Tinker Evers Chance photo

[Shankweather]

I got a reply from Al about the photo!

“OKAY. So the good news is that we’ve found some further info about your photo.

The bad news is that it’s not Joe Tinker.

In Donald Honig’s book The Chicago Cubs: An Illustrated History, we discovered the same photo. The guy in the center is race car driver Barney Oldfield - Oldfield, while very important in his own field, is obviously not Joe Tinker. Oldfield, oddly enough, is pictured WITH Tinker in the 1912 Case Automobiles postcard - we’ve sold a few of those over the years, here’s an example: https://bid.loveofthegameauctions.co...ce?itemid=9051 A quick image search of Oldfield confirms it.

Our Inventory Manager Andrew Aronstein gets the nod for finding the photo.

Of course we also get two demerits for not picking this up, as this is the kind of thing we take pretty seriously. I want you to be able to feel confident in your bids when you’re bidding with LOTG. We take great pride in the information in our descriptions, and we understand the responsibility that comes with running auctions, not just because we want our descriptions to be accurate for the bidders’ sake, but because once it’s up there on the internet, it becomes part of the next guy’s research. We work pretty hard to get it right, but I hope you can appreciate that nobody gets it right 100% of the time.

We’ll also be passing this info along to our authenticator to help with his own research library.

I’m attaching a copy of the page in Honig’s book where we found the image. We will be issuing you a check for a full refund on your purchase, but I want you to keep the photo - it’s pretty cool, and an interesting piece of history in and of itself. We’ll also be sure to update our description so that it’s properly identified for when people stumble onto it.

We cut checks every other week, so I’d appreciate if you’d give us a little time to pay you back.

Thanks so much for bringing this to your attention, and I apologize for the lack of accuracy.”

No surprise he handled it this way. The postcard he mentioned with Tinker and Oldfield is actually already in my collection, so that’s fun. I don’t think they should be judged on this miss since it was an incredibly easy mistake to make