Elston Howard: A new PC

I don't intend for this blog to be Yankee-centric but I have had this post queued up for awhile. A few weeks ago I got this Elston Howard Panini card from a card show dealer's box of 25 or 50 cent cards (I forget which now). Panini stuff is hit-or-miss for me but I liked this one so I picked it up.

I've told this Elston Howard story previously over on my '59 Topps blog many moons ago:

He had opened Elston Howard Travel in my hometown of Nutley, New Jersey. When it opened my best friend and I would walk by daily hoping for a glimpse of a major leaguer. One day a woman waved us in to the offices and told us to come by that weekend. Sure enough Elston was there and he signed pictures for us. Probably my first in person autograph and definitely our first off the field encounter with an athlete.

I'm currently going through my boxes to find that photo. I know I have it as I've seen it within the last year or so. Back to this card...there are (of course!) 'hit' versions that I've seen on eBay which have bat pieces and such. Those do nothing for me.

I've always had a casual Howard collection. By 'casual' I mean that if I come across one of his cards that I think I need I buy it. No modern set cards but career era stuff from Topps, Post etc. Sometimes that leads to me having dupes because I'm too lazy to actually checklist my casual PCs like Ellie, Johnny Callison and Bob Moose. 

One of my favorites is this one from the '64 Topps Giants set. 

Before I get too deep into his cards here is a really cool (to me) piece I found on eBay and added to my collection. These type of key chain good luck pieces were popular back in the day. 

I'm posting an oversize shot of the back because it's a bit hard to read otherwise.

Here are a few more of my favorite Elston Howard cards from my binder:

1957 Topps. I love this card.

Both '62s, this All Star and regular cards:

And here are the three from the sets I've completed/blogged:

His 1958. A beauty.

His 1960 card...why they have him capless is a Topps mystery.

Finally his 1959. I've upgraded this one once so I have one for my PC binder but this one that fills the slot in my '59 set could still use an upgrade.

And just the other day some Twitter-ites were celebrating National Doughnut Day. A baseball related site posted this:

Elston is credited with inventing it. The Wikipedia page for this has some interesting insights as well as links to scientific studies that delve into whether or not it does what it is clams...increase bat speed.

Here is a pic of the back of the box I found on the net.

And finally a variation of the box. Due to that '59 Topps card I associate Ellie and the color light blue. This box therefore is cooler.

Yet another box variation. This one has a red doughnut.which I don't think is what originally came in the box.

Mark Hoyle is another Howard collector based on Howard's contributions to the Impossible Dream Red Sox in 1967.  Every once in awhile Mark rides his Segway through the 20-acre warehouse that houses his collection and returns with a Howard piece to post on Twitter. His collection puts my PC to shame!  But I'll keep digging though.

Cards Just Because

When I go to a card show and dig thru boxes of cheap vintage I will sometimes  always  pull cards out that just strike me as cool. Either I like the composition of the card, dig the photo or get some pang of nostalgia from it. Happened again this past Saturday at the monthly (now twice monthly) hotel show.

Bob Turley was a favorite of my father and I think sometimes he was more enthused about seeing him pitch at Yankee Stadium than he was about Whitey Ford. We always got to the games early so I was very familiar with the Yankee Stadium batting cage. I wish I could figure out who that is behind him on this '61 Topps.

I had completely forgotten about his having won a Cy Young Award until I was checking his bio the last night. He was also #2 behind Jackie Jensen in MVP balloting after that terrific 1958 season. I was too young to remember his days with the fledgling '54 Orioles but he won 14 games on a team that only won 54 overall.

I already have a nice '61 Billy Pierce but if I ever decide to collect the set I need a dupe Pierce to slide into the slot on the binder spine. Now I have one. Plus it's another Yankee Stadium shot. I always like to think I was there the day they took these shots. This is classic Pierce.

I grabbed these two rookie related cards as well. Julian Javier has that great Topps top hat trophy and Fritz Brickell got the star that designated him as a rookie in 1961. I'm not sure that was actually the case (he played for the Yanks briefly in '58/'59). The real reason I bought the Brickell card was the 'windbreaker under the jersey look'. That used to be common. Not anymore.

Brickell's dad Fred was a big leaguer in the 20s and 30s. He died at the age of  54 the year his son's card was issued. Fritz died just a few years later of cancer at the age of 30 in 1965.


Breaking my pattern of 1961s was this Casey/Woodling '63 special. I like the original Mets' clean pinstripe look and the Polo Grounds background. Too bad had forgotten that I already had this card. I could have spent the 50 cents on some other vintage gem.

All in all another great Saturday morning spent with baseball cards. I sunk $85 into 1958s. Oh, did I mention that I'm now committed to collecting that one? Well I am. More on that soon.

New York, New York...and yes, Google is harshing my mellow

I grew up in New Jersey, just a short bus ride from New York. I never rooted for the Yankees or Mets but I was immersed in the 'culture' of those two teams. It was difficult not to be if you lived where I did and was surrounded by the people I was surrounded by.

Pulling cards from vintage boxes always spark a few memories. Sometimes I buy the cards, sometimes I drop them back in the box in favor of cards I like better. On my last trip to the card show I bought some Yanks and Mets. Maybe I was feeling particularly nostalgic.

My trips to Shea Stadium were usually with friends to watch their team, the Giants, Dodgers, Braves or to see 'my' NL team, the Phillies. But no matter who we were watching I'd always root for Ed Kranepool. Damned if I know why. He played 18 years in the bigs, all for the Mets. He made one All Star squad, hit a World Series dinger and won a ring in 1969 and always seemed to be having fun.

If I had a favorite Mets' pitcher I guess it would be Al Jackson. He put together a pretty respectable career on the mound for some pretty terrible Mets clubs. I always liked the Mets' announcers a lot more than I liked the Mets and they all seemed to have a man-crush on Jackson so maybe that's where I got it from. 

Of course, due to the '69 World Series the Mets and I had a bitter breakup. Not that we were ever really an 'item' anyway. 

Hector Lopez was one of my Dad's favorites. I think he just liked the name 'Hector'. This card reminds me of the closest we ever came to snagging a baseball at Yankee Stadium. My Dad was returning from the concession stand when Lopez fouled off a pitch that came back into the upper deck just as he was coming up the ramp. The ball went right past him on a hop.

My friends and I thought Dooley Womack had the dumbest/coolest name in baseball. We liked to say it in our 'Bob Shepard voices'. I have the ticket stub from his one and only major league start. It came in July of 1966. Womack started the second game of a Sunday doubleheader against the Senators. I don't remember anything about that fact. Or that Whitey Ford pitched three innings in relief. I'm guessing that since the Yanks were getting whipped and had already lost the first game that we left early.

Semi-off topic rant #1: I've noticed over the last few months that I no longer consistently get notified what a post receives a comment. Some comments trigger and email, others don't. There doesn't seem to be any pattern as to which ones I am alerted to. I've set and re-set my notification settings any number of times.. Anyone else experience this?

Semi-off topic rant #2: Google is phasing out Picassa Web Albums. I don't know what you bloggers use but PWA has been a valuable tool. I usually scan a big stack of stuff and can easily upload the scans to an album. Then I can post from any device, any place with almost no fuss. I know that I will still be able to upload scans directly into posts but I rarely ever post from my home computer. Google Photos, the 'new' picture site they are pushing sux big time for this. You can't get a direct image URL without jumping through hoops. And alternate sites like Dropbox, Imgur and others either require you to pay for the storage I'd use or are too clunky. Flickr belongs to Yahoo and I think Yahoo is teetering financially. I'll figure something out.

1966 Baseball 'Rag'...True's Baseball Yearbook

I love love love old baseball mags. This one was a virtual 'throw-in' to an eBay purchase I made recently. I would usually buy one of these type of magazines every spring. I always bout the Street and Smith annual, and I got the Sporting News but I'd grab one of these 'junk' mags, too. This one is typical with superstar photos and breathless article teasers on the cover. I'm kind of surprised that none of them announce a player being 'at the crossroads'. There always seemed to be an article about some player in that situation..."Johnny Callison...at the crossroads!" or some such foolishness.

This is the index page. There are some two page 'feature' articles (see below), a 'Gallery of Stars'..i.e. one picture/one paragraph stories on several players. Note that the cover calls them 'Exciting" articles. Ooookaaay.

I'll give True credit for having some big name writers as contributors. Bill Libby, George Vecsey, Maury Allen and Leonard Koppett are familiar names to those of us old enough to have followed the game back then.


Here is Libby's Koufax story. Note the first paragraph swipe at Cassius Clay!

No mag worth it's salt could skip a story on the Yankees, even in down times.

I love this shot of Yogi Berra getting the heave-ho. Norm Siebern of the O's looks rather bemused by it all.

This is the one page feature on Juan Marichal.

Most teams got a two page spread previewing their '66 season. This is the orioles' entry:

For my Yankee fan friends. I knew this team very well.

Oh baby, True did NOT like the Red Sox. And they only got one page.

No self-respecting 60's baseball magazine would be complete without some classic ads. Here's one I don't recall ever seeing. It's for a product call the 'Dippy Disk'. It's not real clear from the ad but I assume it's some sort of 'flat' baseball that is made to curve when thrown. Sort of like a Frisbee I suppose. When I read this I was instantly reminded of Eddie Murray's story of how he and his brothers learned to hit by swinging at plastic coffee can lids.

And of course I think it was a government regulation that every magazine carry a Joe Weider advertisement. This was True's back cover. Back then, and even today, I find this mildly disturbing.

If these old mags weren't such a pain to scan I'd post a bunch more.

EDIT....For Joe Shlabotnik....

Kenny Boyer? Who the heck thinks of him as a Met? I don't and I saw him play there. Went back to look at his stats and I was reminded that he also played for the White Sox and Dodgers. I'm losing memory, fast.

Fathers Day

I'm sure most of us can say that we got our love of sports from our Dads. I know I did. He's been gone for a few years but I'll always have memories of the great times we had at ballparks and arenas in and around New York and elsewhere as I was growing up. And even much later as I was able to take him to ballgames. He loved watching the Texans and Astros in later years. Thankfully I was in a position where I could repay in a small way the stuff he did for me back in the day.

So in his honor I'm posting cards of his favorite players (or guys who were among his faves... I don't have a DiMaggio to post for him. Joe D. was his hero.

The one team we both lived for was the Rangers. I went to my first game with him in 1959 or 1960, I'm not sure which. Anyway his favorite Ranger was longtime Blueshirt backliner Harry Howell.

This 1965 Howell came as part of an amazing package from Chris of the terrific Diamond Cuts and Wax Stains and 1964 Tall Boys blogs. I'll have plenty more to say about that envelope real soon.

Next up, Whitey Ford's 1964 Topps Giants card. As I noted Joe DiMaggio was my Dad's favorite ballplayer, and Allie Reynolds likely his favorite pitcher, but whenever I see a Ford card I'm reminded of the umteenn times he and I saw this guy pitch in Yankee Stadium. My Dad loved doubleheaders and we went to most of the ones the Yanks played on Sundays in the 60s'. I bet Ford pitched in 75% of them, usually the first game.

My Dad also was devoted to the New York Football Giants, as they were called by those who had grown up with two Giants franchises in New York. He and I never saw that Giants play in Yankee Stadium but we always went to Princeton to see them play the Eagles in their annual exhibition game there. The NFL wasn't on TV like it is now back in the day. We listened to many more games together on the radio than we could watch on the tube. I wasn't a Giants fan but the sound of Marty Glickman and Al DeRogatis broadcasting from Yankee Stadium is part of my being.

My Dad always loved Sam Huff. He never failed to mention that Huff was a 'real football player'! This 1963 Huff really takes me back. I love this card. It looks like it was shot during the training camp sessions we went to up in Connecticut back then. Good times, great memories. I'd never fail to tell my Ol Man what the Colts would do to the Giants if they met for the title.

My Dad was a helluva guy. I bet Sam Huff would say he was 'a real father'!

One last thing, here are a couple of pics of my Dad at the 2005 World Series. First outside Minute Maid with my friend and college roommate Robert Wuhl (a.k.a Arli$$):

We watched the game from Roger Clemen's suite. My Dad got a huge kick out of it all. Great night, he talked about it all the time after that.

1965 Jay Publishing Yankee Yearbook

When I was growing up in Nutley, New Jersey I spent a good part of my free time hanging with my best friend at a little store near my house run by a man named Lee Jentis. It was a typical suburban Jersey candy/newspaper/cigarette/soda fountain place. It had originally been owned and operated by a guy named Sam but the crowd he allowed to hang out at the fountain was pretty intimidating to a couple of Catholic elementary school twerps. The high school-aged crowd were what we referred to as "hoods". They generally wore pink 'high-roll' collared shirts and greased their hair back. We'd go in to buy our baseball cards and candy or a newspaper for our folks on the weekend but we gave those 'hoods' a wide berth. We were very happy when Lee bought the place and made a big deal of telling everyone that the 'hoods' were no longer welcome.

Lee gave me my first 'job'. I filled in for his helper during a summer break the guy took. I recall feeling pretty damn self-important to be behind the counter and serving the Cokes instead of buying them. I think I worked several hours each day. I'll never forget that he paid me $5 each week which my Dad thought was not nearly enough but I was thrilled to get.

A few years later my buddy and I had a Newark Evening News paper route that we shared. I delivered the east side of the route, he did the west. There was an old dark but well kept apartment building on my side of the route just full of old folks who seemed to always be cooking. I can still remember how that building smelled. When we were done we would pedal our bikes as fast as we could and meet back at Lee's and have a fountain Coke or a 16 oz. Royal Crown Cola in a bottle and a Drakes Cakes treat. We might buy a pack or two of cards or some cheap 2 cent candy.

I also liked to flip through the magazines. I remember finding a Yankees' unofficial yearbook put out by Jay's Publishing. I was familiar with yearbooks, I had lots of them.... Orioles, Phillies, Mets, Yankees, White Sox and more. My father would let me buy them at Manny's Baseball Land across from Yankee Stadium. But those were the official yearbooks. The Jay's book was a strange animal. I never saw them other than at Lee's although I know if Lee had them then they had to be at other newsstands.

This 1965 version doesn't look familiar to me but that year is right in my collecting wheelhouse so maybe I had one. I hadn't thought of them in awhile but when I was searching for some Jay's Picture Pack photos this thing popped up and it brought a wave of nostalgia over me. I put it on my watch list and it was relisted a few times. Finally my sentimental side overcame my fear of losing my 'Orioles Fan Card' so I bid and won. On a Yankees item. Yikes.

I guess 'unofficial' in those days meant you could use pictures of the players in their uniforms but showing the team stand-alone logo was off-limits. And there are no ads in this thing. The title page has a fun picture of the volatile Joe Pepitone raging on an ump with the since fired manager Yogi Berra coming to fan the flames. Note the disclaimer at the bottom of the page.... "Not an official publication".

First up is a story about the Yankee 'dynasty' and a compelling picture of the ever stuffy Col. Jake Ruppert.

Next we see a three page essay on the 1964 World Series. I remember watching some of those games on TV at my grandparents place in Brooklyn. And the nuns at St. Mary's in Nutley always had the TVs on for the World Series so we saw a lot of the weekday games as well.

When I heard about it I was fascinated by the fact that both teams cast  off their managers that winter. And the Yanks signed ex-Cardinal manager Johnny Keane.

After the Keane bio there are two page spreads of the Yanks' high profile players. Each is the same as this Mickey Mantle spread, a full page photo ...

...and then a bio/stat/smaller photo page.

Second line stars and regulars got one page. I played ball with Jim Bouton's cousin Danny. He was good. Bouton has an interesting bio here. Painting and designing costume jewelry. Wasn't long before he added 'author' to that list of hobbies.

I always liked Al Downing so I'm showing his page, too.

Subs and prospects are two to a page. Elvio Jimenez' bio mentions that he is the brother of "the Kansas City A's gardener Manny Jimenez." I have never heard that term used to describe an outfielder if indeed that's the reference.

The final pages had this 'Immortal Yankees' feature with bios and pics of the guys who were memorialized on the three monuments way out in centerfield at Yankee Stadium. 

And the back cover promoted the rest of the Jay's lineup of yearbooks and the fantastic 'Picture Packs'. 12 photos for a quarter with a dime for postage. Only a handful of Orioles pictures have survived in my collection from those days. I've added a few more along the way and recently purchased a six picture lot of Billy Pierce photos on eBay. 

I'd be curious to see other Jay's yearbooks and I might look for some online but the price would have to be right.

And just for comparisons sake here is the Official Yankee yearbook for 1965. This one I DO remember from back then.

Oh, as for Lee's? It's long gone. I recently found out that Lee had passed away in 1977 at the age of 68 and 'Mrs. Lee' had moved to Florida and lived to the age of 90 before she died in 2010. Thanks for the great memories.

This screenshot from Google Maps Street View shows the corner of Franklin Avenue and Vreeland Avenue in Nutley where the store once stood. That does not look like the same building so maybe it was rebuilt or completely remodeled. The Starbucks two doors down was a shoe and boot repair shop back in the day. Right there where the cab is was where we caught the 13 Broad New Jersey Transit bus to school every day.

Sorry for the maudlin stroll down memory lane. I feel privileged to have grown up when and where I did.