Night Owl Cards

    Two weeks ago, around 6:30 evening, I was at the front door, distributing Reese's and Hershey's to a steady stream of costumed tiny tots as is the ritual in our neighborhood, apparently THE place to go for Halloween door-to-door begging. I heard my phone ring on the end table behind me but I couldn't get to it. When I finally freed myself from the door, my wife said, "Angus called you." Angus? That Angus? On Halloween night? I called him back right then. He was in a card shop. In Arizona. It wasn't Halloween time there. It was 3:30 (4:30? Mountain time always confuses me). Although we did have someone ring our bell at 4:30 in broad daylight and that's not proper Halloween etiquette. He had come across a few 1970s Hostess panels, which he had witnessed my love for in person at a card show three or four years ago. He wanted to know if I needed any. Well, you never saw the kids, the bags and bags of candy, the entire bleeping holiday melt away so fast. ...

As you know, I have been somewhat obsessed with determining the oldest night card ever made. I have a feeling that someone is going to spring some wacky tobaccy night card from 1904 on me that I have no chance of getting. But while I'm still having fun with this, I'll press on. The above card arrived in the mail today. It's a 1953 Bowman Color card of the St. Louis Browns' Don Lenhardt. The much-traveled Lenhardt was an outfielder and corner infielder for the Browns, Orioles, Red Sox and Tigers between 1950-54. This card is from his second tour with the Brownies, and he just may have the honor of being on the oldest night card ever made ... for now. I'm not 100 percent sure that it's a full-fledged night card. It could be dusk, and I'm usually hesitant to add "dusk cards" to my collection. But that blazing bank of lights in the upper left automatically makes me place it under the "night card" category without reservation. So ther...

I saw this card featured on a blog for about the 28th time yesterday. It's the 1953 Bowman Color Pee Wee Reese card and everyone is right when they say it's one of the best, most beautiful cards ever created. This particular post  speculated that it might be the best Dodger card ever made. That's pretty good speculation. It might be. But I wasn't thinking about that at the time I was reading the post. I was thinking about what I always think about when I see this card: I don't have that card and I probably never will have that card. It's a wee bit expensive. I'd probably have to obtain a whole different personality to justify paying the amount that is attached to most versions of this card. But then I thought: one of the best things about this blog is it's about MY collection. I rarely display cards from other places because my blog isn't about cards from other places. My blog is about me and my hobby, meaning the cards are part of my coll...