Charity trivia contest – prize list

Hi all,

A couple of hockey bloggers are taking part in charity runs and thus have fundraising efforts.  I’m trying to help them out and, as such, have devised a little contest.  I’ve gone through my boxes of stuff and have pulled 30-odd (haven’t actually counted) cards from between 1955 and 1979 to offer up as prizes.  The objective is to have a trivia contest – 30 questions, 1-2 questions per day.  First to a correct answer gets a point, most points at the end gets first pick from the prize lot.

Now, this isn’t an exercise to see whether one gets a card at all – everyone who enters gets to pick from the lot.  The last person, by virtue of being last, even gets two.  What we’re competing for is draft order.

It’s $5 to enter ($2.50 to each of the runners) and again, everyone gets a selection.  While only a handful of cards are in the $7-15 range, there should be something to everyone’s taste.  Moreover, if there’s someone you’d like to see who isn’t there, let me know and I’ll see what I have knocking around.

These are the donation links:

Laura/The Active Stick

Sarah Connors

Step one is to make a $2.50 donation to each of them.  Step two is to let me know you’ve done it.  Step three (and this is important) is to give me a mailing address because otherwise, your winnings wind up in my basement.

Most importantly, here are the prizes up for grabs.  I have some stuff coming via mail that I’ll post as soon as I can scan it.

You’ll note the the prize pack is slightly Hab/Bruin-centric.  This is somewhat by design as The Active Stick is a Hab blogger while Sarah Connors writes for the Bruins.  Still, there is a Gordie Howe, a couple Bobby Clarkes and some vintage Leafs, Seals et al for the rest of us.

Bruins

You’ll note (if you’re sharp-eyed) that the 1957-58 Don McKenney and the 1971-72 Pete Mahovlich both appear twice.  There is only one card of each.  Scanning isn’t always clean. 

Please wander over to Pension Plan Puppets, who has been nice enough to host the contest, to see the main thread.

 

Another birthday – Gordie’s 85th

This card was magic.

I missed the day for Bobby Orr last week, but I won’t miss this one.  Gordie Howe is 85 this weekend.  That doesn’t make me feel old as Gordie was always old (whereas Bobby Orr is perpetually young and the notion of Orr at 65 is kind of abhorrent).  I’m not going to try for a career look at Howe as there are so many cards that it’s unwieldy (also I’m missing the ’54 Topps), but these are a few of significance to me.

Like Orr, Gordie Howe is one of those players that has long captured my imagination.  From a collecting perspective, I missed him by this much, as I started in earnest the year after his last card.  I wrote about 18 months ago about the experience of seeing a real Gordie Howe card for the first time.  It was reverential.

Since WHA cards were mostly available in the early 1980s, I was able to get my hands on a number of different Howes.  They were all fun, but what I really wanted to find was something in a Red Wings uniform.  I had the Dad’s Cookies card, but the heart wanted OPC.

When the family left Calgary in 1983, one of the things that made it even a shred palatable to me was the availability of serious card shops.  We simply didn’t have them at that time and I knew that Ontario did.  Not long after we arrived, I got a chance to visit one – it was five minutes to closing and I was allowed to dash in.  It blew my mind.  Only once had I ever even seen a card older than 1971 and this place had them by the dozen, laid out in a cabinet.  I picked up my first ’51 and ’52 Parkies that night along with the Howe above.  It’s hokey to think of it now, but at the time it was all but indescribable.  It was like finding the Hope diamond in a shoebox.

I eventually upgraded it for my set, but this card still resides in the “special” box.

1975-76 OPC WHA

Another favourite is this one – it’s not the most expensive or the rarest, but I’ve always simply liked it.  I said that the WHA cards were largely available, but that’s really true for every set but one.  For whatever reason, 1975-76 is really hard to put together.  This card is posed, but I just like the look of it:

Bobby Hull was the straw that stirred the drink for the WHA, but I never find his WHA cards to be as cool as Gordie’s.

1959-60 Topps

This next one isn’t really all that significant, but it’s one that I have always liked and another that I remember where it came from.  The best shop I have ever seen was in downtown Barrie, Ontario.  It’s gone, sadly, but it was just unreal.  Boxes of old Parkies, the first ’52 wrappers I’ve seen (which were cut from leftover sheets of ’51-52), boxes of cards from the ’30s (of which I should have bought more but didn’t) – if I’d had about $300 there 25 -30 years ago, man….

This card came from that shop. Just one that I like:

A little surface wear, but pretty solid overall

1964-65 Topps

One of the great “ones that got away” stories was a complete set of Tall Boys (probably about EX-plus) for $300 at my Burlington shop in about 1988.  I wanted it, but that was a lot of coin back then.  One of the cards I did get from that shop was this Tall Boy of Gordie Howe.  This is such a cool picture – just the ultimate look of a warrior:

The scars really make it.  Those were earned.

1951-52 Parkhurst

The last one I’ll post will have me accused of burying the lede.  It was a flea market find and cost (I think) $66 around 1985.  I would miss out on a near-perfect one in Burlington for $135 that I’ve never forgiven myself for, but I’m glad I nailed this one down.  It’s one of the highlights of the collection:

It kind of boggles the mind to think that the Gretzky RC is about the same age now as this was when I bought it.

This card is the sort of thing that drew me to vintage in the first place and keeps me there despite all the new and nifty things that companies are doing.  There’s still a bit of that little kid from 30 years ago in me who will pick up an old hunk of cardboard and just be dumbstruck that ‘holy cow – that’s Gordie Freaking Howe!‘  I’ve picked up a modern Howe autograph and a swatch card and it’s not the same thing.  I just find these more real.

Happy Birthday Gordie! I didn’t see you play the first time around, but you gave me a ton of collecting fun.

Happy belated to Bobby Orr

I don’t think there is a player anywhere that has captured and held my imagination the way Bobby Orr has.  I knew his name before I ever watched a game and the announcement of his retirement is one of those moments that has been burned into the memory banks along with where I as and what I was doing when the story broke.  (For the record, this was sitting in the family van heading towards Banff National Park, which, oddly enough, is also where I was when we heard about Elvis.)

Whenever I get a chance and there is an old Bruins game on LeafsTV, I watch it solely for the purpose of watching Orr.  It’s magic.

So of course, when Orr turned 65 last week (March 20), I was ready with a big tribute post, right?  Well, no.  Did I at least have all my cards scanned so I could make this great career retrospective?  Of course not.  I still haven’t done it.  Fortunately, there are old scans I’ve never posted, like this one.

This card is #92 from the ’67-68 Topps release.  It’s the last one produced under the Topps banner by OPC and is a bit of an odd set in that they decided against trying to deal with the six new expansion teams, so half the league is missing.  Still, it’s a set with a great design and bright colours that really display well.  Orr has three cards here – this one, his Calder-Trophy winner (that uses the same picture) and a Second-Team All-Star card (the image from which would appear in both 1968 and 1969).  It’s one you don’t see that often, most of the hobby love heading towards his RC.

More than just about any other retired player, Orr gets a ton of hobby love.  There seems to be a new base card in just about every release and some new autographs every year that never fail to draw at least $100.  I’ll pick up the odd one of the base cards if I happen to like the picture (and I’d love one of the autos) but I never consider these to be “the real thing.”  For me, to really be magic, it has to be one of the cards from his playing days.  The new stuff is fun, but a collection can be complete without it.

Happy birthday, Bobby.  I should have everything scanned in time for your 70th.

The one issue with ’67-68 (other than the absence of half the league from the set) was that they somehow managed to produce a back that was even more boring than ’66-67.

The miniest of mini minis

I mentioned earlier my burgeoning interest in English Football cards, particularly the early cigarette issues which to my eyes are absurdly (but enjoyably) inexpensive.  There was an auction I had an eye on for three 1923 cards printed by DC Thomson.  Thomson was a publisher rather than a cigarette producer, so these were likely trade cards included with a boys’ magazine.  I won for the magnificent sum of 99p (call it a buck and a half).

The condition looked good and I was more than happy to see the win.  What isn’t really apparent from the picture and was particularly surprising to me when they arrived a week later (mail from the UK is not only cheaper than mail from the US, it gets here in half the time – something is off there) was the size of these things.  They’re miniscule.  Even 1951 Parkhurst dwarfs these cards.

I put the three of them next to a standard-sized card (1978 Topps Footballer) for reference:

Where 1951-52 Parkhurst is exactly half the size of a modern card, these are somewhere between a quarter and a third.  I don’t think they make 2/5.  They also appear to have been printed on photo paper.  They remind me a lot of the pictures we used in high school to prepare yearbooks.  For all their tininess, though, they crammed a lot of text on the back:

Patterson refuses to line up straight on the scanner. I blame the fact that he’s a doctor.

They’re actually a touch difficult to read in person.  That’s a lot of text for something the size of a slightly-overlarge postage stamp.

I have no idea how to store these.  I’m thinking perhaps a sticker sheet or a cigarette card sheet.  Either way, these are too small and are going to slew around inside.  I don’t know whether I’ll chase these in earnest, but for less than a pound, they’re pretty cool.

Three reasons Nick Beverley frightened me as a child

Technically, this is two reasons as the ’73-74 is just a recrop of the ’72-73 with a dodgy airbrush job. Still…

Let me say up front that I’m sure Nick Beverley is a very nice man.  He even coached my team for a handful of weeks before disappearing back into the mists of the front office.  They went 9-6-2 before falling on their faces in the playoffs.

So I bear him no ill will.  It’s just that these cards creep me out.  Always have.

It’s the eyes.  They just burn right into you.  It’s like some evil hybrid of Charles Manson and the hypnotoad.  You need to look away before it eats your soul.

Nietzsche said that when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.  Nietzsche never saw a Nick Beverley hockey card.  But he should have.

Brrrr.

When I’d look at the ’76 Rangers, I’d have to skip past the defensemen.  Just too scary.  Makes one wonder just how opposing forwards dared bring the puck into his end.

There are lots of other Nick Beverley cards where he’s looking away and they’re just fine.

The safest way to look at these cards is from the back:

Phew! That’s MUCH better.

Honestly, though.  They knew these things were being sold to kids.  Should have known better than to put pictures like that.  Far better to put pictures like this:

Now, THIS is something I could look at all day.

 

A mittful of 1957-58 Topps

A bunch of ’57-58 Topps hockey. Topps had taken two years off, so the set is RC-heavy. Bionda, Simmons, Hillman and Hebenton are all RCs.

When I was doing some early-year goal setting for the collection, I thought that rather than focusing on one or two sets, I’d try to  do a little of everything at once and build mass across the vintage binders.  Last year, I tried this by picking a focus set each month and trying to nail down five nice examples.  This failed because you can’t really predict what sort of things will show up and in what order.

This year, I simply set the goal that I want to find five nice cards from each hockey set between 1952-53 and 1962-63 (I also picked one set that is a personal favourite and set a target of 15 by year’s end).  This way, serendipity can govern the process, as it does anyway.

Case in point, a whole whack of 1957-58 Topps hockey came up for grabs and in one swell foop I ended up with nine of them.  I wasn’t expecting nine, but they all came in under book, so I don’t mind.  It’s a Bruins-centric lot, but they’d been avoiding me for some reason, so it’s about time I nailed some.

After their first effort in 1954-55, Topps didn’t bother with hockey for a couple of seasons (I suspect licensing issues, but I’ve never seen it explained).  This meant that when they did come back in 1957-58, their set was heavily laden with rookies. (Parkhurst, who also sat out 1956-57, didn’t have rights to US teams after 1955.)  This lot doesn’t have any of the biggies (Glenn Hall, Pierre Pilote, John Bucyk, Norm Ullman), but has a number of the second-tier guys, including Don Simmons, Jack Bionda, Larry Hillman and Andy Hebenton.

With this lot in hand, I’m suddenly at 53 of the 66 cards in the set.  I’m debating whether this now means I should target it for completion or stick to the original plan.  It would be the first 50s set I’d have finished since the late 1980s.

Click on the image to read these. The write-ups are always my favourite part of these things.

Fun with old (British) football

I haven’t spoken of it much, but my lockout-inspired dalliance with the EPL hasn’t stopped despite the return of the NHL and the pending start of real baseball.  I’ve made great strides on my 1975 Topps set and am well into 1978 and both have provided great fun at limited expense.

In fact, “great fun at limited expense” seems to describe most of the football collecting hobby.  I’m sure that the modern releases contain lots of limited-edition manufactured patches and relics of dubious origin, all of which costs scads of money, but I’m primarily into vintage and this stuff is scandalously cheap.

Case in point here is Arsenal’s Charlie Jones, part of the 1928-29 Player’s Cigarettes set.  This was a multi-sport set as opposed to football-only, which I understand depresses the value a tad.  Still, it’s 85 years old, in immaculate condition and quite interesting in appearance, particularly considering the dour portraits that commonly graced hockey and baseball cards of the era.  A 1920s hockey card in this condition would start well north of $100, no matter who was on it.  Charlie Jones cost me the princely sum of one pound, plus two more to ship it.

The other thing I find interesting in football cards is that there is no significant premium placed on star cards.  Where a Bobby Orr or a Mickey Mantle can run for dozens of times the cost of a common player, star cards in football simply don’t.  If they were on the same print run as a standard-issue player, they tend to cost the same.

Charlie Jones above was a good player, a useful starter for a number of years on a top-quality side, but he wouldn’t be named among the greats ever to have played for the team.  Cliff Bastin, on the other hand, most likely would – yet his card cost the grand total of three pounds.  This card is from the 1936-37 Gallaher set, another cigarette release.  I wouldn’t say it has the visual appeal of the Player’s set, but it’s nice all the same.

I don’t know whether it’s that pre-war Brits simply smoked like chimneys or nobody cares about the old cards, but the availability of these things at nominal prices is staggering to me.  It’s like collecting hockey back in the mid-1980s.   I can dabble, pick up whatever is interesting to me, learn something new and have a load of fun, all without breaking the bank.

Strikes me as how it all should be.