Last weekend, I drove to the Emerald Square Mall in Attleboro, Massachusetts, for an indoor mall show. This marked my first time at this mall since repping for Nintendo to promote a SNES Super Scope launch in 1992, well before moving to the state itself seven years later.
I stopped at a local card shop prior to the mall show itself and snapped a photo of this charming Ed Bailey model youth catching mitt, complete with hand-drawn bullseye. Some glove collector will feel lucky to take it home, I'm sure! (Ed also appears on one of my type collection's most esoteric #5s, 1957 Swift Meats.)
Emerald Square itself fell off a cliff around COVID and now sits about half-empty. Its shuttered Sears facade loomed behind a few dozen indoor tables, a true hodgepodge of dealers. Some brought their best stuff, priced and well-arranged, and others emptied out their closets for shoppers to work through by hand.
These days, a good show means I spent half on my own lists and half restocking my dupes box for mailing to friends. A great show sits closer to 75% on hits. This show fell somewhere between those two numbers. Sorry to say that I ran out of shopping time partway through a table stacked with quarter and dollar cards. How many more cheap 70s HOFers did I miss???
That black-and-white Mickey Cochrane sat on top of 27 cards from a 1974 TCMA retrospective of 1929-31 Athletics, one of the greatest squads led by Connie Mack. It lacked just one thing, a footlong team card my friend Mark Hoyle dropped off yesterday.
I swapped a 1971 Kellogg's panel version of Bob Gibson, found at the mall show, for Mark's TCMA team. These cereal box cutouts lack 3-D fronts, so look and feel more like regular cards.
Many 1970s hits from that show went into my dupes box. The most unusual, and one I'll hang onto, is what appears an authentic Dick Selma autograph on the back of his 1972 Topps card. Did its original owner request he sign this spot? It's a puzzler.
This haul proved worth the hour's drive each way and helped me reconsider what mall shows can be! How often does real redemption happen these days?
3 comments:
I never knew about the Kelloggs box cards. They look good.
Great stuff. ... Are the Kellogg's cards cut from the advertisement on the back of the box or specific cards printed for the sake of being cards?
I was in Attleboro once. The worst hotel I've ever stayed in. Town kind of creeped me out but maybe I didn't get to see the good parts.
Never seen or heard about those box cards either. Very cool.
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