably comes closest to an accurate description of these 1/1 rarities.

Chauby had maintained records for more than a dozen of the glossy cards when they were originally sold on eBay. Winning bids ranged from $9.99, which would have been the minimum bid, to more than $30 for the Expos team card and Rich Allen, toa high of $66.65 for Jose Martinez. The average of 17 cards for which Chauby recorded prices was $20.04. Unfortunately, if the Hall of Famers and other high-demand cards in the Sixth Series were ever offered, their selling prices are not recorded. These would include Sparky Anderson, Boog Powell, the Dusty Baker-Don Baylor rookie card, and Luis Aparicio. Given their 1-of-1 status, those 2008 prices seem cheap and can likely be attributed to the fact that these cards were previously unknown and uncataloged within the hobby.

Investigating Baseball Magazine team posters

A recent inquiry about an uncataloged Baseball Magazine poster on the Net54 vintage baseball card forum has called into question the accuracy of the current checklist of those premium as published in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

The posters, which were listed in the American Card Catalog system as M114, were premiums that were issued by the baseball monthly magazine as a subscription premium, and were also offered for individual sale between 1910-1957.

The sizes and formats of the posters varied over the years between about 9" x 12-1/4" for single-player posters to 9" x 20" for some of the team pictures. They were printed in sepia tones on semi-gloss paper stock.

The Baseball Magazine posters are one of a handful of issues that are checklisted in the Standard Catalog not on the basis of known surviving examples, but rather on what was advertised by issuer as being available. Other examples include the 1902-1911 Sporting Life cabinets (W600), the 1888-1889 Old Judge cabinets (N173) and the 1911 Obak cabinets (T4).

In the cases of the Baseball Magazine posters and Sporting Life cabinets, the checklists were generated from advertising within the pages of those periodicals. In the cases of the Old Judge and Obak cabinets, the checklist was derived from lists printed as cigarette package inserts or coupons. In all cases, these contemporary offers indicate only what was available, or even intended to be available, to persons redeeming coupons or subscribing.

Especially in the cases of the cabinet cards, it is possible that certain advertised cards were never ordered by customers and thus were never produced or perhaps were scrapped after the promotions had run their course. This explains why in the cases of some of these issues, the biggest names among the stars of the day are more common in collections today than the more obscure players. It makes sense that when offered a list of players from which to chose, more fans elected to receive a King Kelly, Ty Cobb, or Christy Mathewson cabinet than one of a small-market team's utility infielder or a minor league player.

The Baseball Magazine posters list in the Standard Catalog has been published unchanged for most, if not all, 20 editions of the book. Now, it appears, changes are in order.

The team poster that was posted on Net54 was of the Chicago White Sox "World's Champions" of 1917. It is 7-1/2" x 14-1/2" and features the usual indicia found on most M114s concerning the publisher, etc. Such a poster is not listed in the catalog, which has only two team posters listed for 1917, the Red Sox and the Giants. None are listed for 1918. The Giants and White Sox were the World Series participants in 1917, and it seems likely that it would have been 1918 before posters with the World's Champions notice could have been available as a magazine premium.

That poster appears in an advertisement from Baseball Magazine that offers many team and player posters dating from 1914-1917. The ad is undated, though a small "10 - 19" in the lower-left corner may indicate an October, 1919, issue date.

The upshot is, based on the content of the ad, it looks like the checklist should be revised to include a 1917 White Sox poster and a 1914 St. Louis Cardinals poster. The listing of a Red Sox poster for 1917 may have been in error. If, after suitable inquiry, it cannot be proven to exist, either in a surviving example or included in an ad, the Rex Sox poster will likely be dropped from the checklist.

Even more on Indians' picture packs

This forum has been blessed with quite a bit of new information on Cleveland Indians picture packs in recent months. Most will eventually find its way into the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards. The trend continues with the first checklisting of a 1959 photo pack.

This (probably partial) picture pack was offered on eBay on Aug. 5, when the beat-up envelope and 19 player pictures -- each described as exhibiting some light discoloration -- sold for $36.51. The envelope is a bit misleading in that it shows Chief Wahoo presenting drawings of portrait photos when, in reality, the individual pictures all seem to be posed action shots.

I'd like to have included a photo of one of the pictures in this presentation, but the seller did not respond to my request for a scan. (What's up with that? Doesn't he know who I am?) UPDATE: Thanks to reader Bob Wong, we now have a photo of one of the picture from the 1959 issue. Jim Bolger only played eight games for the Tribe, having come to Cleveland from the Cubs in a pre-season trade and being traded to the Phillies on June 6, 1959.

The pictures are in the usual Indians' photo pack format of white-bordered, blank-backed photos with a facsimile autograph for identification. If the seller was accurate in his description, these 1959 pictures were a bit longer, at 9-1/4", than normal for the genre, but in the same 6-1/2" width.

The checklist here shows only 19 players and manager Joe Gordon, so it is likely incomplete. Indians' pix packs of the era typically contained 24-30 or more pictures.

Gary Bell

Jim Bolger

Dick Brown
Al Cicotte

Rocky Colavito

Don Ferrarese

Tito Francona
Joe Gordon

Jim “Mudcat “ Grant
Woody Held

Billy Martin

Cal McLish
Minnie Minoso

Russ Nixon

Jim Perry
Jimmy Piersall
Vic Power

Herb Score

George Strickland

Ray Webster