Posted By:
leonI am going through some more old hobby publications loaned to me by my good friend John Esch.. This article I will be quoting is from the Sports Fan, March-April, 1981. This is one of the newest publications loaned to me so far. I found an interesting article, extremely lengthy, written by Lionel Carter. A short while back I believe someone on the board had asked what Lionel had ever done for the hobby? It seems as though not only was he just about the most prolific writer in the later 30's to 70's, on card collecting and the hobby, but also wrote the very first article ever published on card collecting, even before Jeff Burdick. Here is an excerpt from the 3-4 page article.....(there are a few typos in the article and I left them the way they were written.....)
" As the managers of the various baseball card teams became older, they also became more adult and dropped such childish hobbies as collecting baseball cards; or perhaps they became more adult they became less interested in cards and more interested in girls. Anyway, I ended up as not only without girls but the only card collector in town. "In town" I mean in Colfax Ill., POP 892. I didn't know another card collector anywhere. No hobby papers, no dealers, no conventions, and no collectors. Was still into stamps at this and a regular subscriber to that fine weekly stamp publication, The Kaw Chief Stamp Journal out of Lawrence KS. When the editor decided to add a monthly section about other hobbies, I wrote to him offering my services as a baseball card expert. Thus it was in 1935, that the first article on baseball cards was published. In fact it was the first article on any type of cards, beating by a few months an article on cigarette cards published in the December 1935 issue of Hobbies Magazine. The special section didn't generate the advertising envisioned by the publisher and folded after a year. Surprisingly, although it brought a few cards to my attention, it never put me in contact with another collector. I don't know how I found Edward Golden of Norton Heights Conn., unless it was through an advertisement in the old Grandstand Manager, but Eddie put me in touch with Jeff Burdick in those early months of 1938 and a whole new world of card collecting opened before me."