Last stop Philly, then on to Wisconsin and SCD ...
My 1993 Summer Tour concludes with this episode, which launched with a trip to Wisconsin, which was a good hike at the time from where I was pretty informally encamped in Upstate New York. I mentioned the IRS in the last blog as a means of pointing out that the only way I could remember all this stuff was from the bookkeeping that I did on behalf of those nice folks.
The Wisconsin trip neatly conformed to tax rules about business trips, since I set up at a show at Serb Hall in Milwaukee and also interviewed with Bob Lemke at the Krause Publications offices in Iola for a position with Sports Collectors Digest that had been advertised in the magazine. Both events panned out pretty well: I got to meet Frank Fulop, the creator of the Hartland statues, at the Serb Hall show, and the SCD thing seems to have worked out pretty well also. The invitation to join the staff would come several weeks later in the middle of the final leg of the East Coast swing.
By late August I was in Bedford, N.H., for a small show, which was as much about a sightseeing sojourn to Cape Cod as it was anything else. In early September, it was back to Mike Riccio’s great show in Stratford, Conn., where I sold a pile of 1954’s, including my favorite baseball card in the whole word, the 1954 Topps Ted Williams No. 250. For once I got a decent nickle for something; since it was/is my all-time favorite card, I wasn’t inclined to any discounting at $475.
A week later I was out on Long Island for Steve Hisler’s National Pastime show, and a couple of days after that to my last Philly Show as a dealer, which was kind of significant, since I had been one of those guys on the famed Bob Schmierer waiting list in the early 1980s before getting my first crack at it in, I think, 1984.
Philly was always fun, since I got to see a lot of old friends from Delaware and environs. Sold a Schmidt rookie and a 1952 Topps Reprint set, the extra one I had bought back in 1983 when they were released. I thought $40 was a lot of money for a reprint set at the time, but here again, even I managed to turn a profit, selling it 10 years later for $250.
And just like that, I hung up my spurs, scooted up Interstate 95 back to Plattsburgh to gather up what stuff I had and headed off to the wilds of Wisconsin.
I didn’t make a whole lot of dough, but I had more fun than you can imagine and saw a ton of new stuff and a lot of old (and new) friends. That sounds like a good summer in anybody’s book.
