Musing about my five collecting interests: All things Orioles and BALTIMORE Colts, 50's Baseball, team publications, Japanese cards and even some football and hockey.
You might find some beautiful women, soccer stuff, presidential pins and life advice from time to time. I don't charge extra for any of those.
The great Stan Musial has two cards in the 1959 set. I've posted both previously over there. His regular card which is really pretty sharp and personifies him in my mind:
And the Baseball Thrills card, not my favorite Topps subset ever. But it was nice to track down the original picture.
I've got a couple more of his vintage cards in my Hall of Fame binder but my favorite Musial card is right at hand. Posted previously was the terrific 1958 All Star card. Now that's Stan the Man!!
Musial was the ultimate hero of one of my oldest and dearest friends. How ironic that within 12 hours or so we would both learn of the death of a favorite baseball figure we held dear. Sam, I'm thinking of you tonight.
Woke up today to the news that one of the Oriole franchise's greats, Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver, has died at the age of 82. I had always thought of him as indestructible. I was so lucky to have met him a few times and told these stories before.
The first time was at the baseball winter meetings in Houston in 1981. I had finagled press credentials from the college paper and skipped a week of classes to hang out with all the baseball bigwigs.
The highlight of that week was a press lunch that I attended and sat down at Earl's table. He had some great stories. I brought up an Oriole-Yankee game from 1970 that had been the best regular season game I had ever seen. Earl picked up the game story from me and went on and on about that game. What a fun day that was.
Some years later I was waiting for my luggage at Hobby Airport here in Houston when a couple of brown tweed bags with embroidered Oriole emblems emerged. I was amazed to see the guy next to me reach for them! I turned and saw it was Earl. I spoke to him and he was genuinely interested in talking to an Oriole fan in Houston. He even remembered (or so he said) the press luncheon discussion from several years before.
The scan up top is of the cover of the program given out at the 'Thanks, Earl' game in September of that amazing (and ultimately disappointing) 1982 season. This video from the ending of the last game of the season, as seen on national TV with Howard Cosell at the mike, makes me choke up today just as it did back when I watched it live.
He was one of the game's great managers and unique personalities. I usually don't get sentimental but I'll admit it was hard to talk to my son about Earl this morning without some emotion bubbling up. He meant that much to Oriole fans of a certain age. I sometimes shake my head when I see how some people get emotional over the death of a celebrity or star they only knew as a fan. But today I know exactly how they feel.
Over the Christmas break my wife and I took a trip over to Austin to listen to some live music (Austin is a great town for that) and to visit the recently refurbished LBJ Library & Museum on the University of Texas campus. We'd been to the place many times in the past and although it's always interesting (I've mentioned many times my interest in LBJ) we both felt it was time for them to make some changes and last year they did just that. The re-opening was in early December and we had heard good things.
Indeed the Museum is greatly improved with some wonderful memorabilia and displays invoking the life of the former President and particularly the decade of the 60's when he served as President. If you have an interest in that rather remarkable decade or know someone who does it's a worthwhile trip for sure. It had always been free to the public but they have started charging for admission. But since we arrived at 3 p.m. they waived the $8 and asked for a donation instead. We went back the next day and did the same.
First have a look at a Topps 1972 card of Johnson from their U.S. Presidents set. I picked this up online a few weeks ago. I had been unaware of it until I happened upon it somehow.
This is an older brochure from the Museum. I picked up new ones but damned if I can find them right now.
One really fun thing to do is pick up these 'phone' receivers they have scattered among the displays. You can listen to some recently declassified phone conversations that were taped by the presidential staff. Fascinating stuff, especially those that give you a taste of Johnson giving a friend or adversary a bit of his ....ahem... persuasive tone.
Below are a few items I picked up in the gift shop. First, a couple of 1960 Kennedy/Johnson campaign pieces. A pretty neat place in and of itself. I think I had the lapel pin already but for $1 I grabbed another one to display. . In those days my folks were serious Democrats and we were a 'Kennedy Catholic' household. That changed over the years and by the early/mid 70s my parents were consistently voting Republican.
1968 Hubert H. Humphrey campaign button, also from the gift shop. He was LBJ's vice president. Back in those heady days Humphrey was a hero of mine for his liberal stances on social issues. I've wondered how this country would have been different if he had defeated Dick Nixon in 1968. I was surprised to find that when I googled 'HHH' the first pages returned were about some dipshit wrestler that went by that moniker. Sweet Jesus, have we come to that?
1968 George Romney (Mitt's Dad) campaign button. See, they are an open minded museum. G. Romney didn't win the Republican nomination. Richard Nixon did and we all know how that turned out.
Back when 7-Eleven convenience stores had a presence in Houston they had a lot of promo tie ins with Major League baseball. Unlike a lot of the player/product tie-ins back then, the MLBPA ones specifically, 7-Eleven held a licence to use the team names and logos. We got Slurpee Cups and Slurpee Cup discs like the Eddie Murray above.
I've also seen some of the cups with generic caps on players. I'm guessing the were produced prior to the licence being acquired. There were also NFL, NBA and Hall of Fame player cups but I don't remember getting any of those. They have had other tie-ins (Star Wars?) since they sold off the stores here in Houston.
Without any research I'm going to guess the that the cups preceded the discs based on the players I have in both forms. I've got a couple of Brooks Robinson cups and some other 60s/70s players. The discs I've seen are from 1984 and 1985. IIRC the disc came with the wax paper version of the cup and was found under the cup held in place by a cardboard insert. At least that's how I remember them.
The discs are like the old Sport Flicks (sp?) cards in that they are 'motion' based. Turn the Murray a bit and a picture of him in a batting stance appears.
Anyway here are some pics of the 7-Eleven cups that I've grabbed from the 'net.
And I've heard rumors that the company is re-entering the Houston market. That's good news because having two or three convenience stores per block in Houston just doesn't cut it.
I have blogged about (and likely put people to sleep with) my collection of presidential campaign pins. I've got just about as many sports related pins and a nice display of some of them in my office. Most of them are mass produced pinbacks and buttons and probably not worth scanning and blogging about. But I do have a few that I really love and do have some value, if only sentimental.
The two pinbacks above are of the type fans used to buy at concession stands and at souvenir shops like Manny's Baseball Land in the Bronx. I can't remember where I got these two but it was likely at a long ago memorabilia show.
The bottom one contains the '1970 American League Champs' inscription which leads me to believe it was a World Series souvenir from that year. The top one doesn't have any dating but it so closely resembles the other that it almost has to be from that same time-frame It had ribbons attached to it identical to those on the other one but they had deteriorated to the put that they crumbled nearly into dust when I took it off my display to scan.
My other treasured items in this vein are my Oriole World Series and All Star Game press pins. I've got those stashed away in a safe place and one day soon I'll pull them out and show them off.
Back in the pre-merger days I was never much of an AFL fan but looking back I can see that the league had a lot of appeal. Three of the standouts are quarterbacks featured in the 1997 UD Legends set.
First we have a shot of the 'Mad Bomber' Daryle Lamonica. He came out of Notre Dame and was drafted by the Buffalo Bills. He developed a reputation as a guy who'd throw deep in almost any situation but was languishing on the bench in Buffalo when he was acquired by Al Davis to replace the popular Tom Flores. Look back on Lamonica's numbers with the Raiders and they don't seem too impressive given the kind of pinball stats you see out of modern qbs, but in his day he was very impressive.
That's a cool shot of him on the card looking to throw down field. Throw off that back foot, Daryle, and throw as far as you can! He ended up winning Player of the Year awards in the late 60s.
Jack Kemp shows up on one of the few portrait cards in the set. Kemp was the guy who started in front of Lamonica in Buffalo. He might have been the best of the AFL's quarterbacks and played in the league for it's entire 10 year run. He picked up an MVP award, too.
And yes, he is that Jack Kemp, former Cabinet member under the first George Bush and the Republican nominee on the Dole ticket in 1996. He died a couple of years ago. And, to beat the wise old Night Owl to the punch, the 'left leaning' scan is NOT a political statement, just a bit of technology-induced irony.
And finally we have the one and only Joe Willie Namath. I hated the guy for his brash ways when he began his pro career. Then he beat my Colts in Super Bowl III after predicting it! So I hated him even more. But through the years I've mellowed on almost everything when it comes to sports and rivalries. Besides, how can you hate a guy who hits on Suzy Kolber while drunk on national TV?
I don't know about you but I keep a notepad by my computer and when I read my daily intake of blogs I scribble down cards and players that other folks have featured that strike my fancy. I've discovered some really fun stuff like that. This may not be an example.
These rather homely cards are from one of the slew of TCMA sets that were put out in the 1970s and 80s. Some younger readers may not know that TCMA was a company put together by TomCollier andMichaelAronstein. You can read a bit about them and their best product, the SSPC sets right here. This page from the Standard Catalog of Cards gives a checklist of all the TCMA sets that featured major leaguers. The company also did minor league team sets. You can see a variety of their products here. Anyway, back to my original premise, I read something about this 1919 White Sox set on a blog and made a note of it. I was interested because the Black Sox scandal has held a fascination for me since I read Eight Men Out back when it was published in the 1960s. So I went to eBay and found a small five card lot for a couple of bucks and grabbed it. Here 'tis. The cards are pretty crude looking, even for an out-of-the-mainstream set such as this. The backs, a couple of which I have shown below, are not much more than brief 1919 stats in a typewriter font. For some reason they remind me of cards that might be included as part of a cheap baseball dice replay game. But for a couple of bucks I have some unusual cards of players I might not otherwise get a chance to collect.
I don't think I'd want to complete the set. I don't remember if there were complete sets available on eBay but I can't imagine they would be very costly. There are a few graded cards which had a $10 to $15 asking price. I'm surprised anyone would 1) submit one of these for grading or 2) pay for one in a slab. But that's just me. I'd kind of like to have the Kid Gleason one though.... ungraded of course.
