1971 Los Angeles convention

[trdcrdkid]

In a previous post (here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218371) I posted an article from The Ballcard Collector about the third annual West Coast Sports Collectors Convention, held August 20-22, 1971. Like the previous two West Coast conventions, it was held at the home of Jim Nowell, and attended by a relatively small number of collectors (25) who gathered mainly to talk cards, buy/sell/trade amongst themselves, and get to know each other. This was also the model used by Crawford Foxwell for his first few Mid-Atlantic Sports Collectors Conventions, and by Mike Aronstein for his 1970 convention -- a small gathering at someone's house, of advanced collectors coming together for fellowship and trading.

The previous month, Ed Broder, co-organizer with Nowell of those early West Coast conventions (and apparently a Net54 member!), organized a show that was much more like what we now think of as card shows -- he rented a large room at a hotel, publicized the show through newspapers and TV, and opened it to the general public. This was the same basic model used by the organizers of the Midwest Sports Collectors Convention (the Detroit show), which soon became the largest show in the hobby. Broder's show, which took place July 11, 1971, attracted 130 people. Jim Nowell wrote a two-page account of the show in the August 1971 Ballcard Collector (#66), including some editorializing about the differences between the two types of conventions. Another attendee, Mike Thomas, who Nowell called "one of the up and coming collectors", wrote about the show in the August 1971 issue of the publication he edited, The Sport Collector's Gazette. Both of those articles are below, giving two slightly different perspectives on one of the earliest "modern" card shows in Southern California.

[Leon]

Nice write up of an early show and auction.

[brianp-beme]

I like the T206 Wagmer reference and the belief that if the hobby had a larger collecting base like stamp collecting, the card would be worth $50,000 instead of the recent (then) $500 sale of the Wags.

Brian

[trdcrdkid]

Originally Posted by brianp-beme

I like the T206 Wagmer reference and the belief that if the hobby had a larger collecting base like stamp collecting, the card would be worth $50,000 instead of the recent (then) $500 sale of the Wags.

He was right in the basic idea, of course, but even with that $50,000 number for Wagner (which I'm sure he thought of as exorbitantly high), he greatly underestimated the number of new people who would enter the hobby in the coming decades, and (perhaps more significantly) the depth of their pockets.

[trdcrdkid]

Reviving this thread from March about the July 1971 Los Angeles convention that was one of the first "modern" sports collecting shows in the sense that we think of them (open to the public and held in a hotel, as opposed to invitation-only and held in somebody's house). This one attracted the biggest crowd ever to attend such an event up to that time (130 or 160 people, depending on the source), thanks to good newspaper and TV publicity.

In addition to the two articles above that I posted in March, from the August 1971 Ballcard Collector (by Jim Nowell) and the August 1971 Sports Collectors Gazette (by Mike Thomas), here are Jim McConnell's article on the show from the August 1971 Trader Speaks, plus the Los Angeles Times article about the show by Dave Distel that McConnell refers to. While Nowell in the Ballcard Collector implied that Ed Broder was the sole force behind this show, McConnell notes that Mark Jordan and John Thom were co-promoters, and that Jordan (visiting California from Florida) had the idea to send out a press release. Jordan had been one of the co-promoters of the 1970 Florida show that first used the template of renting space at a hotel, opening to the public, and publicizing a show through the media.

The Distel article was reprinted the following month in the program for the second annual Midwest Sports Collectors' Convention (the Detroit show), held August 20-22, 1971. As I detailed in another thread (here: http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...60309_0015.jpg), that 1971 Detroit show kicked up the publicity to a national level, with an August 10 front-page article in the Wall Street Journal (by a reporter who attended co-promoter Dick Reuss's wedding) and a subsequent September 4 CBS News report by Heywood Hale Broun.

[Griffins]

Does anyone know what happened to Jim Nowell? I started going to the monthly Garden Grove shows about '74 and the conventions the same year- Jim (along with Gavin Riley, Steve Brunner and Clay Hill) were pretty much the ones running the shows, and Jim was especially nice to young collectors such as I. In a time when condition didn't seem to matter much to most he was very particular about condition, and was always willing to share his knowledge. I've often wondered if he's still around and still collecting.