Quote:
Originally Posted by powderfinger
and others, like Wayne Terwilliger, Charlie Maxwell, Ed Robbinson and others charge $5 or $10 per request. Al Dark was a great signer, though his autograph was very shaky over the past few years. The men still living are very accommodating signers, and with most being in their 80s or 90s the hobby should be thankful they're such good guys.
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All postwar collectors should write to Wayne Terwilliger while he's still with us. "Twig" saw action with the Fourth Marine Divison on Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima during World War II. He has some amazing stories to tell, and is well worth the $5 fee. When I wrote to him, I mentioned that my neighbor was a USMC officer during the Vietnam War, and Terwilliger wrote back "Semper Fi to your neighbor, and tell him thanks for his service".
I wrote to Dark about a month and a half before his passing, and he was still signing even then. My SASE was stamped on the back "Unable to sign/Thank you for understanding", but he still signed my card. It must have been one of the last autographs he ever signed. I recall reading somewhere that Dark was stationed in China after the war, and the route they patrolled took them through territory controlled by the Chinese Communists, and they'd always make faces at each other. Then two weeks after Dark's unit was rotated out, the ChiComs massacred the Marines patrolling there.
I don't have a count of living players from the 1952 Topps set, but for my 1953 project, there were about 50 players still living when I started in July 2014, and 44 of them signed TTM for me. Some of those 44 have since died (Dark, Rosen, Pierce, Miller, Minoso...) but overall there are probably 40 or so players alive. That set was about 25% smaller than the 1952 set, and there is a lot of overlap between the two, so I would expect maybe 50-60 players from the 1952 set to still be alive.