Hello there. Just to introduce myself (although this isn't my very first post), my name is Alan Kleinberger and I've been collecting baseball cards, non-sports cards and autographs for about fifty years. I know, it sounds like the start of a 12-step program meeting...
Anyway, in the four-odd years I've been lurking on this site, I've come across one or two (but no more than that) references to an individual I remember quite fondly, references that seem to indicate some type of scandal. I'm talking about Ted Elmo, who was an autograph dealer way back in the Sixties.
Elmo advertised once a year in the pages of Baseball Digest, and eleven-year-old me send him a self-addressed, stamped envelope for his price list - which turned out to be a handwritten letter. Elmo offered HOF signatures on 3x5 index cards, generally charging fifty or sixty cents each for living players (you know, commons like Dizzy Dean, Sam Crawford and Frankie Frisch!
), and a couple of dollars for recently deceased players like Dazzy Vance and Mickey Cochrane.
Of course, those were steep prices for a kid in 1966, but over the course of a couple of years I did order a few pieces. I recall that he told me that he had a Babe Ruth bank deposit slip he could let me have for $40 - but seriously, forty dollars circa 1967 might as well have been forty thousand dollars.
Anyway, I lost touch with Elmo over the course of time, and by the Seventies the card collecting hobby was gathering steam. I got back to autographs a little later but never heard from or heard of Elmo thereafter. I assume after all this time that he's deceased, but the few cryptic references I've caught online seem to indicate that "something" happened at some point.
What happened?
