SCD 50th: Sports Collectors Digest began 50 years ago with an idea from collector, publisher John Stommen

John Stommen (1931-2001) was an athlete, collector, writer, publisher, entrepreneur and family man.

In 1973, he was publishing two weekly newspapers in Milan, Mich. when he came up with the idea of publishing a sports collectibles paper called Sports Collectors Digest.

Also See: Hobby pioneers who laid the foundation for sports collectibles industry  

In honor of SCD’s 50^th anniversary, we reached out to the Stommen family to get their memories about the early years of SCD. Two of John and Barbara Stommen’s sons, Jeff and Phil, were happy to share their experiences of working with their dad in publishing SCD between 1973 and 1981.

Jeff Stommen, the oldest of the Stommen children, was in college in 1973. He remembers his dad’s reasoning that he was already in the publishing business full time, and he saw an opportunity for a new niche publication on sports collectibles.

John Stommen was born in Chicago in 1931 but moved to Kalamazoo, Mich. in 1945. He was proud of being the center on the basketball team for St. Augustine High School’s 1949 Class C State Champions. He continued playing basketball at Kalamazoo College, leading the freshman team in scoring and making first-team all-conference as a sophomore.

He was the sports editor for the college yearbook, alumni magazine and newspaper as well as the student sports publicity director. He was also on the student senate and played varsity basketball and tennis for four years, graduating with an English major in 1953. With an enrollment of about 700 students, yet with a full range of athletic teams, publications and activities, Kalamazoo College provided Stommen with many opportunities to play and write about sports.

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His first job out of college was working for the local paper in nearby Vicksburg, Mich. Within a year he seized the opportunity to buy a small weekly regional paper, the Milan Leader, in historic Milan, 12 miles south of Ann Arbor. John and his wife Barbara moved to Milan and began to raise a family.

Old farm towns like Milan likely saw large families helping out on the family farms. John didn’t have a farm, but he could use the extra hands putting out a weekly paper. He ultimately had six children available — Jeffrey, Michael, Patrick, Philip, Paul and Mary Jo. All of them eventually got involved with getting the publications out the door.

Stommen was a card collector and was aware of the gradual emergence of hobby publications and card shows. His children joined in the card collecting as well.

John attended the early-1970s Midwest Collectors shows in the Detroit area. He observed that some hobby publications were very basic and not always timely. Publications were often produced by young collectors trying to support their collecting habits. He thought he could produce a better product that would come out on time and be reasonably priced.

He was interested in all sports and all collectibles, not just baseball cards. His obituary mentioned, “He never saw a sport that he didn’t like.”

Stommen thought that the format he was already using for his weekly Milan papers would work well for a hobby publication.

“My dad knew it was important to subscribers and advertisers that a publication needed to come out promptly and predictably,” Phil Stommen recalled. “He was used to the weekly deadline of his papers. He was also an incredibly fast typist. I remember my dad bouncing different names around among family members before landing on Sports Collectors Digest. He very quickly decided that the name had to include sports collecting or sports collectors, so people would know what it was at a glance.”

The first 16-page issue of SCD appeared on Oct. 12, 1973. SCD reported on card conventions or meetings in New York, Northern California, the Mid-Atlantic, Indianapolis and Cincinnati.

“We feel that bringing sports collectors in touch with each other is the chief function of a sports collecting publication,” John Stommen wrote in that first issue, surmising that there were many collectors who didn’t know that others were collecting as well.

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The first issue included three pages of classified ads from collectors like Ray Hess, Roland Villard, Jack Urban, Bill Klink, Bruce Yeko, Ron Gold, J.E. Spaulding, Jack Smalling, Tim Newcomb, Jay Barry, Steve Vanco, Fred McKie, Gar Miller and Fred Kopp. Articles covered media guides, the history of card collecting in publications, an auction calendar, checklists for a few sets and bios of collectors.

The biggest ad was from insider Jeff Stommen, who was auctioning programs from the major sports. Subscriptions ran $7.50 for 24 issues per year, or only $6 if you rocketed them a check by the end of October 1973.

Barbara Stommen was the circulation manager. She also kept track of deposits, organized ads, visited the bank, went to the post office and took care of the house, meals, laundry and the rest of the family in her spare time. Jeff and Phil helped by driving to the printer 90 minutes away and by handling mailings, which both brothers called the nuts and bolts of a publishing operation.

“In 1978 alone, I flew to 25 card shows around the country promoting SCD and selling cards,” Phil Stommen said. “Dad joined me at a few shows, but usually stayed in Milan to get the next SCD to press.”

Jeff Stommen was with his dad at an early Midwest Collectors Show when a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card was being auctioned. His dad told him that he should bid on the card. Jeff was in college and not in the market to spend a lot of money on a card. He took a pass. Hindsight is 20/20 for all collectors, dealers and publishers.

John Stommen was the editor and handled much of the writing with steady, factual reporting. He wasn’t looking to stir up debates. According to Phil, “My dad really disliked drama and tried very hard not to create any or let SCD be used as a vehicle for it.”

Freelance writers contributed articles and a few editors-at-large, like Dave Meiners and Ted Taylor, participated, but it remained a Stommen family endeavor.

Phil was still a college student when he handled SCD phone calls in Milan. There was no worldwide web providing a market for sports collectibles. Subscribers and advertisers would call in with a “constant drone” of questions that required patience and attention to detail.

“An always present frustration for John was that no matter how rigid the publication and shipping schedule, SCD's arrival at collectors’ doors was at the mercy of the post office,” Phil recalled. “Countless hours were spent on the phone with collectors upset that the guy up the road had received his SCD days earlier.”

The hard work paid off with increased subscriptions and advertising. What started as a 16-page paper in 1973 doubled in size within a year and grew to over 150 pages by 1981 with plenty of advertisers.

In 1974, SCD had 2,647 subscribers; by 1981 SCD reported 8,500 subscribers.

“Dad knew we could raise rates considerably and work less crazy hours, but he didn't want to price the little guy out of the magazine,” Phil said.

Subscribers were even given free classified ads.

At the 1975 Midwest show, the editors of the various hobby publications met and adjourned to the hotel bar for refreshments. Hobby pioneer Bob Jaspersen wrote, “Following the meeting, Dan Dischley called a meeting of sports hobby publishers, all of whom were present. Adjourning to the bar, in addition to Dischley [The Trader Speaks], were John Stommen [SCD], Mike Bondarenko [Sports Collectors News], Charles Brooks [The Sport Hobbyist], and Bob Jaspersen [Sport Fan], where they held a two-hour discussion and pledged to join forces in fighting some of the hobby’s undesirable elements.”

The mean age of the hobby publication czars at the time was 31, and they were in the relatively brief golden age of sports hobby pulp.

According to Bondarenko, when Stommen came along with Sports Collectors Digest, it blew his publication, Sports Collectors News, “out of the water with pictures and professional printing.” The Trader Speaks had the highest circulation in 1973, but within a few years, SCD had surpassed TTS as well.

“After John and Barb sold the local paper along with the downtown Milan building that housed it, the SCD production office moved to a not-so-fancy 350-square-foot room in a former dairy building shared with the farm radio programming business Dad co-founded,” Phil recalled.

“As for collecting, Dad avoided competing with other collectors for things advertised in SCD. He had a couple of early 20th-century sets [wide- and fine-pens for example] that he focused on, but publications in general, Michigan football, and older hockey stuff were his favorites. Between shows, local opportunities, relationships with Detroit area collectors and sheer time, he did amass a significant volume of collectables.”

Mark Camps’ memories seem typical of early SCD subscribers.

“I thought SCD was the bomb,” he said. “I would go straight to the want ads and see if people were selling cards I wanted at reasonable prices, and they usually were. I'd go through the ads line by line with my yellow highlighter — it was a ritual. I bought several starter sets via SCD and my first baseball card checklist book from Larry Fritsch. I remember Dean's Cards was always advertising and so was Kit Young. SCD was the only resource I could find that had this info.”

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Subscriber George Altemose also learned to check the classified ads and responded to many of them.

“Probably the most productive one led to a visit to a retired airline pilot in Key Largo, Fla., where I wound up purchasing his father's collection of tobacco cards from around 1910,” Altemose said. “This included around 300 cards, mostly T205s, T206s [including Eddie Plank] and a few orange borders.”

It was more common back then to just list sales prices rather than go to the considerable trouble of running an auction, and subscribers wanted to get to any great deals before other subscribers beat them to it. New issue information was a hot topic. Many collectors still had a lot to learn and enjoyed the education through the articles, ads and the convention calendar.

One day in 1981, Phil fielded a phone call that he thought would be like many other calls he had handled. However, this time, the call was from a stranger from Iola, Wisc., an even smaller town than Milan. The caller was Chet Krause, who owned a stable of hobby publications and was looking to purchase a publication like SCD. Bob Lemke was editing Baseball Cards Magazine for Krause at the time and had a previous brief conversation with John Stommen on the subject.

Phil got the message to his dad, who had not been looking to sell. However, the growth of SCD had also meant more work for the family. John reasoned that he either needed to invest to continue growing, or a larger publisher like Krause might “eat them alive,” as Phil recalled. Within a few days, the Stommens and Krause came to an agreement on an attractive-enough price and SCD was sold in 1981.

In the final 152-page issue under the Stommens, dated Aug. 31, 1981, associate editors John and Phil wrote, “This column is a little tougher to write than most because after 200 issues [190 regular SCDs and 10 of SCD Express] it is also our last. We have sold the publications to Krause Publications of Iola, Wisc., the publishers of Baseball Cards Magazine as well as many other publications in the hobby field. After eight years serving the hobby with its largest publication both page-wise and in paid circulation, we bow out of the business with mixed emotions. It has been fun, but a whale of a lot of work for a small family operation.”

Also See: How collector Marshall Fogel built one of hobby's largest collections 

Writers contributing to this final issue included: Larry Shenk, Roland Chapdelaine, Steve Freedman, Jim McConnell, Steve Cooper, Wayne Ebinger, Tom Gregg, Dan Even, Bob Parker, Bill Dod, Ted Taylor and Ed Kobak. Bob Wimmer provided photographs from shows. Articles made up 30 percent of the magazine.

Longtime collector and sports journalist Jim McConnell remembered the early SCDs and John Stommen.

“SCD had a positive effect on the hobby,” McConnell said. “Part of it was being in the right place at the right time, as the hobby took off with card shows, card shops and the general rise in the popularity of sports in the 1970s. John was a professional journalist and kept his product away from some of the personality clashes and ego inflation that hurt other hobby pubs in the past.

“He had a nice mix of articles on all phases of the hobby, even something as obscure as pocket schedules [which McConnell wrote]. He kept the ads affordable. The bane of his efforts was the U.S. Post Office, and John's ultimate aim was to go to news rack sales, which is partly the reason he sold to Krause.

“The editorial content of SCD was helpful to most collectors and encouraging to those new to the hobby. Certainly, it would be fair to say John [and myself] never envisioned what the hobby would become and the amount of money being thrown around on a simple baseball card that cost a penny when new.”

T.S. O’Connell started writing for SCD in 1985 and served as editor from 2000-2011. He had also been an early subscriber.

“It may be impossible to overstate the significance of the fledgling publication Sports Collectors Digest to the expansion of the baseball card collecting hobby in the 1970s and, perhaps more importantly, the 1980s,” O’Connell said. “In the 1970s it was suddenly fashionable to point out to the uninitiated that tiny little pieces of cardboard could be worth a lot of money, a revelation that enabled a couple of generations of collectors to ‘come out of the closet’ and proclaim their fealty to a hobby previously thought to be restricted to adolescence.

“When all of this started to develop in the early 1970s, publications like SCD and The Trader Speaks gave those very same collectors an avenue to buy, sell and trade those treasures to a degree never previously imagined. Where you once thought you were alone [relatively speaking], there were now hundreds and even thousands of others who shared your passions. As the hobby expanded through the 1970s, the stage was being set for an even more portentous moment, the historic court rulings that opened the door for new competitors in the baseball card manufacturing arena.

“SCD was at the center of that phenomenal expansion, producing magazines that ultimately would boast 300 to 400 pages, even with a publication schedule that by then had reached weekly status. The magazine played a role in the similarly stunning growth of the card show circuit, the development of a complementary autograph circuit and, just as importantly, the explosion of the vintage memorabilia marketplace that would take the hobby to even greater heights.

“Not bad for a homespun family newsletter imagined and designed at the kitchen table and dutifully mailed out to a loyal legion of followers.”

SCD UNDER KRAUSE

Announcement of the sale of SCD to Krause Publications came suddenly to subscribers with a new issue that looked very similar to the printing format under Stommen but slightly wider. Krause tweaked the publication schedule slightly to fit in with their publications, but the transfer went smoothly with many of the same writers continuing. What was noticeable was that the masthead had several names on it, and none were Stommen. Suddenly SCD had a publisher (Doug Watson), editor (Bob Lemke), associate editor (Steve Ellingboe), editorial assistants and an advertising manager (Dan Albaugh).

Bob Lemke interviewed John Stommen for the Jan. 15, 1982 issue.

“We had five boys who at the time [1973] were between 8 and 17. We were all interested in card collecting and thought it would be kind of fun,” Stommen said. “Since we were already involved in the publishing business, we just decided to get something in print and go from there.

“Mailing was probably the biggest bottleneck, coming out twice a month and just being a family operation. … We got a lot of people interested in the hobby, and they were able to get two issues for the price that anyone else was getting for one issue. And we did keep our ad rates relatively low. I think those were the things that we were most proud of during the time we had SCD.”

Readers will notice that John Stommen’s succinct paragraph summarized what all the people interviewed remembered.

The growth under the Stommens continued under Krause with larger and more frequent issues. For a time, SCD even went to a weekly schedule and added catalogs and other titles.

SCD benefited from Krause’s full-time employment of editors experienced in journalism and sports collecting. Krause was also an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), which gave employees a stake in the company’s success. Other hobby publications came into the market in the 1980s, but most did not continue very long. Even longtime magazines like The Trader Speaks disappeared as SCD took over their subscribers in 1983.

“After the sale of SCD, John focused more on the farm radio programming business he co-founded several years earlier,” Phil recalled. “He and Barbara used their newfound time to organize their collection and, after a couple of years, returned to the show circuit. The opportunity to do shows and travel together in retirement was both a joy and a supplement to their retirement income.”

John died in 2001 and Barbara passed in 2021. Paul is the youngest of the Stommen brothers and has remained active in collecting, along with his son Josh.

— George Vrechek has been a freelance contributor to SCD for 37 years and can be reached at vrechek@ameritech.net