Night Owl Cards

  This post is a product of spending a lot of time lately in the early '70s, in each of my hobbies, card collecting and music. While adding some of my recent 1970 Topps acquisitions to the binder, I paged over two very familiar cards, which are exactly 20 cards apart when paging by number. I'm going to focus on the fellow who arrives second in the set because he's a well-worn blog topic, someone whose fantastic cards were introduced to me during my early blogging days. Lowell Palmer is one of two new Legends of Cardboard in my continuing series . You might remember that players are only selected as a "Legend of Cardboard" if they are known more for their cards than their baseball career. And while certain moony-eyed women of the early '70s would argue, Palmer's fame rests with his cardboard, specifically his Joe-Cool specs, which appear in both the 1970 and 1971 Topps sets. Uniform and background aside, it's almost as if the 1970 and 1971 photos were t...

While waiting and waiting for last night's post to appear on everyone's blog rolls -- the post was inexplicably delayed by Blogger for three hours -- I went through the cards that I had featured, cataloged them, filed them ... and discovered I had five of them already. Heh. Then it hit me. No matter how well you prepare and research, something's going to go wrong. You're going to acquire a card you already had. Blogger's not going to publish the post at the time you scheduled. Despite your best efforts, you're screwed. Planning and preparation merely ensures that there are fewer issues, not no issues. This brings me to my long-ago announced Best 100 Cards of the 1970s countdown. Since I decided I was going to do this, I've kind of lost focus and I still don't know when I'm going to pull this off. But at least there are small spurts of effort interspersed with all of the uncaring. For example, I have researched the cards from one of the s...