Go West, Young-ish Man

One of the more enduring bits of hobby lore concerns the rarity of the 1949 Bowman Pacific Coast League set, whose 36 subjects have bedeviled collectors for decades. The PCL was nearing the cusp of "open" classification from Organized Baseball at the time, which was eventually granted to see if it could become a viable third major league. That ascension from AAA to Open happened in 1952 and the level of talent often was better than the minor league designation implied. The weather was fine for the most part (some seasons ran to over 200 games) and a lot of major leaguers on the way down from the Show ended up playing there along with dozens of major league prospects headed in the opposite direction. There were also players in the league who were career minor leaguers by choice as the circuit offered relatively good pay and extensively recruited west of the Rockies at a time where it still wasn't all that common to casually travel across the Continental Divide.

There's a rich history of PCL sets that stretch back to the T-card era and by 1949 most were either team-issued or sponsored by businesses that primarily operated in the same geographic area as the league.  That particular season, which ran to 187 games, the league boasted franchises in Oakland, San Diego, Hollywood, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. For reasons unknown, Bowman elected to issue a separate set of PCL players in addition to their major league specific 240 subjects. 

Reports vary but the cards seem to have been sold in Philadelphia (home of Bowman), Seattle and Portland, possibly co-mingled with the MLB cards, although Mark Macrae, as reliable a source as there is for all things PCL, relays they were known to have sold separately, at least in Seattle.  A number of surviving examples are hand cut and some sources indicate they could be found in sheet form as well. All-in-all, it's remarkably murky distribution-wise, especially for a Bowman product.

They look just like the regular-issue 49 Bowman's:

Rucker was a typical PCL player of the day- a veteran who had played in the National League for a half-dozen years in the Forties (all with the Giants) and then concluded his career out west, in this case ending in 1950. A short blurb in the December 1951 Card Collectors Bulletin gives us what is likely the first or second mention of the set (it reads like it had been identified in an earlier issue that year):

Still not very well known by the end of the decade, the fourth issue of Woody Gelman's Card Collector newsletter, dated September 1959, had a short piece on them. This was quite possibly the first time many collectors had even seen an image of one:

Gelman, or his ghost writer, mentions most of the cards were destroyed, which I'd say is possible but not definite. In fact, if they were actually disposed of, they were likely sold by the pound to Philadelphia "junk" stores specializing in paper and not just discarded.  No matter, they are difficult; PSA presently has 605 examples in their database, or just under an average of 17 per subject. Specific populations range from a low of thirteen to a high of twenty-two, which is essentially random as there are no star players involved. As above, some fairly well-known names were included though.

The cards are not impossible but do get pricey even as demand for them has waned a bit over the years. They are neat little items and their infamy has kept them in the minds of hobbyists for over seventy-five years now.

Holy Sheet!

I've been rolling through a ton of old hobby publications of late and am presently in the midst of The Trader Speaks (TTS) issues from 1978.  TTS of course was owned by the recently deceased Dan Dischley (a New York City cop who sometimes used his connections to go after hobby fraudsters) and was the pre-eminent hobby 'zine of its time until being overtaken by Sport Collectors Digest (SCD) in the early 1980's as the entire structure of selling and marketing baseball cards was changing.

197 issues of The Trader Speaks were published, with all but the last 18 under Dischley's stewardship. The first edition came out in November of 1968 and once the fifth issue came off the presses it followed a fairly set format, first with checklists and updates of same then more and more short articles.  It was punctual (almost unheard of at the time), informative and opinionated. Dischley published 179 issues including a special "Convention" issue for a three day show held at Shea Stadium in August of 1978 and never missed a month.  There were practically exponentially expanding numbers of shows occurring at the time and perhaps the most fertile time of hobby growth was from the Summer of 1977 through the Fall of 1978. A lot of this was aided and abetted by the appearance of the Sports Collectors Bible in 1975 and a couple of other early price guides.  Jim Beckett also conducted two price surveys in this time period, with TTS dutifully publishing the results and by time of the Shea Convention the modern hobby had been born.

Lew Lipset, a name familiar to all of us grizzled old collectors --and certainly a few ungrizzled ones-- very quickly became a major dealer (and eventually cataloger) in the mid 70's and by 1977 had a regular TTS column called Lew's Corner that was pretty entertaining but served the real (and dual) purpose of tracking pricing of star cards among other things. Hobby price guides and the Beckett surveys had mostly focused on full sets and certain series within those sets and while dealers had been warming up to the idea of what we would now call superstar card pricing since the early 70's, Lew was one of the first guys to discuss and embrace this idea. He had some other neat observations as well and today I'd like to focus on one in particular, which came via letter to him:

Most readers under the age of 50 or so probably do not recall the glorious messes that were usually referred to as "junk stores" but along with antique shops, classified ads and "trading post" periodicals (TTS was modeled after the latter) they essentially comprised the eBay of their time and even the smallest towns always seemed to have a handful of good to great ones ones. Meyer's sure seems like a classic junk store but also one that gave us a lot of Bowman oddities that have survived to this day.

I'd wager a good chunk of the handcut 1949 Bowman PCL cards circulating today originated from Meyer's and were just overlooked by the writer of the letter. There are unusually high amounts of the pre-1953 Bowmans out there that are print oddities, such as this Murry Dickson from my collection, that could have come from the shop as well:

Bowman's 1949 PCL cards are now thought to have had some distribution on the west coast, both in their own packaging and also (possibly) mixed in with the MLB cards for a very, very short period of time. While still difficult, there are found more readily today than they were in the 70's, when they were widely considered to be among the toughest of all postwar issues. Lew's concise comment the prior month says it all:

The PCL cards have been steadily demystified over the years and while still a bit pricey, you could assemble a couple of sets with ease just from current eBay listings.  Don't get me wrong, they are not easy but the PSA pop report has 569 showing, or around 15-16 of each on average and interest in PCL issues is not what it used to be.

Here is the concise history of TTS publishers in case you were wondering:

Nov. 1968-Sept. 1983: 179 issues (Dan Dischley)

Oct. 1983-March 1984: 6 issues (Sonny Jackson)-mailing list then sold to SCD's parent company

June 1989-May 1990: 12 issues included in copies of SCD

How Irregular

Well it's been just over a year since my last post on The Card Collector and now that I've dusted off some more issues, I thought I'd share some additional fun facts.

I don't have a full run of issues but I did note that sometime between issue 11 (5/15/61) and 16 (12/30/61) Woody Gelman turned over the editorship to Jim Zak of Cicero, Illinois, although it remained essentially a house organ for Gelman's Card Collectors Company, which still published the little 'zine.

First up, from number 19 (3/30/62) we get an issue date for the Bazooka Presidents set, namely 1962.
(UPDATE 6/23/20: It turns out it's from 1960 after all):

Previously attributed for the most part to 1960, this 33 card sets runs through Eisenhower.  These were issued in the familiar 3 panel package designs.  Here's old Zachary Taylor:

Later in the same issue we see that the 1962 Topps Baseball Stamps were being issued 40 at a time, at least in the beginning.

The Stamps did clock in at 200 subjects, although Roy Sievers is shown with two teams (Athletics and Phillies) as Topps corrected a mistake as he was never on the A's. This little hiccup meant 201 stamps were actually issued!

Anyhoo......Fleer's FTC complaint against Topps makes news.  Fleer would win one of their arguments in 1965 before the decision was overturned and they sold all their player contracts to Topps in '66. Topps had 414 of 421 major leaguers locked up and Fleer took exception.

Things pick up a bit in the next issue, dated 4/20/62, check out the CCC ad:

1949 Bowman PCL cards are one thing but 1956 (really 1955) small Hocus Focus cards in uncut sheet form for $2.00???!!!  The $1.00 price point for the PCL cards is intriguing as the recently reappeared 1952 Baseball high numbers (garbage scow, my ass) were going for the same rate.  As it has turned out, the former are a good bit harder to find that the latter.  And I've never seen an uncut sheet of the Hocus Focus cards-the mind reels at what that would be worth today.  Other ho-hum items include T205's, Hopalong Cassidy foils and the rare #68 Fleer Ted Williams card. Jim Zak had some deals too, no?

In issue 22 (6/20/62)  we get one of the first inklings of the 1962 Baseball green tints:

Meanwhile issue #24 (8/20/.62) brings 1949 Bowman misprint sheets and 1952 Topps highs. Woody was really turning up some goodies!

I hope to fill in the missing issues (I have about half of the run) but these seem a little harder to find than some other hobby mags of the day. Some are also very mundane but the hobby was visibly nascent for two decades and the Card Collector was a vital early publication that helped fuel the wide-ranging world of cards that exists today.