Baseball cards in the morgue

 

I'm working on a story for my paper on an old baseball team in the area. Posts might be less frequent than usual this week because of that.

 

While doing some research for the article, I visited our newspaper library, which is right in the building on the same floor as my office. It's a great, old reminder of what newspapers were and are and every time I'm in there, I nearly have to stop what I'm doing just to absorb how much history sits in that space.

 

Those who are familiar with newspaper terminology know libraries like this are called "morgues". A newspaper morgue is where a newspaper stores clippings of past stories and categorizes them by subject in alphabetized file cabinets. My paper has been around for more than 150 years so there are a lot of file cabinets!

 

As you can guess, I don't use the morgue that often anymore. We started storing articles in digital format in 1988 and the old microfilm machines gradually disappeared as they became too expensive to maintain. But sometimes the old morgue files still come in handy.

 

Finding sports topics in the morgue can be challenging -- librarians aren't always sports fans -- and I was hunting all over, from file cabinet to file cabinet, for info on this team. I didn't find anything -- found more in our digital archives. But while searching generally under "baseball," I came across an envelope titled "baseball cards". Well, let me pull that one and bring it to my desk!

During a free moment, I pulled the clippings out of the envelope. The clips included articles from basically 1970-90. I noticed a flurry of articles in 1980 when news of Donruss and Fleer breaking the Topps monopoly occurred. Most of the articles, whether national or locally generated, contained the same theme: "cards aren't just for kids anymore, cards are big business." It's amazing how that theme keeps coming up in an endless loop.

The most interesting article that I found (to me, anyway, don't know how interesting this is to people who couldn't relate to my SI post) was written by the sports editor of the time, printed in 1976. It was another "cards are big business" story but there were quotes from the Topps representative then, explaining how the company went about creating cards.

 

Then I found the coolest thing in the envelope.

 

These are photographs of the 1976 Topps Pete Rose and 1975 Topps Bert Blyleven, probably cards from the sports editor's collection, halftoned and miniaturized with adhesive on the back to be used during the old "paste-up" method of placing articles on a newspaper page.

 

When I first started getting familiar with the paste-up process at our paper, this was the method of producing newspaper pages (there were professionals who did all the cutting and pasting and we were there to edit copy -- with a blue pen -- and determine where cuts should be made but we couldn't do the cuts ourselves!). Seems absolutely archaic now and when I think about it I wonder how the hell we created a newspaper every day with this method. But, yeah, there's a definite DIY-like nostalgic charm to stuff like this.

 

 

Here is a portion of the story on the actual newsprint article. You can see from part of the article that the Topps representative explained the different photos taken of each player in the event that he was traded after pictures were taken.

 

Also, note the misspelling of Blyleven's first name. The copy is also pretty sloppy with a widow -- another newspaper term for a line that leads off a column not progressing halfway across the column -- directly under the caption (Duryea, Pa.). The caption is merely bolded, which is not enough to distinguish it from the rest of the article.

 

Every time I look at old copy from 50 or more years ago, I'm astonished by how sloppy and haphazard it seems (I also remember one old compositor who could not line up a strip of type straight to save his life. That would create crooked columns in the newspaper if no one caught it). People these days holler about newspapers and how they can't be trusted, but the quality has improved quite a bit generally, at least in my experience. The computerization of the process has certainly helped that. It's made things much easier, while also making the former compositors obsolete.

 

The article also featured a '75 Topps Catfish Hunter card but I couldn't find any half-tone image of that card in the envelope. The collector in me starting hoping the actual cards were in the envelope, too, but no luck.

 

The envelope is still on my desk and I still want to read through the rest of those old articles. It's always great fun when the media covers our hobby. Just the other day my uncle spotted the New York Times story that it wrote on the Chicago card show and Fanatics and all the changes. He had questions for me and I gave him the scoop.

 

So anyway, just wanted to relay that. It's not often that my work and hobby converge. It's fun when it does, and who knows what other card stuff might be in that morgue.