Tobacco card expert Keith Olbermann e-mailed me the other day with some thoughts about the column I did recently about a 100-year-old article in the Charlotte Observer talking about youngsters in 1909 clamoring for “pictures” that came in the various American Tobacco Co. cigarette packs sold at local drugstores.
  
   Alluding to the two most prominent theories that would seek to explain why the T206 Honus Wagner card is so rare (a – he didn’t approve of smoking; or b – he wanted to be paid for the use of his image with a commercial product), the MSNBC news anchor toyed with a third option. “What if both theories about the T206 Wagner are wrong? Not just the ‘didn’t want to encourage kids to smoke’ one, but my theory that Wagner hit them up for money for his likeness?” Olbermann asked.

   With that he cited fragments from the news story: “Greatest desire to procure Cobb and Wagner ... no reference to Wagners ... kids in North Carolina desperate for the Dutchman from Pittsburgh ... buying pack after pack."

   "To hell with Admiral Schlei," he muttered at the end, assuming you can mutter in an e-mail.

   Still, he’s not ready to abandon his original theory just yet. “Although, as I think I pointed out in an article on T207  that I did 20 years ago, if you look at the progression of the American Tobacco sets, there is a definite “star drain” – T206 has Plank and Wagner, evidently withdrawn. The T205 issue has neither player (pretty much busting the Plank ‘broken plate’ theory) and is missing a few lesser stars.
  
   “T207 has no Plank, Wagner, Cobb, Mathewson, etc., and is filled with obscure rookies who wouldn’t get their own card in any set today. That certainly fits the idea that there might have a growing money issue."

   So what’s your verdict, either about Wagner specifically or some of the other tobacco card rarities in general? And your choices don’t have to be limited to anti-tobacco bias, royalty compensation or deliberate chase card. We are willing to listen to other suggestions as well, just don’t blame it on the guy on the grassy knoll. He’s got enough on his conscience already.

 
   I ran across this TCMA card of Eddie Gaedel the other day and it reminded of an old friend from another time who was just about the same size as the famous St. Louis Browns pinch hitter.
   
   About 35 years ago I was living in a good old-fashioned boarding house in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where six or seven boarders essentially took over the upstairs section of a private home, sharing the restroom but not getting any dining privileges.
   
   Just down the hallway from me was a guy named Johnny Allen, a dwarf from England who had emigrated from the United Kingdom and somehow settled in northern New York to ply his trade as a tailor. We had been pals virtually from his first day in Plattsburgh when I was an undergrad at the state university.
  
   Johnny used to drive a brand-new Mustang with special doo-dads added to the foot pedals to allow him to reach them. He wasn’t a very good driver, couldn’t hold his liquor too well (I’d carry him home under my arm) and wasn’t much of a pool player (table’s edge was at eye level for him), but he was an amazing tailor at a time when the profession was probably fading away a bit.
  
   After a couple of years in Plattsburgh, he announced he was moving to The Big Apple. We were all instantly terrified for him, as it turns out for no good reason.
  
   We never heard anything from him, other than a note that he was doing costume tailoring for some Broadway shows.
  
   Then, in 1979, I was at the theatre with another of Johnny’s old mates, as he might have described us, and there barely 10 minutes into the 1978 thriller “The Eyes of Laura Mars” with Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones, was Johnny, up there on the silver screen. He even had a line spoken to the Oscar-winning actress, one clearly cobbled into the screenplay to get him the scale fee from the Screen Actors Guild.

   My friend and I almost fell out of our seats, and made something of a fuss in the theatre exclaiming, “There’s Johnny,” at a time when movie staffers were a bit stricter than they are nowadays.

   We never did hear from Johnny again, though we subsequently saw him in the “Buck Rogers” television series, in the Sylvester Stallone movie “Paradise Alley,” and in the Sex in Cinema section of Playboy magazine. Plus, he showed up as one of Santa’s elfs in a Penthouse magazine advertisement.

   Just for the record, I wasn’t a subscriber to either of those two. On those rare occasions when I ran across either one, I was always impressed by the literary content, which I think has been widely underestimated. Seriously.

   This kind of stuff must read suspiciously like the old Reader's Digest "Most Unforgettable Character" feature, so I won't try to deny it. I'd be interested in some of the readers' choices as the most memorable persons they encountered in the hobby over the years. Especially if you ran into any dwarfs, or Minis, as we might call them in the card-collecting world.

    Tom Hultman, whom SCD readers will remember as one of our editors for many years and who is now a school teacher here in Central Wisconsin, sent me a link to a movie trailer the other day. In keeping with our nostalgia theme around here, the movie in question is almost 20 years old, and the reason he sent along the link to the trailer is to enjoy once again the appearance of yet another SCD notable.
  
   Rick Firfer, our longtime correspondent in the metro Chicago area, is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and has turned up in a number of major motion pictures over the past 20 years.
  
   In the trailer of the hit 1989 film “Home Along,” Firfer is the manager of the grocery store where Macaulay Culkin goes for supplies as he stocks up for the ordeal of being a home “survivor” as an enterprising 8-year-old kid inadvertently left alone by his family over the Christmas holiday.
  
   As Culkin checks out at the cash register, Firfer questions the kid about where his mother and father are and whether he has any sisters or brothers. Told that that he is an only child, Firfer asks the kid where he lives. “I can’t tell you that,” Culkin tells him. “Why not,” Firfer counters. “Because you are a stranger.”
  
click here
  
SCD readers wouldn’t concur with that, but it is great fun to see somebody you know show up in a movie. Toward the end of the two-minute trailer, the Firfer charcater sets up the ultra-precocious kid for a line that ultimately became a real-live catch phrase in the early 1990s.
  
   Asked if he’s at the grocery store alone, Culkin responds, “I’m 8 years old. Do you think I’d be here all alone? I don’t think so.”
  
   So Firfer’s got a claim for a role in altering the national lingo, to say nothing of all the different roles in various movies he's been part of. He also gets those residual checks ... and it hardly matters that the film editors clipped his talking part out of the final version for widespread release.
  
   Just like the guys who get a cup of coffee in the major leagues, it leaves the rest of us green with envy to be able to say you’ve had your moment up on the silver screen.
  
   Tomorrow I’ll tell you about another friend who suddently popped up in a number of movies and several television roles. Here’s a hint (though not a particularly helpful one): he’s much, much shorter than Firfer is.

   The latest news that the Barry Bonds perjury trial has been postponed to at least July and possibly beyond has left me with the nagging realization that the whole enterprise has been ill conceived, ill directed and ill considered in its entirety. And the other thing I realized is that I have enormous respect (potentially qualified) for Bonds’ former personal trainer, Greg Anderson. There, I’ve said it, er, blogged it.
   
   Bonds is a victim, and a scapegoat of the first order. If it wasn’t always apparent – and it should have been – the period covering much of the 1990s and first few years of this millennium was clearly plagued by widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs. Widespread.
  
   What pushed me over the hump finally was the release of Alex Rodriguez’s name from a list of 104 that was supposed to be kept confidential. Once that got out, almost nobody complained about the unfairness of one guy being singled and pilloried for the sins of so many.
  
   And I don’t care a hoot about the technicality that Bonds’ is supposedly being pursued for perjury rather than the alleged steroid use. His Fifth Amendment rights were violated by the whole process when he was essentially compelled to give testimony against his own best interests. And don’t tell me he could have exerted those rights; ask Mark McGwire how well it works to even informally decline to offer self-incriminating testimony to the 536 hypocrites on the hill.
  
   Even if you want to insist that Bonds needs to be punished for what he did, isn't it pretty clear that he's already been punished enough? He has presumably spent many millions of dollars defending himself against a federal behemoth run amok. He has presumably surrendered at least a year of his baseball career and the many millions that would have meant, and he may even have torpedoed his chances at enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Does that sound like a suitable spanking for a "crime" that is being ignored for so many of his peers?

   If you don’t think the injustice of the whole prosecution is reason enough to urge its termination, then give up on it for practical reasons of expense. Ultimately, the federal government will end up spending tens of millions of our tax dollars to convict someone of doing something that more than 100 other people also did at a time when his own employer (MLB) was willing to wink at what was clearly a financial boon to just about everybody involved.
  
   And Anderson is probably more of a victim than Bonds, having already paid for his initial crime as dictated by a plea agreement with the government, then hounded for the next several years because of his refusal to toss Bonds over the side.
  
   Though I concede I can’t possibly know if the motivations are any more complicated than what they seem, but Anderson has already spent more than a year in prison for refusing to rat on a friend about something that never should have aroused the interest of the Feds in the first place. If you can get past the icky nature of the basic enterprise, it ought to occur to us that Anderson's refusal to testify – at great risk to his own freedom and well being – would be applauded in other circumstances. Plus I hate that the Feds are also bullying his family as well in an effort to turn the screws on him. Uncle Sammy needs to get a grip on something other than Anderson's neck.
  
   Leaving aside everybody’s hysterical reaction to the steroid boogeyman, this has been 21st-century McCarthyism gussied up to look like something more noble. It isn’t.

   To illustrate how oddly my mind can operate, back when I was a youngster in my 20s or so I used to ponder that if I were ever sent to prison, I would be able to amuse myself by conducting Strat-O-Matic Baseball Games in my head from the cards that I had all but memorized over my teen years.
  
   Just musing about what you would do in prison is goofy enough – there was no attendant crime that I had in mind that might have explained how I got there – but the absurdity of my being able to remember so much data is now stunning 35 years later. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday.
  
   Anyway, while I no longer daydream much about how I would spend my days in the slammer – that television show “Lockup” on MSNBC has drained all the utility from that notion – my daily sorties into cyberspace do make me think once again about that strange exercise.
  
   If someone had access to the Internet (presumably not an ideal situation for some felons), one could easily wander off into the endless digital universe and pursue almost anything in the world, from mischief and mayhem to culture and advanced education.
  
   And if studying the Warren Commission Report or 17-century literature wasn’t your bag, just relegating yourself to our hobby, for example, would lead to so many cool things the amusement would be bountiful and the education unavoidable.
  
   I scoot around to a dozen or more websites every morning searching for blog fodder or whatever they call it, and this a.m. that meant a stop at http://www.vintagecardtraders.org/, and if you’ve never been there I can’t recommend it enough.
   
   Along with creating a great venue for trading with like-minded collectors, it also links to a host of similar-type sites, all seemingly with a genuine affection for collecting first and foremost.
  
   As it turns out, I have to drag myself away from all of these enticing locations every morning just to ensure that I get back to the business of my antiquated print magazine, for which, I might add, I still have a great deal of affection.

   To tell the truth, I’m not really sure which installment of the “I was a lousy card dealer” series this is, so I just guessed it might be Part III. The possibilities might have otherwise been endless, but I haven’t set up at very many shows in the last 15-plus years that I’ve been here in Iola.
  
   In the course of looking up records for something else, I ran across my trusty “Red Book” that I used to record sales almost since I started the O’Connell & Son Ink outfit 27 years ago.
  
   What I noticed was a show in Albany, N.Y., in the summer of 1993, I think at the Polish Community Center out in the western suburbs of the state capital. One of the sales entries showed $800 for a 1955 Topps Sandy Koufax rookie, a 1954 Topps Whitey Ford and a 1956 Topps Roberto Clemente.
  
   Now, I realize this is a lot of self-induced embarrassment, but that ship has long since sailed. Upon reading the entry, it immediately occurred to me that this didn’t seem like enough money for those three cards. Even for 1993. All three were really nice cards, probably described as EX-MT when I bought them many years earlier, maybe even NR-MT.
  
   So I checked the records, and it turns out that I had a grand total of $705 into those three cards. For those of you who think that a $95 gross profit ought to be adequate, I can only suggest that you may have never had to go on the road selling baseballs cards in order to pay the rent. If even I can tell that I had shortchanged myself on a deal – albeit 16 years too late – than it must have been fairly lopsided.
  
   My only possible defense, which ought to be a good object lesson for anyone selling cards, was that it was a stressful time in my life. I was in the middle of major upheaval and thus was in need of the money, which any novice knows is not the best time to sell.
  
   For the record, the $95 gross profit represents about a 12 percent margin, and when you toss in the expenses for gas, hotels and food, the lopsided nature of the deal becomes a bit more apparent.
  
   It’s another indication of what a schlub I was out there on the road that I can’t seem to remember hardly any triumphs from the other direction, those instances where it was I who made out like a bandit, either buying or selling. I am sure I must have had a few, but it’s hard to spot them from scanning my little red book.

   In my travels around cyberspace, I see discussions in sports forums about the relative merits of sports cards – particularly vintage sports cards – vs. traditional stocks and other speculative venues as a safe haven for investments.
  
   I should state upfront that when it comes to the debate about investing vs. collecting, my credentials as they relate to the former are less than stellar. Collecting for the sake of collecting, this I know something about, but trying to turn that into a nickle’s worth of profit is probably not an area of great expertise for me.
  
   As I’ve noted before, I am not particularly proud or embarrassed about this; like so much in life, it is simply the way it is, and were I capable of remaking the universe, this aspect would be so far down the list as to be essentially unreachable.
  
   But I will concede that blasé attitude has cost me a lot of money over the years. My only defense is that I’ve been aware of the tensions between investing and collecting as far back as when I was a teenager, and made decisions at that delicate juncture that would solidify my lifelong credentials as a non-investor.
  
   About the time I stopped being much of an active collector as a kid, say 13 or so when the peer pressure developed to set aside such childish things, I also made a decision – quite consciously – that I would stash the cards away, thinking that I would give them to my own son someday.
  
   I also made it a point to set aside only one copy of any individual card as a means of ensuring that I was not doing it as an investment. To that noble, if ill-advised end, I gave away any doubles that I had to some younger kids in the neighborhood.
  
   From that inauspicious start, four decades later I remain hopelessly inept in the investment end of things. In the 1980s when I put together nearly a dozen 1950s and 1960s Topps sets – card by card – I concentrated on finding the best bargains I could in collectible condition, probably anything from a strong VG to EX-MT or occasionally even better than that. And I was woefully deficient in policing the idea of centering.
  
   As a final note, I should point out that the best bit of investing in baseball cards in my life was actually engineered by my then-wife around 1983 or so when she bought me the entire Perez-Steele Hall of Fame Postcard Set as a Christmas present.
  
   Oh, I may be exaggerating a bit, since I made money over the years in spite of myself, but you get the idea.

   A while back I blogged about how much fun it was to page through the dealer catalogs from folks like Larry Fritsch Cards, or Kit Young, then, about a week later, a lady here at Krause dropped off a half dozen or so catalogs from TCMA, the Baseball Advertiser as it was dubbed, saying they were going to throw them away and didn’t know if the sports department might be interested. We were/are.
  
   The 48-page Spring of 1984 catalog included a cool welcoming letter from company president Mike Aronstein, along with a little “National Notes” sidebar story telling readers about the upcoming National Convention in Parsippany, N.J.
  
   In contrast to the Fritsch and Kit Young catalogs that emphasize vintage cards, the TCMA catalog offered hundreds of more-recent sets, most notably all of the major mainstream stuff, plus the vast inventory of their own creations, the TCMA Great Teams, Greatest Players, reprints, the Fleer and Laughlin World Series cartoon cards (shown), Z-Silk Cachets and First-Day Covers, puzzles, buttons, reference books, cool posters and lots of records.
  
   This was neat stuff at a time when the hobby was welcoming tens of thousands of new collectors every year, and the offerings in these catalogs provided a nice entry point for collectors who might have otherwise been intimidated by the prices of vintage cards. Little did we know at the time but the prices of vintage cards probably represented a major bargain at that particular moment in history.
  
   I even noticed a giant crossword puzzle, about 4-by-5 feet, that had nearly 1,500 questions about baseball. I bought that thing despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly enamored of crossword puzzles, though I was interest in baseball triva. I had been married for about one year at the time, and my exceptionally good sport wife thumbtacked that thing up on our bedroom wall, and we proceeded to complete it over the course of a couple of years.

   The temptation might be to lay the blame at the doorstep of a staggering economy, but the explanation for the closing of the well-capitalized Sports Museum of America in New York City after only 10 months of operation is probably more complicated than that.

   With a reported $93-million financing, it would have seemed like a good candidate to buck conventional wisdom that has always held that building a tourist attraction in a museum setting can be a tricky business. It should be noted that the official announcement said that the museum’s founder and CEO, Phil Schwalb, was hoping to find a new buyer who would re-open the facility in Lower Manhattan.

   All the traditional suspects are being paraded around as culprits for the demise, but I can’t shake the more simplified explanation that: a) Museums are a tough proposition; and b) Multi-sport undertakings are even tougher.

    base this on little more than my years of experience in sports in general and our hobby in particular, but I truly believe that to have a chance at all a museum would probably have the best chance with a particular focus, if not exclusive but certainly a clear-cut emphasis on a particular sport.

   Hell, if Barry Halper couldn’t engineer to get his fabled collection (shown here) planted in a museum even with his legendary accumulation, what chance do others have? I understand the idea that appealing to the broadest possible base seems attractive, but I fear that people balk at going to museums out of a sense that a significant portion of the facility is aimed at interests outside their own. Still, having said that, I can't help but root for the success of another multi-sport museum on the West Coast, Gary Cypres' incredible Sports Museum of Los Angeles. It's slated to re-open this summer, and I've gotta tell you that it's a must-see for anybody even remotely connected to or interested in our hobby.

   Even when I’m at one of my favorite places on Earth, the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, I’ve got to admit that there are a number of sections at that bit of hallowed ground that don’t ring my chimes in the same fashion as others. Still, I think it helps enormously that the site itself is so utterly linked solely to the National Pastime.

   And I add this as not necessarily significant as far as I know, but still worth reporting, that the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown was perhaps the most prominent major museum that had not entered into any kind of consignment arrangement with the New York City venture, despite being only about four hours away up the Thruway.

   I’ll admit up front that the link between the Hall-of-Fame linebacker and the modern curse that is the ubiquitous cell phone is tenuous or maybe even preposterous. I wanted to carp about cell phone use and extoll the virtues of the 1959 Topps Football set in general and that Joe Schmidt card in particular, so I joined a couple of admittedly disparate themes.

   The 1959 Topps set came into the picture in a cover feature that we did in this week’s issue of Sports Collectors Digest (March 13). I’ve never collected football as an adult, though I probably had most of the set as a kid in 1959. Some time in the early 1960s, I traded all of my football for another kid’s 1960 Topps Baseball cards, and since the other kid was quite a bit more fastidious than I am (not too tough a call: Oscar Madison is more fastidious than I am), his 1960 Baseball cards were in far better condition than my own. Good enough that I still have a whole bunch of them a half century later.

   But doing the article was great fun as I looked back at a wonderful set of cards, and now I’m thinking of maybe putting the set together. We also had a lot of fun with the garish pink backgrounds that were used on so many of the 1959s, creating one of the silliest covers we’ve ever had in the 35-plus years of SCD. (shown)

    now my beef. I was having breakfast at a House of Pancakes yesterday and trying to enjoy my Sunday New York Times when a woman about 45 years old and seated a table away began talking on her cell phone.

   She was seated at a booth with her son, perhaps in his early 20s, and she talked at full volume for what was probably 20 minutes but seemed like 40. I’d like to tell you that my first thought was that if Joe Schmidt were here, he wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior, but I would be fibbing. Mostly I was just mad as hell.

   For anybody who would suggest that having to listen to her talk on the phone would be no different than listening to her talk to her son, I say, phooey. People raise their voices for the telephone, and even if they didn’t, there’s a different tone and modulation to it that makes it harder – if not impossible – to ignore.

   Ultimately, it’s our fault for tolerating this kind of second-hand audio smoke. Grrrrrr. I once sat in a limo for 25 minutes from an airport on my way to an auction on the East Coast and listened as some dullard preened and cavorted through all his earth-shattering business ventures. I should have smacked that dolt on the forehead with his very own instrument, and I should have politely asked the lady yesterday to return the call at another time in a non-public venue.

   That’s what Joe Schmidt would have done.