Topps Bobby Locke PC

I never thought I would include Bobby Locke in my list of PCs but here he is. Before I pulled his autograph out of a Heritage pack I really had never given him much thought. I had his 1960 Topps card but I haven't featured it yet on that blog. He has no '58 or '59 cards so I had yet to do any looking into his career.

Locke appeared in five different Topps sets during his career. I picked up the ones I didn't have from eBay last week.

This is his 'rookie' card, the 1960. Pretty standard card with a portrait and a b/w 'action' pose. I'm 99% sure this is a picture taken in Municipal Stadium. Those windows over Locke's right shoulder look a lot like the ones in this one of Rocky Colavito.

The back is where this one shines (well it does to me, I love the 1960 cream/orange/black early series cardbacks. Locke had pitched for the Indians in 1959 after nearly five minor league seasons. The pix were likely taken that season.

Second year Bobby Locke, his 1961 card. It's a high number and cost more than the other put together. It's also my favorite. Note that the picture used is the same as the one in the 1960 'action' shot. more of those windows...Municipal Stadium. 

I'm not a fan of the green cardboard but you get full stats and two cartoons.

Now we are up to 1962. Same background. More than likely the same photo-shoot with the photographer getting his cap-less pic, just in case. With Locke now with the Cubs the cap-less shot came in handy. 

A nice play on his last name in the cartoon caption. Locke didn't make it out of Spring Training as a Cub. He had issues with the the weird 'College of Coaches' idea and he was dealt to the Cardinals in April. He was with them for three weeks before being traded to the Phils. He spent most of the season in the minors.

The '63 and '64 seasons were also mostly minor league years for Locke although he was around in September of '64 to watch the club blow it's big lead in the NL. After a couple of years off Topps' radar in October of '64 he was sold to the Angels. Topps pulled out their 'Locke' file and made him another card. He is listed with the Angels but he never played for them, at least in 1965. He was in the minors before he went to the Reds in a July deal. He pitched a bit in Cincinnati the second half of the year. 

He is obviously in his old Indians uni again here. Only the cap logo is scrubbed out. The pose is also exactly the same as his 1960 'action' shot. This picture is obviously from that same photo session. 

The '65 set rightfully holds a place dear to the hearts of many vintage collectors. It's about damn perfect.

After a couple more seasons spent mostly in the minors Locke appeared in the 1968 set. This is the same photo they'd used in 1962.  It's well within the range of possibility that Topps issued five separate Locke cards over the course of nine years using the pictures taken at one 1959 photo shoot!

He'd returned to the Angels' organization about a year after they had traded him to the Reds and in 1968 he pitched in 29 games, easily his most since 1961. Topps crammed a lot onto the backs of these '68s.

I have two more Locke cards from Topps. This is the 2017 signed Heritage done in the '68 style.

And I picked up another version of the '68, a buyback issued in 2015.

So that's my Bobby Locke 'rainbow'. I know that's not the right term for whatever you call a complete run of a guy's cards but whatever. Bobby turned 83 earlier this month. Here's to many more years of health and happiness with his family.

I found a few other Bobby Locke items including a couple of cool minor league oddballs. Those will hold for another day. Here is a montage of his Topps cardback cartoons:

Let's wrap this up with a handful of off-the-wall facts I found on his SABR bio page.:...

• He debuted in the big leagues with a starting assignment against the Boston Red Sox on June 18 [1959], and in his second at-bat he hit his only major-league home run, a three-run shot off Frank Sullivan over Fenway Park’s Green Monster wall in left field. 
• Locke was born on March 3, 1934, in the little town of Rowes Run in the rough mining country of Southwestern Pennsylvania about 40 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. He was one of ten kids in the family.
• [In high school] he played fullback and defensive back in football and made several all-star teams. He excelled in baseball as a pitcher, throwing two no-hitters and averaging 13 strikeouts a game. His 1952 team went undefeated, and he pitched a one-hitter with 13 strikeouts to win the state championship. Locke played in the Sandlot Classic at the Polo Grounds in New York City as a member of the 1952 USA Baseball All-Star team.
• Locke accepted a football scholarship to Arizona State University but returned home to focus on baseball early in his first gridiron season.

You can read the rest here.

Bad Ideas

OK, I'm the 99 Cent store on Monday (everyone does that on their first day of Spring Break, right?) and as soon as I walk in I see a display of these:

Yup, Root Beer flavored Pop Tarts. C'mon man! I'm guessing that these didn't sell well in the regular groceries since there were so many 99 cent boxes available Monday. I'm thinking that two folks at Kellogg's lost their jobs over this....the person in R&D who dreamed them up and the dumbass in Battle Creek who signed off on them. 

Late last year I was in there and they had Maple Bacon flavor. I can almost understand Maple Bacon Pop Tarts, but Root Beer? Nope. That was a bad idea.

A little later I saw this display:

Look, I'm not a wine snob. I enjoy it at Italian restaurants but as a regular thing, I'll pass. But even I know that buying wine at the 99 Cent Store is probably undoubtedly a bad idea. Yes, the bottles were mostly $2.99 and $3.99 but still. 

Sidebar: My wife and I attended a friend's wine/dinner party a few weekends back. Everyone was supposed to bring a bottle of wine and tell the rest of the guests the story behind it. I kid you not. We brought a bottle of the stuff we served at my son and daughter-in-laws' rehearsal dinner last spring. Everyone seemed to like it. It wasn't from a bag or a box, It was like $17 a bottle. And that was the story......"We served this at our son and daughter-in-laws' rehearsal dinner last spring. The End". Other folks' stories mostly involved being served this particular wine at a Chef's Table experience in France, being given a bottle by the Prime Minister of Bolivia, discovering a wine on a bicycle tour of Napa Valley vineyards, and so on and so forth. To paraphrase the immortal George Gobel...that party was a tuxedo and my wife and I were a pair of brown shoes. /Sidebar

All that is a long way around to the subject of this post....the bad idea I had later on Monday....

Heritage isn't the bad idea...me buying it is. Hey, I like the cards just fine. I got a nice autograph out of my first purchase but I have no need to buy a hanger box of something I'm not going to collect. But like the guy in Battle Creek who knew in his heart that Root Beer Pop Tarts was a stupid concept I went ahead with buying that box.

I actually did OK with the 20 cards I got. First of all I had no dupes. That's unusual for me. Normally I buy a pack of something and a month later buy another one and half the cards are dupes.

Second of all I got this card:

It was the first one in the cello I think. And it instantly made me think of this card:

Well done Topps! A Heritage that mimics the original set. I suspect a lot of the '17 Heritage are supposed to. I like when it's pretty obvious.

I also got this which is supposed to be some kind of disk.But it's square which sort of ruins the effect. It would make a cool button and I may use the button maker at work to try it. Maybe not.
.

I don't know why my scanner makes these game cards square. And cuts off the top. I tried a couple of times with the same result.

Most shocking of all was the fact that I got an Oriole!!! My only out-of-a-pack Oriole for 2017. Mike Bourn is out awhile with a broken finger but he's an Oriole! Plus he's a Houston Cougar. Doubly nice.

I'm showing Buster Posey just to see if Night Owl reads this far.

And I'm showing Hernan Perez because the Photoshop'd pic with him in front of that sky makes him appear to be in one of those '3-D Jesus' pictures my wife's grandmother had on her wall in San Antonio.

Yea, this one...

And finally I'm showing the Sean Doolittle card because it's a mini. I didn't know they were doing minis. Chris Carter is there for perspective. And because if he swings he's not likely to hit anything.

Nostalgia Is A Helluva Drug

I worked at the Houston Post newspaper from about 1971 or 1972 until 1991. I left to do other things during that time but I kept coming back, working part-time or full. Sometimes just as a summer fill-in and sometimes as a second job. I loved the Post. Especially during the years the paper was owned by the Hobby family, one of Texas' most distinguished. The Hobbys sold the paper in 1983 and it was never the same.

The Post passed on to the Great Press Room In The Sky in 1995 leaving behind a quirky building and a lot of upset employees who had been given no warning of the closure. But I digress.

I have a few mementos of my time there....some pencils, stationary and this comic-sized booklet intended to be used in schools through the Post's Newspaper in the Classroom Program. It was printed in 1972-ish and features a two page spread on each U.S. President through Richard Nixon. I'd forgotten all about it until I was clearing my work desk drawers last week. It's printed on stock that is about one step up from standard newsprint. 

It's discolored over the years but it's not fragile like a regular 45+ year-old newspaper would be, I was reluctant at first to scan the thing because I figured that folding back the pages and pressing it to the platen would damage it. But It seems none the worse for wear now that I'm done.

The cover:

The graphic wraps around to the back cover:

The Presidential Seal is awesome. Makes me wish we still had a president.

I stuck GW's portrait up at the top. Appears to be the same portrait as is seen on the dollar bill.  I took a photo of the JFK spread for perspective.

Here is GW's 'fact page'/bio. It's funny how a some pages have aged differently than others. The discoloration is slight with some but others have turned a much darker shade of orange/brown. I'd guess that two different qualities of newsprint were used to print this and combined in the collating process.

Honest Abe. He lost the popular vote and yet went on to become arguably our greatest President. Sigh.

I don't think any President has led a more diverse and entertaining life than Teddy Roosevelt. Public Service Announcement: Read This Book.

My man, LBJ:

The last President in the publication is Richard Milhous Nixon. Another fascinating and complex character. A few years ago I watched a lecture on the 1968 election and how George Wallace's presence siphoned off votes that likely would have put Hubert Humphrey in the White House. How would Viet Nam have played out? No Watergate? It was pretty interesting.

Back to the Post. This is the building as seen in my time there:

The building inside was as interesting as it appeared from the outside. We called it the 'Castle'. The Houston Chronicle bought the Post properties many years ago. They immediately began using the presses but it wasn't until a few years ago that they moved their main offices from their downtown Houston location to the Post building southwest of town. They then put their name on the outside. I drive by often but I can't even look at it now. In the 70's there was a real rivalry between the two papers, the Chronicle was our 'enemy'. I've been reading the Chronicle since the Post died but I've never gotten over that. LOL

Lastly a note about a memorable day at work. In May of 1976 a tanker truck fillied with liquid ammonia was speeding through the elevated interchange of US 59 and the 610 Loop right outside the Post building. It crashed thru the guardrail on the upper ramp and crashed. I'll never forget being herded upstairs to the third floor but not before telling my drivers (I was Ad Services dispatcher then) not to return to the building. I had them take their company-owned delivery vehicles and head home.

Here are a few pics I found and following them is a video done by my late friend Judd McIlvain who was a reporter at KHOU back then.

You can't see our building in the first one but it's behind the elevated freeway ramps.

The Pearl distributor was across the Loop and a block south from us. The Post would be just off to the right.

It was a hell of an explosion. Shook the building something fierce and broke this concrete pillar.

There's the Post  between the pillars in these next two pics.

Here's the KHOU video. If you've read this far thanks for indulging me on my trip down memory lane.

1976 SSPC '200 Years Of Freedom' set

It's really a wonder that I had no idea that this set existed until a couple of weeks ago. I've been trying to find a SSPC baseball set on the cheap for quite awhile so I pretty regularly scrounged through eBay searching for 'sspc baseball complete'.

Then one day this '200 Years of Freedom' set wiggled it's way through the eBay filters. With my interest in memorabilia items political/presidential related and the fact that it cost just seven bucks I picked it up. I wasn't sure what I was getting exactly other than a sealed 45 card set put out by SSPC to commemorate the '76 Bicentennial celebration. It showed up this past week.

I thought it might breeze trhough the entire 200 years but the focus is the American Revolution. The cards feature heroes, battles and key moments of the war.

The cards have the same 'semi-glossy' look and feel as TCMA's SSPC baseball and the Renata Galasso issues.

The backs especially resemble the Galasso sets in that they share the same red/blue printing.

Two things I noticed right away upon taking off the clear cello wrapper. First of all the cutting or trimming process in producing the cards resulted in them varying in size quite noticeably and many of the cuts were rough resulting in 'fuzzy' edges. Those things are not seen in the scans but are very obvious in hand.

The other thing is that the cards are warped. If you own some of those Bowman Chrome cards you have an idea of what these look like. It may just be how they were stored, I have no way to know. What I do know is that they are tough to scan correctly because the warping makes them sort of 'spin' on the platen no matter how carefully you close the scanner cover.

It's an interesting little set. I'm glad I picked it up but I'm also glad I didn't spend much on it. I saw some listed with an asking price of up to $30.

All the Revolutionary 'superstars' are included.

As are some of the lesser known contributors.

Some of the cards which depict famous scenes are made from better reproductions of paintings than others.

Big George gets two cards.

Here are a few more backs. I'm not up to 'fact checking' these things like I did the Civil War News cards.

Here is the complete checklist:

 1    The Declaration of Independence
 2    The Declaration of Independence
 3    George Washington                         1732-1799
 4    Paul Revere                               1735-1818
 5    Minutemen
 6    Battle of Lexington                       April 19, 1775
 7    Ben Franklin                              1706-1790
 8    Sam Adams                                 1722-1803
 9    Patrick Henry                             1736-1799
10    The Battle of Bunker Hill                 June 17, 1775
11    Thomas Paine                              1737-1809
12    Thomas Jefferson                          1743-1826
13    John Hancock                              1737-1793
14    Nathaniel Greene                          1742-1786
15    Robert Morris                             1734-1806
16    Marquis de LaFayette                      1757-1834
17    Henry Knox                                1750-1806
18    Washington Crosses the Delaware           December 25, 1776
19    Capture of Hessians at Trenton            December 26, 1776
20    Horatio Gates                             1728-1806
21    Alexander Hamilton                        1757-1804
22    Charles Lee                               1731-1782
23    Benedict Arnold                           1741-1801
24    John Paul Jones                           1747-1792
25    Serapis vs. Bonhomme Richard              September 23, 1779
26    Battle of Saratoga
27    Nathan Hale                               1755-1776
28    Benjamin Lincoln                          1733-1810
29    John Adams                                1735-1826
30    Casimir Pulaski                           1748-1779
31    Battle of Princeton                       January 3, 1777
32    Death of Mercer at Princeton
33    Anthony Wayne                             1745-1796
34    Betsy Ross
35    John Stark                                1728-1822
36    Battle of Monmouth                        June 16-July 5, 1778
37    Francis Marion                            1732-1795
38    Valley Forge
39    Frederich von Steuben                     1730-1794
40    Comte de Rochambeau                       1725-1807
41    "We fight, get beat, rise and fight again"
42    Cornwallis Surrenders at Yorktown
43    Resignation of Washington
44    George Washington
45    Spirit of '76

Card #2 shows the Declaration document itself. So if you've ever wondered what the Declaration of Independence looked like at less than 2.5x3.5 inches here 'tis:

All in all it's a neat but totally unnecessary little novelty set. And yes, I did find an SSPC baseball set for a good price. I'll talk about that another day.