My vending machine takes dimes, not pennies …

I should apologize to anybody who might have been looking for these blog thingys over the past week; I finally took a few days off and went golfing around St. Louis as we have traditionally done over the last several years. It was so hectic in leaving and trying to get as much done as possible for the issue of Sports Collectors Digest that would be produced this past week that I forgot to mention that I wouldn’t be blogging for awhile.

While I was gone a couple of things that I won at auction showed up, and of course that was a treat to have cool stuff waiting for me upon my return. One was a complete set of the Perez-Steele Hall of Fame Art Postcards, and the other a neat 1950s baseball card and gumball vending machine.

The former was won in the recent Hunt auction; the latter came from Legendary Auctions, and not surprisingly just about everything was precisely as advertised in the catalogs. The Perez-Steele set, which I had already owned, is in pristine, as-issued condition, and there are few sets that I would be more comfortable in owning an extra copy. I remain convinced that the famous franchise absolutely needs to be restarted, and I hold out that seemingly quixotic hope despite the passage of a whole decade since Perez-Steele shut down. It’s a hobby treasure that we just can’t let fade away. More on that in subsequent blogs and SCD columns.

My vending machine is nothing short of spectacular, even though I guess I’ve got to go out and buy some gumballs. The catalog says they should have been included, but maybe the Legendary guys chewed em up while they were doing the first-class packing job.

I’ve hardly got a beef about the machine, which seems to work just fine, except that I can’t find a key to work in the back, the one you need to empty out the money from time to time.

The other thing is that it seems to take dimes rather than the penny as advertised on the glass. I don’t regard that as much of a calamity either, but more simply as a reflection of more than 50 years’ worth of inflation.

But I’m going to have to figure out how to empty out that money box. I’ve been spitting out 2009 Topps Heritage cards (that’s what we had lying around the office) faster than kiss a duck. And I’ll eventually pick up some gumballs I guess, though I obviously was never in this hobby for the gum.

Nor did I read the articles in Playboy magazine, either.

When it came time to post this online, I couldn't locate the picture of the machine, so in an emergency I pictured my favorite baseball card guy.