The program for the fourth annual National Sports Collectors' Convention, held in Chicago in 1983, has a three-page article by Lionel Carter with his reminiscences of two prominent collectors who had died the previous November: Bob Jaspersen, longtime publisher of Sport Fan, and Buck Barker, legendary collector and successor to Jefferson Burdick in updating the listings for the American Card Catalogue. Like just about everything Carter wrote, it's interesting reading, but it's especially interesting (to me) for the details about those men's non-collecting lives, and for the tidbits about hobby history.
I knew that Jaspersen had tried to organize a national sports collectors' convention in Chicago in 1956, some 13 years before the first convention of any kind; Jaspersen wrote a little about it in the 25th anniversary issue of Sport Fan (which I posted here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218561), and Charles Brooks wrote about it in passing in the July 1956 Sport Hobbyist, where he said it had been mentioned in the Sporting News, and at more length in the August 1956 issue, where he said that it had "failed to stir interest in many sport hobbyists" and had been postponed. Carter, who had been one of the local organizers along with John Sullivan, gives more details about the failed 1956 convention, including the dates (July 7-8), the location (the Larrabee Street YMCA, the site of which is now a park that I see every day from the train on my way to work), and the fact that only seven people responded to Jaspersen's announcement.
Carter's memories of Buck Barker are poignant and a little sad. Barker, much like Burdick, didn't know or care much about the monetary value of the cards he collected. In his 1962 article about the prices of T206 that I posted here (
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217680), he started out by declaring "Being assigned to a discussion of prices for the T-206 White Border did not make the writer happy at all, because I firmly believe that price should not be of any particular importance in card collecting -- or any other real hobby." Barker didn't go to any of the early card conventions (Carter wrote in February 1974 in Ballcard Collector that Barker had never been to a show), but when he finally started going to some shows in the mid-70s, he got ripped off by people who took advantage of him when he was trying to be nice to them. He was a true old-school collector, and when the money involved in the hobby got too big, he just wasn't willing or able to adapt. He sounds like a great guy, though.
