Here's one that will probably sound unbelievable for younger collectors who can’t imagine what it was like in the old days of the hobby before the convergence of collecting/investing seemed to give it an aura of respectability.

   The various Veterans Day ceremonies yesterday prompted me to dig out the photo you see shown here of a 1911 barracks. It’s a wonderful photo for a number of reasons, not the least of which from a hobbyist’s perspective, would include the T206 White Border cards that are displayed on the bulletin board bottom and sides along the back wall.

   Baseball cards in a military barracks! Who knew such a thing was possible? Fast forward 58 years to a Navy barracks in the Philippines where I had to grease a fellow sailor to get him to buy me three or four packs of 1969 Topps at the Base Exchange. I wanted to get a look at the new issue and I was too embarrassed to buy them myself.

   So how come these salty-looking GI’s got to have T206’s posted on their wall and I had to slink about Subic Bay Naval Base trying to surreptitiously purchase 40 cents-worth of Topps cards? The short answer is, I think, that the T206’s came from cigarette packs, while the Topps cards were quite fairly linked to childhood and bubble gum.

   In the photo, which I realize is reproduced here essentially too small to make out the T206 cards or even much detail of the cool postcards and advertising pieces nearby, there are lots of other neat details to ponder even aside from baseball cards. Like the antique light over the table itself, or maybe the leather pockets on the corners. I even got a kick out of the “pill” bottle sitting atop the wooden rack on the wall on the right. I don’t know how much “Pill Pool” is played anymore, but I played a bunch of it in the 1960s in New York poolrooms that could have been used as locations for 1940s gangster movies.

   I haven’t counted it in several years, but I am pretty sure I’ve put Mickey Mantle on the cover of Sports Collectors Digest more than any other single individual, though I suspect Babe Ruth probably comes in a solid No. 2.
   Obviously, I make no apologies for that, since it is pretty much conventional wisdom that Mantle is the most influential post-war figure in the sports card and memorabilia hobby. I occasionally get criticism about our admitted reverence for all things Mickey, but it’s hard to take it too seriously. Objecting to Mickey Mantle is like dissing Halloween or the Easter Bunny, the latter of which could not get around on a fastball.

   So our 35th anniversary issue, which will be the issue dated Feb. 6, 2009 (a few weeks late, so sue me) will launch “Mickey Mantle: The Complete Collectibles Guide,” an unprecedented multi-part special series written by one of the most well-known and widely respected Mantle experts in the hobby.

   Kelly Eisenhauer (shown lower left), a Mantle fan and collector for more than 40 years, offers insight and literally hundreds of photographs of many of the thousands of pieces of ephemera, consumer goods, trinkets, toys, advertising pieces, magazines, books, postcards, regional and food issues, the Topps inserts and test issues, oddball items, and, as they say, a whole lot more.

   Whether you’re a Mantle fan or not, this is going to be an extraordinary undertaking, one which I am looking forward to in the same fashion I did for the marvelous T206 Series “The Monster” by Scot Reader in 2006 and the acclaimed “Topps Proofs” Series by Keith Olbermann this past year.

  


The breadth and scope of Mantle stuff is simply staggering; about my only regret is that the constraints of a weekly magazine – even with a minimum of 12 installments planned – means that we will only be able to picture a fraction of what the author has available. Even having said that, I am going to run a whole lot of pictures with each installment, though they will have to be smaller than we typically would provide.

   This is going to be a lot of fun, and along the way it’s going to create a wonderful reference source for serious fans and collectors.

---

   Last week or so, I blogged about Richie Ashburn and the wonderful original artwork of the Hall of Famer that turned up in that amazing aggregation of artifacts from former Topps Executive Vice President Sy Berger.

   The Ashburn artwork is one of 117 original paintings from the Topps archives that will be featured in the Robert Edward Auction next spring. Most of the paintings are recognizable to serious collectors as they were used in the classic 1953 Topps Baseball issue.

   What set the Ashburn painting apart from most of the others was the fact that it was never issued as a card. At the time, he was the darling of a Philadelphia Phillies squad that was at the tail end of a rare period of reasonable success, a First-Division team, as we so quaintly called it back then.

   Since Bowman Gum Co. was based in Philly, I assume Richie was in the middle of wrangling between the two companies over exclusive contracts. He wound up on Bowman cards from 1950-55, but missed out on Topps in 1953 and 1955.

   No less of a white knight than former Standard Catalog editor and longtime SCD colleague Bob Lemke has come to the rescue, producing his own version shown here that’s easily the equal of anything engineered by Berger and Woody Gelman 55 years ago. Just like Lemke's ersatz 1955 Topps All-American cards, the “cards” he creates are typically better than the originals.

   Lemke’s attention to detail is extraordinary, as the card back shown here illustrates. Bob even gave it No. 253, one of the half-dozen numbers from that year that carries a “not issued” designation in the Catalog.

   If alien beings came to earth 75 years from now and found this Ashburn card nestled comfortably within a real 1953 Topps set – or even the reprint set – it’s a pretty good bet that nobody could tell the difference.

   But it’s still likely that one of them might chime in with a, “Where’s Stan?”

   Along with trying to become a more prolific blogger over the last several months, I’ve also been in the middle of another project that has consumed just about every available bit of time in the evenings and on weekends since about mid-June.

   The book department here at F + W Media asked me to author a book, Legendary Yankee Stadium: Memories and Memorabilia From the House That Ruth Built. This was not my first book – I authored the Alan Rosen biography True Mint in 1994 – but it was the first done through the traditional collaboration with our book department. Much different than the virtually solo affair of 14 years ago (solo except for dozens of hours of interviews with Rosen).

   And while the soon-to-be-demolished Stadium has been the subject of a number of books, ours will hopefully still attract a good deal of attention because we’ve gone at it from a slightly different direction.

   Legendary Yankee Stadium is going to showcase many of the remarkable artists and photographers that our Sports Collectors Digest readers have come to know over the years, plus we’ll obviously also have a dramatic emphasis on including images of memorabilia from many of the great auction houses that have graced those same SCD pages.

(Mantle artwork by Ron Stark; www.ronstarkstudios.com)

   For my part, I spent the summer researching online and poring over two decades worth of SCD’s in assembling profiles of some of the Yankee legends that any Bronx Bomber fan would come to expect. Rather than recount the results of World Series contests or All-Star Games, we’ve approached it instead as an opportunity to look at the heroic names from Yankee history, with an a bit of an anthropological bent by unearthing (figuratively speaking) some of the artifacts that were so much a part of their careers.

   With a focus on Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Berra, Ford, Reggie, Thurman, Mattingly, Jeter and A-Rod, plus hundreds of photos of the Stadium (old and new) and our own unique perspective (and photos) of Barry Halper and his acclaimed collection, we’re hoping to provide a look at all of this that defies easy categorization.

   Much of my end of the undertaking is completed, though we had hoped that a bit more information about Stadium demolition plans might have been available at this point. The book is already in the design phase and is slated for release next spring.

   A week or so ago I blogged about what a horrible card dealer I was for the several years that I tried it way back before I started full time here at SCD, so it’s only fair that I reverse course and talk about my best day as a dealer.

   I think it was 1992, and I was doing a Chicago show in the western suburbs, but I am pretty sure it wasn’t George Johnson’s Sun-Times show. I think it was on Ogden Avenue, which just came to me – I don't know how.

   Anyway, it was what you would call a typical Saturday morning when a man about my age came to my table and was looking at my early 1970s Topps stuff. It took me a while to recognize him, but the fact that his clothes were so snappy was something of a hint. It usually is with big-league ballplayers. You notice they ain’t shopping off-the-rack at WalMart.

   It was Dave LaRoche, the pitcher from the 1970s who carved a spot in baseball history with his own version of Rip Sewell’s famous Eephus pitch, which he called “La Lob.” He was tickled that I recognized him, and we struck up a conversation for several minutes.



   He asked to take a look at complete sets of 1971 and 1972 Topps that I was offering, noting that his first two Topps cards appeared in those years and he had always wanted the full sets. The sets I had were near-mint or better, though I suppose that with today's hyper vigilance from grading the 1971 might fall short of that these days.

   But in 1992 it would have been acceptable to “grade” both in that fashion, certainly the 1972 set, which I had put together card-by-card many years earlier (with the last series purchased en masse from Larry Fritsch). But LaRoche didn’t have a lot of time to look at the cards; he was the White Sox pitching coach at the time, and there was a game that afternoon at Comiskey.

   He asked if he could come to my hotel room that night to get a closer look at the sets. Gee, tough call. Sitting on a hotel room bed with takeout food while watching reruns of “Walker Texas Ranger,” or kibitzing with one of the game’s top relief pitchers from the 1970s ... and maybe making some money. The internal debate lasted 3/8’s of a second.

   About 9 p.m., he showed up with his bullpen coach, Johnny Stephenson, in tow. That made it evern better; Stephenson was a backup catcher for my Metsies in the mid-1960s, so I had a great time talking with him about Casey and the rest of that amazing crew. While we had a couple of beers, LaRoche sat at a table and carefully went through the two binders, page by page.

   As the title of the blog suggests, he ultimately decided to buy both sets, and under the continuing premise that I am a better journalist than baseball card dealer, I’ll defy another convention and say that he paid me – as I recall – about $3,400 for the pair of them.

   That made it about $4,200 for the weekend, which was easily the record for this lousy card dealer. I drove home Sunday night to Indiana and asked my then-wife to guess how much I had made, thinking it would be a nice surprise, since the take was usually $1,000 or even far less.

   “$5,000,” she exclaimed. She was a psychologist, not an accountant, so the surprise was gone, but at least I still had the dough.

   I watched the first game of the 2008 World Series last night and wondered how the event might seem to an impressionable 10-year-old getting acquainted with the game for the first time.

   I blather in this fashion because it struck me just how much technology has changed since I watched my first World Series nearly 50 years ago. It’s probably hard for younger people to imagine it, but television didn’t rule the roost in those days and the World Series games were afternoon affairs, meaning they conflicted with, ugh, school attendance.
 
   So the first World Series I remember much about was the 1959 Dodgers/White Sox clash, and my familiarity stemmed from an odd combination of the World Series cards included in 1960 Topps (shown) and an 8-mm film that I remember seeing at a Little League banquet that summer.

   I don’t remember what was on the menu, but I do remember big Ted Kluszewski stabbing a fierce line drive at first base. Even though he was nearing the end of the line at that point – and his greatest years had been with the Reds – I became a Big Klu fan for good. For most of the other memories of that Series, I couldn’t tell you if it came from that highlight film (which we saw several times), or from studying the Topps World Series cards. I do recall being confused why there weren’t World Series cards in my already-treasured 1959 set. I would have liked to have a look at the 1958 World Series in that fashion, even though my Milwaukee Braves got thumped by the Yankees.

   The first World Series game I ever remember seeing on television was in October of 1960, by which time my father had taken a job in New York City and we we’re living in Yonkers. I raced home from school on Oct. 13 just in time to see the last couple of innings of one of the great games of all time, capped off by Bill Mazeroski’s historic home run. I was already a full-fledged National League fan by then, so I couldn’t have been more thrilled – unless it had been the Braves.

   That’s a pretty good way to ensure that a 10-year-old would develop a lifelong addiction to the game of baseball.