Buck Barker

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Posted By: Bruce Babcock

These are a couple of Old Judge backs. Has anyone ever seen the back stamp on the left before?

As fas as the back on the right (Bray 62), I have always heard that Buck Barker wrote the name of the collector and the year of the acquisition on the back of his cards. If that's true, he acquired this card from Charles Bray in 1962. It looks like the same writing appears on the card on the left. It looks like "63" but I can't make out the letters in front of it.

Any thoughts, anyone?

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Posted By: Mark Macrae

Bruce.... You are correct on Buck Barker's notations. They refer to the collector he acquired them from & the year it was acquired in. I've owned a few thousand of 'his' cards over the years. From what I understand, Buck used to do most of his player research at the Sporting News archive in St Louis. It is standard practice in doing archival research that "pencil" be used over pen, primarily to prevent permanent ink damage to the paper. Looking at the backs of many of Buck's cards, you'll also find his 'shorthand' which indicates the teams / years the player was active and statistics in many cases. It is very likely that Buck took the actual cards with him into the research room (normally only a notebook & single pencil are permitted) and copied this info directly onto the cards.... While some modern collectors may cringe at the thought, Barker was among the most active baseball card researchers in his day, establishing the data that virtually everyone takes for granted in modern checklists (First names particularly). From my experience in handling his cards, more than 75% of his notations were done in pencil.

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Posted By: Scot York

A different back.

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Posted By: Bruce Babcock

Thanks, Mark. How it cool to have handled so many cards owned by Buck.

It has been suggested to me that the card on the right says "Orem 63," for Preston Orem, which I think must be correct. The pencil writing is very faint.

Scot, I've seen that back before but have never owned one.

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Posted By: Bob

Mark- Buck seemed to have done a lot of "notating" on the backs of his Obaks in pen. I "upgraded" several of these before I realized what I was doing and so kept a few. On the Obaks he sometimes used every available free space and really hen-scratched them.

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Posted By: brian p

I have a couple of favorite Barker cards. The first is a mid 20's Zeenut whose reverse has a very colorful 'wet-transfer' strip card-like image of James Cagney. There is about 1/4" border surrounding this image on all sides, and this is where Mr. Barker filled completely with notes on the player on the front of the card.

The second is even more special as it shows what lengths and how important his research was into identifying the players of earlier issues. It is a 1925 of Haughy of San Francisco. The back lists about eight possible variations of 'Haughy' from Hughes to Hough that he indicated he had checked in The Sporting News files trying to locate the identity of the player in question, with a final notation that 'can't find TSN'. My bet is that this player is still unidentified by first name in any of the catalogs (which of course shows how lax my own research is that I couldn't even find out if his full name is listed in the catalogs).

I view Buck Barker's scribble cards as an added value, not a downgrade.

Brian

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Posted By: Jay

Bruce--I have an Old Judge with the handstamp that Scot has on the M101

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Posted By: brian p

To follow up on my previous post, I checked out Becketts Almanac which lists full names of players in the Zeenut sets. In the 1925 Zeenut set, there are three cards that are only identified by the last name (as shown on the card). And sure enough, Haughy is one of them. Just shows you that in many sets, especially minor league issues such as the Zeenuts, if Buck wasn't able to find out a player's name, the player has still not been officially identified.

Brian

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Posted By: Rich Klein

Just as an FYI, no one with that last name every played in the PCL; (That is according to Carlos Bauer's PCL Encyclopedia.

If anyone has any ideas to the actual first name; I'd love to add that information.

Regards
Rich