Now Playing Center Field, Tippi Hedren

 My wife is a big Alfred Hitchcock fan.  I did like Rear Window and North by Northwest.  I didn't care for The Birds myself.  I'd much rather see a good comedy any day.

Tippi Hedren played Melanie Daniels in this movie.  Coincidentally, her daughter is Melanie Griffith.  The Working Girl star was six years old when the film was released.

I came across this great card in a drawer the other day.  Reed Johnson was already a fan favorite in Toronto when he joined the Cubs in 2008.  During two stints he would become a Chicago favorite as well.

As I recall the gulls would come around late in the afternoon presumably looking for scraps from the fans.

Reed spoke with Ryan Dempster recently on Demp's podcast, Off the Mound.

Smooth As Silk

Topps has issued a variety of cards featuring some kind of image on "silk".  This is one I pulled from a blaster in 2013.  

2013 Topps Rookie Patch Sandy Koufax

As with postcards, covers offer a great variety of subject matter.  A subset are the silk cachet envelopes.  There are a good many baseball subjects available.   This one is, of course, of actor and writer Alan Alda.

I was a M*A*S*H fan.  I'm sure I saw every episode when it first aired.  Toward the end of the series I felt the actors became a bit too sanctimonious and it left a sour taste for me.  M*A*S*H may have had more to say than "Hogan's Heroes" but it was still a sitcom.  

I came to a new appreciation of Alda through his memoirs and his great work on PBS as a fantastic liason between the scientific community and the general public.

How many people do an Alan Alda impression?

Dropping a Dime

I hear that basketball cards are more popular than they've ever been.  Is that right?  Are you collecting them?  Can you even find them?  Can you find anything?  Even if I could I'm not interested in chasing some rookie's shiny new card.  Certainly not as an investment.  If you're reading this you probably collect for the fun of it like I do.  

So I don't have any Zion Williamson or Ja Morant cards.  No Luca Doncic, no La Mello Ball.  

I suppose I'd like my collection to be worth something but that's a bonus.  I'm irritated by the recent news about Target having to limit sales on cards because investors are buying them up.  I haven't been buying cards very often but I like knowing I can walk in a store and find a variety of packs if I'm in the mood.  Maybe it's a good thing for the hobby in the long run but it's certainly not now for the casual collector.

I do have some basketball cards.  They're not serial numbered and they don't shine.  Luckily I never gave my Mama a chance to throw them out.  My total investment was $.10, one dime.  That's about $7.00 in today's money.

These guys aren't Zion but I think they were pretty good.

1971-72 Topps #100 Lew Alcindor

1971-72 Topps #1 Oscar Robertson

1971-72 Topps #65 Walt Frazier

1971-72 Topps #10 Elgin Baylor

1972-73 Topps #175 NBA Rebounds Leader Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wes Unseld

1972-73 Topps #195 Julius Erving

1972-73 Topps #5 Pete Maravich

1972-73 Topps #144 Pat Riley

1972-73 Topps# 81 Len Wilkens

1972-73 Topps #32 Phil Jackson

A Collecting Analogy

I've been collecting postcards over the last few years or so.  It took a while to happen.  Some years ago I bought my wife a small binder's worth of Paris cards as a gift.  Then there was one card from Philadelphia that had pigeons in it.  A few years ago I had the idea to gift her some Art Institute of Chicago cards.  That's what really did it.  (I've been in Iowa for around ten years but I was born in Chicago and spent my first 50 years there.  I'm truly a Chicagoan living in Iowa.)  The gift idea turned quickly to the desire to collect old postcards of the my home town.  

This card is probably from the 1950's.  I'm still not great at dating cards.  

Postcard and trading card collecting have a lot in common.  Remember when we learned about analogies in school?  Meow is to Cat and Bark is to Dog, Hat is to Head a Sock is to Foot, etc.?

I see analogies in my collecting.  I'll give you my clearest example.  I collect cards of my boyhood baseball hero, Ron Santo.

If I'm not in the Hall of Fame of Ron Santo collecting, I'm at least in the Hall of Very Good.  

My postcard analogy is this Chicago treasure, The Art Institute of Chicago.  I've been going there all my life.  My wife and I went there on our first date and we got engaged there.  It's filled with some of the most famous and wonderful art ever made.  I currently have an entire 2" binder devoted to just this one building.  The cards date from the the first decade of the last century to about the 1960's.  I'm always looking for ones I don't have.  As with baseball cards there are what I consider "unique" postcards featuring the same image.  There are vintage examples and more modern, rare and common, expensive and less so, etc.  

I've just been talking about collecting one very specific pair of cardboard subjects.  They are the centerpieces of each collection.  That being said I've always been one for variety.  As I've branched out in trading card collecting, from cigarette cards of transportation subjects to recent sets of things like movie posters, I've done the some of the same with postcards.  The number of subjects you can find is endless.  Like trading cards you can store postcards in boxes or binders.  They even fit in my trading card display cases.  

Well, you've heard of tortured analogies.  I'll torture you no further today.  If I haven't inspired you to collect postcards yourself maybe I've piqued your interest in seeing more here.  

This Day in Blackhawks History -- The Golden Jet

On this date in 1966 Bobby Hull scored 4 goals (his 17th career hat trick) in a 6-5 loss to NY Rangers, becoming the first player in team history to score 300 goals.  The Golden Jet would finish his  Blackhawks career with 604 tallys .  Teammate Stan Mikita is second with 541.  Current superstar, Patrick Kane, counting last night's lamplighter, is 4th with 390.

1994-95 Parkhurst Tall Boys #25 Bobby Hull

1971-72 Topps #50 Bobby Hull

2008-09 Champs Hockey #7 Bobby Hull

From later that season.

Card of the Day -- The Golden Arm

 This card was #1 in the 1971 Topps football set.  Johnny was still sporting the iconic brush cut (not sure what year this shot was taken).  I think of him as Johnny, don't you?

1971 Topps Football #1  John Unitas

I remember reading a story about Johnny breaking his nose during a game and plugging it with mud to stop the bleeding.  I'm sure Tom Brady is tough but I can't imagine him doing that.  

Here's  some highlights from the same era as this card.

The cartoon mentions Johnny's restaurant.  Here's a copy of the menu from 1968 courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Opening Night for NHL 2021

 The NHL begins play tonight.  As the pack below notes, it is the 2020-21 season.  But not so.  It is the simply the 2021 season.  Will next year's cards list stats that way or will they show both years?  

My wife gave me this pack for Christmas.  It's hard to find packs at Walmart and Target here in NE Iowa and I'm guessing this was her best option.  They're ok cards but I think Upper Deck's flagship is the best.  I did pull one one Blackhawk and a bunch of assorted veterans.

Are you excited about hockey season?

2020-2021 O-Pee-Chee Hockey