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This is a positive thread to make Comics General better.
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Started by porcupine48,

3,896 posts in this topic

Hepcat

Hepcat

Posted
Posted (edited)

It was a Saturday morning in April or May of 1964. My mission: to go door to door in downtown London and sell fifteen Globe & Mail newspapers for fifteen cents each. The reward, five cents per paper sold plus an SPP monster wallet of my choice!

 

FMcouponclosed.jpg

 

FMcouponopen.jpg

 

These wallets were perhaps the coolest things that I'd ever seen and I absolutely, positively had to reach the target!

 

But the Globe & Mail was a pig of a paper and very tough to sell in London. First of all, the Globe & Mail was Toronto based. The London Free Press was the paper of choice for most Londoners. Secondly, the Saturday Free Press cost only a dime. Thirdly, coming all the way from Toronto, the Globe & Mail had to be printed much earlier and so didn't contain that many sports scores from the previous day. In comparison on Saturdays a whopping three editions of the Free Press were published, the regular Free Press published early in the morning, the London Evening Free Press published in mid-afternoon and the Night Final which included various afternoon race results for punters and sundry other horse degenerates.

 

Fourthly, the Saturday Free Press was loaded with features including a coloured comic section with many cool strips such as Di ck Tracy, Tarzan, Blondie, Archie, Micky Mouse and Uncle Remus:

 

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The Globe & Mail was comparatively drab and had no comparable comic section.

 

What did the Globe & Mail have to offer in return? Just the best business section of any newspaper in Canada. So I could only hope to sell the thing to stuffy old businessmen or the odd deluded Torontophile. The maximum I'd ever sold before was six or seven papers. I really had my job cut out for me.

 

But I could not fail! I flung myself into the task with avid, wild-eyed enthusiasm! And my efforts bore fruit. Nearing the end of the afternoon I'd sold eleven papers; then one more. So close, so close, but yet so far.... Time was up.

 

But then, an idea! I bought the remaining three copies of the stupid rag myself! And there they were, a whole box of wallets from which I, one of the successful newspaper boys, could choose! "I want the Mummy, I want the Mummy" was the popular refrain I was hearing from other boys. I, however, had a mind of my own and I chose shrewdly - the Creature-Wolfman wallet!

 

Wolfmanwallet.png

 

CreatureWallet.png

 

And the three papers I had bought myself? No problem. I sold one to my father and two to neighbours on my own street! Easy sales indeed.

 

And I was now the proud owner of a wallet like no other in the school yard! Shortly thereafter I caught on as a morning paperboy for the London Free Press (a real newspaper) with my own thirty paper delivery route which actually took me less than ten minutes since the houses were all on the same block. And there I was, proud as a peacock brandishing my super cool monster wallet as I went collecting from my customers every week, a wallet that I had incidentally earned stuffing the crappy Globe & Mail down customers' throats just a few months previously!

 

Unfortunately, my wallet's change purse started coming apart in less than a year (cheap bloody plastic) so I very sensibly threw it out. I mean what do you need a wallet for anymore if it's all falling apart? Right? Right?!

 

Now I've since managed to acquire the Mummy-Dracula and Frankenstein-Phantom wallets:

 

MonsterWalletsFrankenstein.jpg

 

MonsterWalletsPhantom.jpg

 

But another Creature-Wolfman wallet continues to elude me to this very day.

 

:(

Edited by Hepcat
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Hepcat

Hepcat

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When it comes to trading card part of my collecting activities, I'm a completist, a set builder of the sharpest, whitest, brightest cards I can find. I'm tough on corners and toning but I'm easy on centering. I'll accept cards that are well off center so long as they are not miscut.

 

I collect them raw and unslabbed for three reasons. The first is that I've always collected cards raw ever since I was a little kid. Secondly, they're too bulky to store or even handle when slabbed. Thirdly, my grading priorities are not the same as those of the grading companies. I'm very tough on toning which they seem to ignore, but I'm easy on centering while they penalize off-center cards heavily.

 

My collection of non-sports cards ranges from the late forties to the mid-seventies - but the sets I most treasure are typically from the 1957-1965 period which coincides with those cards I remember accumulating as a kid.

 

The first cards to which I was exposed were the 1957 Topps Hit Stars. My older sister had brought a few home. She was looking for Yul Brynner, a search doomed to frustration since there was no Yul Brynner card in the set.

 

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The first cards I ever owned though were four 1958-59 Topps hockey cards which I gathered off the street one December day in 1958. The first three were Detroit Red Wings, but the last was a Chicago Blackhawk. When I saw that big Indian head on the red uniform, I knew that was my favourite team - even though I couldn't read the name yet!

 

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I admired the 1959 baseball cards in the schoolyard:

 

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But the first cards I ever bought were the 1959 CFL cards:

 

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These first few cards to which I was exposed left a lifelong imprint upon me. I ended up collecting the CFL, hockey and baseball cards most years thereafter until I graduated from grade eight in 1965.

 

I was well aware of the various non-sport sets such as TV Westerns, You'll Die Laughing, Funny Valentines and Flags of the World that O-Pee-Chee was marketing in my corner of London, Ontario at the time (the Flags were probably remainders from 1956 that OPC had decided to redistribute).

 

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The first non-sport cards I collected in a big way though were the 1961 Leaf Spook Stories.

 

Spooktheatrefront.jpg

 

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The 1962 Topps Civil War News cards came next:

 

CivilWarNewscards.jpg

 

The summer of 1963 was when I went big time, however. One of my buddies Anthony proposed that we pool our efforts and collections and just collect any card we could get our hands on. This was initially to his benefit because the 1963 baseball cards I had lying around dwarfed his meager stock. Nonetheless, over the ensuing two years Anthony and I amassed close to 4500 different cards. Needless to say, sheer numbers as opposed to condition was our defining priority.

 

Strangely enough though, we succeeded in gathering up most of the sports cards issued in our neck of the woods back to the 1960-1961 hockey cards. But any cards older than these were very tough to find and we only had a very few examples from even sets as large as the 1960 baseball. In fact, coming across any pre-1961 cards in the schoolyard was such an uncommon occurrence that it seemed to be an almost magical event. And even today I feel the same sense of wonder, the same sense of magic, perusing the pre-1961 cards that I have even if they number in the hundreds and fill a binder!

 

Among the cards we managed to acquire was a wild but very curious one called Hairy Fiend which we got in a generic pack while trick or treating on Halloween. We'd never encountered any of this set before and somehow just weren't bright enough to read the caption on the back that would have identified the set. Nonetheless, it became our favourite card.

 

When I went off to boarding school in grade nine, I just turned my half interest in the cards we'd accumulated over to Anthony who was a grade behind me. Bad mistake. Within six months or so he too lost interest in the cards which were approaching 6500 in number at the time and gave them to Billy, the snot-nosed kid across the street. Anthony's thinking was that Billy would carry the torch so to speak and continue to build on the collection. To Anthony's horror and dismay though, Billy went and scrambled the cards in front of his eyes! That's right, he tossed the contents of the whole box up into the air just to watch every other little kid on the street scramble to get as many as he could! Anthony still grouses about that to this very day some 48 years later.

 

I also collected the premium coins that were issued in jelly desserts and potato chips up until I graduated from grade school. The plastic Shirriff/Salada hockey coins, the Shirriff plastic baseball coins, the Jell-O/Hostess Airplane Wheels, the Krun-Chee Warships and the Humpty Dumpty CFL coins were the ones that drew my most avid interest - and dimes.

 

But you know the memory of these cards never left me. I'd often think back to my collecting days and wish I still had my cards even when I was in my late teens but I thought that there was no way I could ever reassemble what I'd had as a kid. Then came an article in the Canadian Magazine Saturday supplement to the newspaper. It featured Angelo Savelli of Hamilton, who was described as the world's biggest card collector. Angelo had evidently started buying sports cards in 1948 and never stopped. The article filled me with an incredible longing for the cards I'd once had, cards that I thought were now lost in the mists of time.

 

Flash forward a few years to 1979. I had finished university and had been working in Toronto for a couple of years. I discovered that the big city had four comic shops. Two of them carried old gum cards as well! The first sets I bought at the comic shops were Man from UNCLE, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the first two Funny Valentine sets. Shortly thereafter I discovered that the main comic shop in Hamilton also carried cards. When the proprietor Paul pulled out NM (or so I thought at the time) sets of the 1959, 1960, 1963 and 1964 CFL cards, I could not reach for my wallet quickly enough! Prizes beyond belief! As was the Civil War News set he had and the You'll Die Laughing set I picked up a few weeks later at a comic show.

 

When I bought the first edition of Chris Benjamin's Non-Sport Price Guidein the mid-eighties, I realized that the Hairy Fiend card we'd had twenty years before belonged to the notorious Mars Attacks set.

 

I've never stopped collecting. I now have a fabulous collection of non-sports, CFL and hockey cards and I've even made inroads into baseball cards from the 1954-1965 period as well. I've also amassed one of the better collections around of those premium coins to which I referred earlier e.g. Shirriff hockey and baseball, Warships, etc.

 

I used to feel an incredible sense of longing whenever I saw the type of old variety store at which I used to buy my cards and comics as a kid. No more though. My collection now of most cards is so far beyond what I dreamed of having as a kid that I've shed that sense of loss.

 

I eventually met Angelo Savelli in the mid-eighties at a collectibles show in Toronto where he had set up to sell card and he's now a friend of mine. It was at the big annual Toronto Sportcard and Memorabilia Expo in 2002 or so where I saved one of his binders full of expensive hockey cards from the thirties and forties from a thief. I noticed that a tall young fellow at the other end of Angie's table had scooped up what appeared to be one of Angie's binders and walked off briskly down the aisle. Angie himself was on the other side of the table and was in no position to give chase (besides I'm a lot fleeter of foot than Angie is nowadays) so I set off after the fellow myself. I caught him before he got to the door of the hall and said "Excuse me, but is that your binder?" Much to my surprise, the fellow just said "No!" and shoved the binder into my hands. While I stood there startled for a second or two, he swiftly made his exit through the door. Oh well. I'm not in the business of apprehending thieves anyway, but I'd managed the most important detail which was getting Angie's binder back for him.

 

Since Angie sold almost all his cards other than the hockey and CFL around the turn of the century and I've accumulated so many cards myself in the last thirty years, I no longer envy Angie for his cards. How the circle turns!

 

:cool:

Edited by Hepcat
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porcupine48

porcupine48

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Sorry, NOOB speaking.... :makepoint: looks cool, will check it out.

Please don't take Hepcat away from my positive thread,I really look forward to his posts here and pictures of himself and Cowboy,who by the way,Maybelline has been asking about again,she really is crushing!

And this thread is everyone's! I believe Hepcat has staked a great claim in the positive forces of positive.

EXTRA EXTRA!Non comic news,but Hepcat,guess what I found in a recycle container this Thursday....a small sized milk or cream bottle...but with the top seal intact!!!Delaval Company Limited. NEVER seen a top on before.Images tomorrow,withUptown,finally have the PC functioning again.

Also a Schepps bottle I've never seen either,it is SUPER heavy.

Jimmers

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