My Best National Finds

T-minus 18 days and counting until I head to the National for the first time since 2019. All indicators are green for go. No pandemic, no trial, no dead parents (summer 2022 was not a fun one), nothing looming on the horizon to mess up my trip. My hotel is booked, my plane ticket purchased, my admission ticket ready and waiting. I plan to post a show report as often as I can; tune in every day during the show for my curmudgeonly travelogue and overall bitch-fest about all things large and small.

If only I had a dealer pass…but I guess that is a thing of the past, so I will wait impatiently with the other ‘VIP’ entrants to bum-rush the show Wednesday afternoon. My hunch is that the great stuff will be gone by the time I get inside, gobbled up by dealers, so for this installment of my life as a card-master, I thought I would run through some of the great stuff I’ve picked up at past Nationals in the halcyon days of old when I could cadge a dealer pass from a friend and hit the show running Tuesday morning.

By “best” I don’t necessarily mean the most expensive or most valuable or most prestigious. I mean the things I like the best. My rule of thumb at the Natty is that if it is unusual and reasonably priced, I will buy it, so I did. And so I will if my Spidey sense allows me to ferret out some goodies this time.

2010 NSCC, Baltimore, Wednesday, Al “Bummy” Davis promotional photo: One Wednesday in Charm City I came across a treasure trove of 1940s boxing promo photos, clearly from a single collection, most removed from a scrap book. I pulled dozens of photos from that collection, many signed, but my favorite hands down is a management-issued photo of Al “Bummy” Davis. Who was Bummy? He was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, at a time when the dominant force on the streets was an Outfit outfit run by Jewish gangsters and used as the enforcement wing of the mob. They killed so many people that the press gave them the colorful nickname of “Murder, Inc.” Many of them ended up in Sing Sing, some in the electric chair. Davis’s father was a speakeasy owner and his brothers were enforcers with Murder, Inc., but Al boxed and was not in the rackets. His brothers’ heavy street rep kept him alive and well, but make no mistakes, Bummy was tough as a coffin nail and afraid of no one, not even the terrifying hitmen who ran Brownsville. His career was hindered by the mob because he refused to get with the mob’s boxing machine. In the ring, he was a brutal left hooker who destroyed a who’s who of HOFers in the middleweight division. And to top it all off, he was murdered at 25 in a bar trying to stop an armed robbery. Bummy took on four shooters and dropped a couple but was gut-shot for the effort. As far as anyone can tell, Davis has no career-contemporary cards or postcards. In cases like that, the best you can do as a collector is a photo, and the best I can do in photos is a fighter’s management-issued promotional photo. What I found that day is a glorious mid-career Bummy photo and a personal favorite item. Honorable mention that show to management photos of The Cocoa Kid and Georgie Abrahams.

2012 National, Baltimore, Wednesday, 1950s Rodine Hall of Fame postcard: This was one of those ‘stumbled across it’ finds. Rodine was a brand of the American Chemical Paint Company. Around 1954, the company issued a series of oversized postcards with original artwork of baseball hall of fame players by artist Jerry Doyle. The likenesses are really good and the cards are nicely designed. If you’ve never heard of this set, you are not alone. It is one of the rarest postwar baseball issues with only a handful of known postcards and one premium (larger versions of the cards, allegedly available from the company on request). I’d never heard of or seen one until I came across a card with Cobb, Cochrane, Delehanty, Lajoie and Walsh, #4 in the set, on Wednesday. I was smitten and laid out what I thought was a lot of money for it. In subsequent years, I found a few more cards and a premium. One card had a ‘received’ stamp on it dated in May 1954, so that dates the issue.

2014 NSCC, Cleveland, Tuesday, Cubs snapshot: Alas, we shall never see the likes of the IX Center again. The city sold it to Amazon, which is turning it into a data center. I won’t miss that dank dungeon of a former tank factory with the filthy bathrooms in the middle of nowhere, but I did get some great stuff there. On this particular Tuesday, I found a dealer with a box of vintage baseball snapshots. Did you know that the Cubs trained on Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles? I did; I live in Los Angeles, I have been to Catalina, and I knew that Mr. Wrigley owned a big piece of the place and brought the Cubbies to the island every spring. I found a small group of snaps from Catalina, mostly of Gabby Hartnett, and bought them all happily, but one really caught my eye. The dealer knew it was a helluva photo too; he told me flat out that it would be expensive. It was but YOLO. The snapshot showed seven Cubs players in full gear walking down the main seaside roads in Avalon (the main/port city) with … shovels and picks? What?? Think about it: seven guys with tools walking to work: what pop culture meme is that? Another hint: Heigh Ho. Yup, the photo dates to 1938. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves had been the box office sensation of the winter, and the Cubs, with ringleader Hartnett in there, were yukking it up for the folks by doing their best Seven Dwarves impression on the way to practice. Honorable mention from that find, what turned out to be a shot of Jimmie Foxx at the plate during his stint with the Cubbies.

2019 National, Tuesday, 1952 Star-Cal Decal Al Rosen 74-B: I collect Rosen, and there are some items that are elusive, some that are rare, and some that are just about impossible. 1951 National Tea label, 1952 Central Bank of Cleveland, and the big solo Star-Cal Rosen. It eluded me for years. The decal falls into the rare category, trending towards impossible. How rare? Well, PSA has graded 246 Star-Cals from the Type 1, single-player series. Total pop of 74-B Al Rosen: zero; the other Al (Zarilla) has more graded examples. Anyhow, the item had been on my Rosen want list for years. Early Tuesday I came across a dealer breaking an entire set of Type 1 Star-Cals. I was the first customer in there and I got the Rosen. Got a signed Jack Sharkey (heavyweight champ) Exhibit card too, but that was just the cherry on top of the cake.

2019 National, Chicago, Tuesday, 1950 Sylvan Sweets Jackie Robinson mail-in card AND 1887 N285 Buchner Gold Coin Cap Anson: Man, I really killed that day. I found these with the same dealer. The Robinson card is a genuine rarity. In 1950, Jackie Robinson was featured in a flip book by the aptly-named Flip Book Television, Inc. (the company advertised two of them but the second one has not turned up and may not have been printed). The flip books are tough but not impossible; the cards are all but impossible. According to a comment to an article by Dave Hornish, who writes an exceptional Topps-based blog (thetoppsarchives.com), the cards may have been inserted into packs of Sylvan Sweets’ candy cigarettes (candy coffin nails: different times). How rare, you ask? Well, the SGC graded pop is two; PSA not only has not graded one, but it is also not even on the PSA Registry’s Jackie Robinson Master Set checklist. I was lucky to find one, but as Branch Rickey said, “luck is the residue of design”. I was lucky because I was there, and I was there because I got to Chicago on Monday and got into the show when dealer set-up started Tuesday morning and walked the show relentlessly. The Anson is a conventional card but such an expensive one that I had no plans to own one. Ever. I got mine on the (very) cheap because it is trimmed and skinned. Yeah, but it is Cap Anson and it is mine.

Last one, I don’t remember which show but I know it was a first day find, a trio of 1940 Diamond Dust punchboard cards: DiMaggio, Hubbell, Camilli. Diamond Dust cards are brutal rare, which figures since they are paper betting slips that were folded into tiny ‘sticks’ and put into gambling devices. I’ve never even seen many of the cards on the checklist. Finding one a show is noteworthy; this dealer had three and I cleaned him out even though I already had a DiMaggio. Two is better than one, you know.

Alright my fearless readers, see you in Chicago. I will be hanging around pestering the kind people at two booths: Love of the Game Auctions and LUTFA. LOTG’s Affable Al Crisafulli is one of the nicest people I know in the hobby and specializes in unique baseball items. I’ve consigned two significant oddball pieces to his auctions, and he has done a bang-up job on both. The guys at LUTFA (ask them what the name means; it ain’t an IKEA item) bring out the good stuff in prewar baseball. Always a fun stop. And I plan to hang around in the bar at the Hilton every night, so you can find me there drinking sparkling water; yeah, I am a wuss who can’t hold his liquor, so I don’t even try. I’ll be the overweight white guy dressed like a ten-year-old. That should narrow it down to just a few hundred people in the bar.