Pasadena Show

Day 1

Saturday was the first day of the first good-sized show in quite some time in metro Los Angeles, at the Pasadena Convention Center. I had a table without showcases, just picking boxes.

The venue is really nice and incredibly well run. I loaded in on Friday night and other than the conga line of cars to get into the loading dock caused by a need for security to check in every car one at a time, it could not have gone smoother. There was ample parking in the dock area, plenty of staff to guide us, and two freight elevators with the larger one run by an attendant. Very smooth operation. The center was busy on Saturday with multiple events but the bathrooms remained usable all day. Hey, it’s important and a good gauge of how well run a facility is…and you never know when you might need to drop the kids at the pool, so to speak, so better to have a usable facility.

But I digress.

I packed and loaded my car with an eye towards load-in issues that fortunately did not happen, so I was able to get everything up in two cartloads. New cart I bought was absolutely perfect. I got all of my cards into one (very heavy) load. Load-in was faster than the drive in from Burbank. I was in and out in under an hour. I left the actual stocking work for Saturday morning, just got everything in place and locked up the body bag.

The tables are 6’, which is 2’ short for a major show, but there was very ample back-up space so I was able to stack my storage boxes and give myself a little workspace table top.

Food selections bit ass, as usual for a convention center, but we are right across the street from the Paseo Colorado, a major shopping center with all kinds of food, and Colorado Blvd., which is a foodie hotbed, so if you have someone you can send out, you are gold. I didn’t; my wife decided not to show up, so I packed a lunch. Parked at the Paseo for $12 versus $15 at the center.

Now the part you care about: the stuff. The show had 180 tables and I would guess about half as many unique dealers. About ten had real serious vintage stuff, mostly postwar mainstream, but some decent bit of prewar too. Not much picking other than at my table. One friend (who is reading this) found a 1936 newspaper ‘card’ of Lefty Grove, SGC graded, for sixty bucks. The card was captioned “Bob Grove” and the nitwit dealer didn’t realize it was Lefty, so he sold it as a common. Cha-ching! I was able to walk the show and most of the vintage I saw was aggressively priced.

Modern was everywhere. Ultra modern. Very shiny. I overheard some interesting things about that. More than one dealer was not buying, at all. The guy next to me repeatedly turned down laydowns, telling the customers that he was not buying. Highlights the nature of what I call “commodity cards.” Commodity cards are readily available. In a 150+ table show, customers have their pick of commodity cards and the only way for dealers to compete is on price. There is no urgency to buy a commodity card; you just move on to the next table.

One thing I heard repeatedly from my customers on Saturday was that I had stuff no one else did, which is precisely what I aim for when I buy for resale. I sold several items that the buyers just went nuts over because they’d never seen them before. One guy, a huge Koufax collector, actually found something he’d never seen and did not have (a 1960 Los Angeles Examiner Koufax pin up) and he was just thrilled. Another was looking for an oddball Reds piece as a gift and walked away very happy with a piece of sheet music with a great Crosley Field picture on the front. Other unique items that found new homes included 1940s pin-up blotters, pins, scorecards, photos, postcards, tickets and press passes. Even sold NASCAR stuff and a 1970s punk ‘zine I picked up a few weeks ago. For that matter, I sold a surprisingly large number of publications, including a chess magazine—guy said he loves chess. I didn’t even put out the pubs at Anaheim. You never know what will sell. One thing that is consistently the case at a show is that you can load up 20,000 items and fill a table to the breaking point and someone will want something else, which is why I pack it anyway and hold it off table. In this case, I ran out of room and left a box of 1990s shiny off the table. Sure as heck, two guys wanted the big names from that exact era. I brought out the box and made a few nice sales off of stuff I hadn’t even put out.

I had no walk-ins at all. Hope for some on Sunday.

So far, the show meets my financial expectations. Sales were steady all day. I did not get slammed like the first day of the Anaheim show but I was fully engaged and busy from the VIP open for about 2.5 hours. Met a few Network54 folks and had some nice visits.

At 4:30 I was toast and it was slow, so I zipped up the body bag and walked the show for half an hour before leaving. Easy peasy. Stopped in before rolling out and found that the toilets were still usable. Yeah, I have an issue…

More on the 2nd day.