In previous posts, I've made several references to the national sports collectors' convention that Bob Jaspersen, the editor-publisher of Sport Fan, tried to organize in Chicago in 1956. Jaspersen mentioned it briefly in the 25th anniversary issue of Sport Fan (March-April 1976), several pages of which I posted a couple of months ago, here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218561. He said that his proposal for such a convention was the lead story in the October 1954 Sport Fan, but he didn't mention the fact that the convention never happened, or why. The fact that there had never been a sports collectors' convention of any kind, and there would not be one until 1969, was a big factor. Jaspersen was way ahead of his time.
A month ago, I posted (here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=219926) the obituary that Lionel Carter wrote for Jaspersen and Buck Barker, which appeared in the program for the 1983 National in Chicago. Among other memories, Carter recounted how he and program collector John Sullivan had helped Jaspersen (who lived in Minnesota) with the local arrangements for the attempted 1956 Chicago convention. He mentions a headline in the November-December 1955 Sport Fan about July 7-8 being set as the tentative dates for the convention. In the end, it has to be cancelled because only seven people signed up to attend, and Carter said he was kind of relieved, because he didn't want people messing up his neatly mounted albums of cards.
Now, here are the original articles that Bob Jaspersen wrote in Sport Fan about the planning for the convention, and the aftermath of its failure. I don't have the October 1954 issue in which he first made the proposal, or the November-December 1955 issue mentioned by Carter, but I have most of the other issues from that period, with lots of breathless coverage of the proposed get-together, and then a postmortem after it fell through. I've posted the relevant articles below, interspersed with commentary.
The first three articles below are from the three issues following Jaspersen's initial suggestion: Winter 1954, February 1955, and March 1955. He discusses his vision for what would be at this convention, and his vision was pretty accurate, given that he was writing 15+ years before any real conventions happened. He was originally planning to hold it in the eastern U.S., but then decided on Chicago for its central location, and in 1956 to allow for more planning. In the March 1955 article (which I had to split in two because the page was so long), he optimistically lists the committees that would have to be filled: transportation, welcoming, housing, entertainment, publicity, finance, program, advertising, and display booths.
There was nothing more in Sport Fan about the convention until the November-December 1955 issue, when, as Lionel Carter noted, the lead story announced that July 7-8, 1956 had been tentatively set as the dates. The lead story in the January-February 1956 issue was the death of Connie Mack, but in April 1956 Jaspersen announced that he, John Sullivan, and Lionel Carter were the general committee in charge of the details, and that Sullivan had secured the Larrabee Street YMCA as a venue. In the May 1956 issue, he announced that a football thesaurus would be awarded to the exhibitor with the best football collection, that the Sporting News would have a display, and that the Elias Baseball Bureau and Sportmaster would also award books as prizes. He also announced that the Sporting News had run an item about the convention in its May 23 issue. These two articles are below. The June 1956 issue of Sport Fan was to be devoted to the convention.
The June 1956 Sport Fan was nicer looking than any previous one, with an offset cover depicting Lionel Carter showing his set of Delong gum cards to John Sullivan. The accompanying article by Jaspersen on page 3 is very interesting, listing some of the rare sets Carter had and valuing his collection at the then-astronomical sum of $1000. But tucked away at the bottom of page 5 is a terse announcement that the first annual sports collectors convention had fallen through due to lack of interest from collectors, and promising more information next month.
As it turned out, the next issue of Sport Fan (vol. 6, no. 6) did not come out until December 1956. The lead story is about the winner of the contest from the June issue, but on page 5 is Jaspersen's account of his trip to Chicago in July (presumably on the weekend originally planned for the convention), where Carter and Sullivan met him at the train station. They went to the offices of Hobbies magazine and met with the editor, Pearl Ann Reeder, about the possibility of writing a monthly column about sports collecting for the magazine. Reeder was open to the idea, but only if Jaspersen shut down Sport Fan so as not to be a competitor. That was a nonstarter, so Jaspersen and Sullivan made the rounds of some bookstores before going to Sullivan's house to eat and visit. In the evening Jaspersen went to Carter's house in Evanston for dinner.
On the next page is Jaspersen's editorial about why the convention failed. He estimated that there were "close to 500" sports collectors in the U.S. and Canada, but lamented that only 10 had signed up for the convention. He mentions successful recent conventions for collectors of postcards and matchbook covers, and wonders why sports collectors can't generate that kind of enthusiasm. Of course, we can now see that Jaspersen was just ahead of his time, and that there would eventually be enough sports collectors to fill huge convention halls. In the second incarnation of Sport Fan (1970-1982), Jaspersen became the hobby's most thorough chronicler of card shows, displaying the same enthusism that he had shown back in 1956 when nobody else was interested (except a few fellow collectors like Carter and Sullivan).
04-21-2016, 11:28 PM
The 1956 "National Convention" that never was -- as reported in Sport Fan
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