October Mini-Show

There is a local LCS here in the Greater OKC Area that has a small show on the first Saturday of every month..  Al's Sports Cards and Gaming is up in Edmond, which, being a 50 mile drive, isn't local for me. But, I had to buy horse feed and wormer at the farm store near the Remington Park race track. That got me over half the way there, so I decided to roll on up and see what was going on.

As usual, the show had about 6 sellers, only one of which had any vintage.  I was probably only at the show about 45 minutes, and didn't spend much at all, but I did buy a few things.

I found 5 more cards for my 1972 set, including the three above.  This leaves me with three cards left to complete the set.  Of those three, two are semi-high commons, 537 (Bob Locker) and 645 (Jim Maloney.)  The third card is 695 (Rod Carew), which I rarely see selling at what I consider a reasonable price ($20-$25). Getting this late in the set building process, I will probably weaken and spend more than I want just to get the set done, but I am going to try and avoid that fate.

I trawled through some discount boxes and found a couple things that interested me.

A 2001 Bowman Reprint Bat Relic of Minnie (Orestes) Minoso.

Nice little oddball here. It is actually a playing card. The 10 of Clubs to be specific.   The restaurant was a St. Louis institution for many years, but has been closed nearly 30 now, victim of a business dispute with former Musial teammate, Joe Garagiolo.  For more information, see this article.


What I am listening to: Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty

Stickers

I try to remain focused with my collecting.  Because I am mostly a vintage collector, I try to preserve my cash because bargains are few and far between.  However, I do try to leave a little room for serendipity.  One such serendi[pitous diversion was the 1974-75 Loblaw's hockey sticker album a couple years ago.  You can read more about this set here. Along the way, I picked up the Acme SuperSaver version of the book and mostly completed that.  I still needed about a half dozen stickers to finish it.

I keep two EBay searches active in order to keep an eye on what is out there and be ready, should I decide to finish the second book. But, I've been generally focusing on other areas of my collection over the last year.  However, recently I saw an auction for what was clearly these hockey stickers, but was mistitled as being from 1972.  The lot consisted of 75 - 8 sticker panels and 50 - 7 stamp panels (I am not aware of 7 stamp panels ever being issued, so I have to assume it had one stamp removed. I haven't really looked into who was missing from the panels to see what the deal was.)  The lot also claimed to include around a thousand loose single stickers.

I ended up winning at the starting price, which meant I got all these stickers for about $20 delivered.

For context, around same time someone auctioned a lot of 134 (correctly identified) panels with a final price of $260 or $2 each panel.  So, conservatively, I won my lot for less than a tenth of what it should have gone for. I figured that the lot would mainly be devoid of stars, but I was wrong.  The Bobby Orr sticker can sell individually for up to $25. I felt lucky when I won a panel including Orr for around $15.    As it turned out this lot had 6 Bobby Orr individual stickers and 2 complete panels that included Orr.

There were precious few Flyers stickers. Oddly few. Until I looked at the return address.

I did manage to complete the ACME album with stickers from this group.  But that wasn't all.  The lot also included football stickers!

So, naturally, I went out and found the corresponding album, which was distributed by Sunoco and DX gas stations.  I'll probably do research on this sticker set and post about it in the future.

Now I have a larger task ahead of me.  The album includes 144 stickers. However, it covers all 28 26 teams, with 32 24 player stickers per team.  That adds up to 896 624 stickers.  So, this will probably end up being a long term project. I haven't really done any research on how much the stickers cost yet. I don't expect them to be expensive, since the album in pristine condition only cost $15.  But, we'll see.

P.S. I also found another Loblaw's hockey sticker album for fairly cheap. It is coming from Canada, so it will be a while before it arrives, but, I'll get to work on that (again) too.

Added in Edit:  There were only 26 NFL teams in 1972, so I have updated the math.