1952 Topps Look 'n See Pt. 2

Here is the other half of my '52 Topps Look 'n See purchase. First up, George Eastman. Hard to imagine the excitement level you'd reach as a kid when you opened the pack of these to find Ol' George staring back at you like your grumpy neighbor when you ask him to retrieve your baseball from his backyard. 

Francis Scott Key looks like Paul McCartney. With some Prince thrown in. I guess. The cards with 'busy' backgrounds are more interesting obviously. I like this one. Key seems unperturbed by the chaos at Fort McHenry.

As you get into this set the fact that each and every one is a portrait begins to wear on you. I've reached that point with Paul Revere.

 

Next man up is Washington Irving. I remember reading some of his short stories many years ago and becoming interested in the Hudson River Valley which was the locale of many of them. Years later I was able to spend time in the area and really fell in love with it. Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Newburgh and other towns along the river just have a charm and feel I don't find in many other places. Upstate New York, particularly the east and central regions of it is my favorite place to be.  Retiring up there is my dream but with my wife's family all in the Houston area it's just not very likely. Sigh.

 

 
Anyway, that's it for my '52 Look 'n See group.  Recently I loaded up some cheapies in my cart at COMC but decided to hold off and maybe just pick up a decent copy of both Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Time (and funding) will tell what I do with this set.

1952 Topps Look 'n See Pt. 1

Someone posted a card or two from this '52 Topps Look 'n See set back a few months ago and I decided that I needed a few for my collection. I found a small lot on eBay and I picked it up. It's been so long that I can't remember if it was a B-I-N or Best Offer. Whatever, it wasn't costly and I thought I post the best of the bunch in a couple of posts. It's a neat set containing historical figures on 135 cards. There is plenty of info on the set on the net including this page on the PSA website. Another good resource is the Cardboard Connection site. The set is broken down into several subsets, Famous Americans, Military Men, Inventors, etc. Babe Ruth is the only athlete on the checklist and there are some fairly reasonable examples of his card floating around. I'm not planning to chase many more of these but the Abraham Lincoln and a few others are tempting me.

Not much to add to the cards, the write-up on the back is a bio with a trivia question. The answer is revealed by placing the provided sheet of red cellophane on the back of the card. I've seen the cello sheets on eBay before although there doesn't appear to be one up now.

Obviously my little group isn't in very good shape. I'd rate them as "ATACC"...Acceptable To A Casual Collector. That rendering of Whistler makes him look a bit creepy.

P.T. Barnum looks like an actor but I can't quite place who it might be.

These are 2"x 3", smaller than what we now consider the standard card size. I've scanned one next to a '58 Topps to demonstrate the difference.

One more for this post, Ol Jeff Davis. His name has adorned a bunch of schools and a hospital in my neck of the woods. But little by little that is changing. 

I've got a few more to post. These things are growing on me.

 

Wacky Packages....they served their purpose

One of last month's eBay purchases came with a few 'extras'. The seller stuffed the small plastic case with filer in the form of Wacky Package cards stickers. I think these are the first time I've ever actually had things like this in my hand. According to this WP 'fan site' they were introduced by Topps in 1967. 

I vaguely remember them but they came after my die-hard collecting days of the early to mid 60s. I'm pretty sure my younger siblings had these things plastered to their school notebooks and binders.

These kind of things never appealed to me anyway so it's not surprising that I don't have any memories of them. When it came to non-sports I was more of a Civil War News and Mars Attacks guy. 

But here are some of what the guy sent. These Awful Apps cards are actually pretty clever. I got a grin out of them.

The rest are the typical Wacky Packages stickers. I scanned the reverse of the first two. No further explanation needed.

I know a bunch of fifth graders that would find this next one hysterical.

This one had tape damage. I'm guessing that these were received by the guy that sent them to me from someone else who likewise had used them as 'package stuffing'.

That's it. You were expecting something classy for the Fourth?

Archives Bull Durham Card of Robert Wuhl

I bought two 'jumbo' packs of 2016 Archives, paid too much for them and picked up a couple of mildly interesting cards. But that's a subject that'll I discuss in another post.

What we have here is an eBay purchase. That's Robert Wuhl, my long time friend and college roommate at The University of Houston on his '16 Archive subset card. The subset consists of  seven cards including one of screenwriter/director (and one-time Orioles farmhand) Ron Shelton.

Robert played pitching coach Larry Hockett as seen here drinking a beer, something Robert has never done (or admitted to) in real life.

The card back alludes to the 'candlesticks' quote that occurs during a mound meeting with catcher Crash Davis played by Kevin Costner and pitcher Nuke Laloosh, played by Tim Robbins;

(quoted at IMDb)
Larry: [Larry jogs out to the mound to break up a players' conference] Excuse me, but what the hell's going on out here?
Crash Davis: Well, Nuke's scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man's here. We need a live... is it a live rooster?
[Jose nods]
Crash Davis: . We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present.
[to the players]
Crash Davis: Is that about right?
[the players nod]
Crash Davis: We're dealing with a lot of shit.
Larry: Okay, well, uh... candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she's registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let's get two! Go get 'em.

Robert pretty much ad-libbed the scene from a real life conversation he had just prior to filming with another college friend of ours. He had asked her for wedding gift suggestions and her response was pretty what you see in the quote above. To bring this full circle, that friend, Barbara, passed away quite unexpectedly this past February. In May Robert came to speak at the University of Houston Alumni Gala at which she was to be honored for her volunteer work in the community. The honor, of course, became a posthumous award. It was a bittersweet night. 

He's a huge baseball fan and picked up some sweet seats for an Astros-Mariners game through Roger Clemens. Here we are, right behind the catcher with my wife already checking her phone three pitches into the night. LOL

I also snagged a red-bordered variation. The prices for signed versions of these cards were kind of silly. When they first hit eBay I saw a red border sig card with an asking price pushing $400. They are down to the $85 range now. That kind of kills my plan to buy up all the ones I could find, get them signed and sell them. Robert was all for it. I was only half serious when we discussed it. LOL

Robert doesn't have any of the cards and said Topps paid him $20 for each card he signed. 

As for my Archives pack purchase.....I got no Orioles. I NEVER get any Orioles. But, as I noted I got a couple of keepers. I need to scan and post them soon.

Pierce-related GQ Minis

Before we made our trip to Chicago Jedi Jeff of 2x3 Heroes sent me a handful of cards. Three of them were 2016 Gypsy Queen minis of White Sox players and they will make it into my Billy Pierce collection. Or at least into the 'Pierce-related' pages I keep in the back of my Pierce binder.

All three display the player in a way that shows off the #19 memorial patch they wore following Pierce's death last July. The Minnie Minoso patch (#9) is visible as well. They re a little hard to see in the scans so I blew up a part of the Rondon card above. Take a look:

I've been trying to find one of those patches since they were used last year. I see plenty of team uni patches for sale on the net but not this one. I poked around every kiosk and team store I could find in Comiskey but they don't seem to be available. I'll keep looking though because sometimes I'm surprised by what turns up on eBay.

Jeff also tossed in a couple of Orioles. This is a 2005 Topps something or other of Boog Powell. Any card with a Topps Rookie trophy is worth having. I'm not sure why the back scanned so poorly though.

Speaking of Boog Powell....here is a headline from ESPN a few weeks back that gave me pause:

Mariners minor leaguer Boog Powell gets 80-game suspension for PEDs

I had no idea there was another Boog Powell in baseball. But there is. And he's in trouble.

Finally here's an SP card of one of those Orioles whose career was totally eclipsed by my 'baseball boycott' of the late 90s. It's Curtis Goodwin and this shiny chromified die-cut beauty just screams '1990s hobby cards'. 

Goodwin stole 22 bases for the '95 Orioles and repeated that number for the '97 Reds but never was able to grab himself a full time job as he bounced around to a handful of other clubs. I learn a lot from these cards of guys I never knew existed.

Thanks again Jeff. I'm on the lookout for a '19' patch for BOTH of us.

Chicago..my kind of town

This is going to be a bit of a travelogue. My wife and I took off on an extended road trip to Chicago two weeks ago and spent 10 days exploring the Midwest, checking out Presidential museums and visiting ballparks.

I had hoped to post from the road but a number of things got in the way, primarily the disappearance of a folder from my Picasa web storage. So I've been largely absent from the blogosphere.

The reason for our trip was the fact that my daughter was getting her Masters from the University of Chicago. We were proud to see that ceremony and happy that she is going straight to work in her field for a social services agency in Chicago. We decided to turn the trip into our vacation by driving and making many stops along the way, both coming and going.

Our first stop out of Houston was the Clinton Library in Little Rock. It's one of the newer presidential museums and it's quite beautiful, spacious with a wide open feel.

There were some sports related items on display.

Next day it was on to St. Louis and a whirlwind tour courtesy of my best friend Sam. I've been to St. Louis before but it was all new to my wife. We had Italian food on The Hill and a 'concrete' at Ted Drewes. Good stuff.

The Cards were out of town but the new Busch Stadium is easy to check out from street level.

The Fox entertainment complex there contains the Cardinals' Hall of Fame.

We hit Springfield the next day and toured a couple of the Lincoln sites including the Presidential Museum and Library as well as the old train station that is currently housing an exhibit of items from the Spielberg Lincoln film of a couple of years ago.

Next stop was Chicago and four days of fighting traffic and cramming lots of stuff into too short a time. It wasn't my first trip there but it was my first visit to Cellular Field (which I always call Comiskey, I'll never get used to it not being Comiskey).

We had great seats behind first base, the weather (in the 60s!!) was perfect for baseball. I loved every minute of it...from the 'Hey...Texas!?!' greeting we got from the tailgaters we parked beside to the easy egress after the game from a loaded lot.

They were handing out all kinds of freebies on the way in so we grabbed all we could. There were the promotional packages of 2016 Topps cards (yes, Cubs were in each pack!):

These next cards have some sort of local grocery coupon on the backs:

I loved getting a Kittle. I need to send this to him to sign.

Apparently mascot birthdays are now a thing. This marks the third one been witness to in the last few months.The Sox marked the occasion with over-sized (5 x 7) cards of Southpaw.

When I bought a pin and program the guy gave me some Sox schedules.

I loved that the Sox were wearing their 80s era throwbacks.

And I had to visit the Billy Pierce statue of course. I have to admit I got a little emotional posing with it. RIP Billy.

Chicago was also hosting a Copa America game involving Argentina so Messi jerseys were everywhere and we stumbled into the America's Cup practices at Navy Pier. I didn't know they were still doing this race. It used to be a big deal.

Leaving Chicago we took a ride down the old Route 66 through Illinois as far as Springfield. It was an all day affair but well worth it. Where else would you see so much kitchy Americana?

Back in Springfield we made a visit to the Tomb of Abraham Lincoln that we had skipped over on the way up. It was awe inspiring. Pics don't do justice to the feeling one gets inside that monument.

We headed across Missouri and stopped in Independence for a visit to the Harry Truman Library. It's one of the older presidential museums but what it lacks in the modern interactive displays it makes up for with extensive history lessons.

That night we hit Kaufmann Stadium which was just a few exits down the interstate from Independence. Another first time visit for us although when my son was at Nebraska he made some trips to see baseball there. 

They had a much better beer selection that Comiskey and the place was very pleasant overall. The Royals beat the Indians with a late Sal Perez homer but my wife and I were pretty worn out by this point in our trip and coupled with the brutal heat we decided to make a rare early (7th inning) exit from a ballpark. 

But on the way out we toured the outfield section to check out the fountains and statues.

Leaving the KC area the next day and heading for Hot Springs Arkansas we were routed by Google along the Arkansas 7 Scenic Byway. 32 miles of absolute white-knuckle driving. Twists, turns, narrow bridges and oncoming semis through the Ouachita Mountains. A forty five minute trip that felt (to me driving) like five hours. It didn't help that five minutes in the car in front of us drove off the road, took out a sign and nearly flipped over. Next time, I'll go the long way, thanks.

Hot Springs was OK. It's seen better days as a tourist town but we found a nice place to eat and the next morning we visited the seven preserved spas that take up a couple of blocks and are now one of the nation's smallest National Parks. It's known as Bath House Row. The area saw plenty of ballplayers who visited when many clubs held spring training there back in the day. Hot Springs was also a favorite of some shady characters in the 20s and 30s and one building downtown houses a 'gangster museum'.

The next day we were headed home and after 10 days and almost 2700 miles I was glad to be there. It was a great trip but the next time I go to Chicago I believe I'll fly.