Card Values Being Updated

Update 10/2021: I'm on my last grouping, the Prototype and Promotional cards. This one will take a bit since the group of 48 is variably priced based on production numbers and where they were distributed. Updated pricing is in YELLOW.

I started collecting Conlon Cards back in 1991 when the first Megacards set came out. That's 30 years and counting. In that time, I've managed to assemble about 99% of all the baseball cards using Charles Conlon's photos. This endeavor has cost me somewhere around $2500.

That said, we all know (or should) that the huge (1980s-90s) increase in production numbers from other card production companies printing seasonal cards - like Topps, Fleer, Dunruss, Score, and Upper Deck - depressed the value of all cards in the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately, the Conlon cards were also printed in that time-frame.

It's important to note, however, that the Conlon cards (besides showcasing golden age players photographed by Charles Conlon rather than current players) were published by much smaller printing houses in much smaller numbers. Conlon sets were printed in numbers no greater than 200,000 per run, and some as low as 10,000 per run. These cards are far more rare than the number of seasonal cards printed 1980 through the strike of 1994-95 AND cover players from the Golden Age of baseball.

As time has gone on, I've noticed a number of the cards I bought for reasonable prices 10-20 years ago are now more expensive, and some are VERY hard to find. A collector today, for example, would have to pay about $3 for some common cards. A 100 card set would thus cost $300. compared to buying the whole set at the time for $100.

Bottom line is there simply aren't as many Conlon Cards in-the-wild any more, and that has driven the pricing up - especially for the smaller print runs.

What should also increase the value of these cards is the unfortunate event that the original negatives are now in the hands of a private (anonymous) collector. This means there is now little-to-no chance that these photographs will ever be used in a baseball card format ever again.

To keep my Blog-Page up to date, I'm adjusting the card-and-set prices more closely to what I feel the current market supports. This will give you a better idea of what the set will cost you, and what it might be worth when you complete it.

These cards ARE unique; photos specifically by Charles Conlon (1904-1942), and historic Bios by the Sporting News historian, Paul MacFarlane. These cards are both historical and classic - documenting players from the golden age of baseball. In my opinion, they provide so much more value than any set designed around a single season. 

I expect, once I have completed this pricing review, that a complete (or near complete) set of cards will have a value of near $4000. I also believe that this collection will increase in value over time, as more and more collectors realize exactly how lucky we are that these cards were ever produced in the first place.

1993 Card #955 - Hal Wiltse

Recently, I received an Email from a relative of Hal Wiltse (Card #955), informing me the card Bio and stats were correct, but the photo was not of her great-uncle - but of Tony Welzer. A short investigation proved this to be true. It's likely that Megacards mislabeled the printing plate back in 1993 which caused the error. As far as I know, no one else in the collector's hobby has found this error.

In any case, I'm including the original Card #955 and a corrected "card" as it should have been. I've also made a corrected replacement card to add to my collection.

I am including this article from Christopher Brandon who has done a fantastic job of tracking the history of the Conlon Photographic Archive; from 1904 when Charles Conlon began taking photographs of baseball players to 2016 when 7,462 remaining images (of over 20,000 originals) was sold at Auction to an anonymous bidder for $1.8 million. This article is taking the place of my previous attempts to do the same.

I am including this article from Christopher Brandon who has done a fantastic job of tracking the history of the Conlon Photographic Archive; from 1904 when Charles Conlon began taking photographs of baseball players to 2016 when 7,462 remaining images (of over 20,000 originals) was sold at Auction to an anonymous bidder for $1.8 million. This article is taking the place of my previous attempts to do the same.

Tracking Down the Charles Conlon Collection

by Christopher Brandon, November 4, 2019

In my opinion there is no better or more iconic sports photographer than Charles Conlon. His images are timeless, and he captured one of the most important eras of baseball. In nearly 40 years of photography, Conlon captured over 7,000 images, and I am willing to bet that is a conservative estimate. Nonetheless, a collection of 7,462 original negatives of Conlon’s work was sold through Heritage Auctions back in 2016 from a private collector.

Now, a private collector seems like an odd place for something of this caliber and historical significance to be found, so how did it get there? The story is as interesting as it is frustrating, and certainly adds to the discussion of what should be up for public purchase and what should be placed in museums. So, we are going to be taking a look at the Conlon collection’s historical pathway, and discuss the question of personal responsibility in terms of items of historical significance.

Charles Conlon was the photographer for the New York Evening Telegram and Spaldings baseball guides between 1904 and 1942. However, his work was used by the Sporting News, in advertisements, numerous newspapers, and were also used for trading cards. He was not the only sports photographer of the era, but he was certainly the most prominent, and his photographs speak for themselves. Charles Conlon had a great eye for getting the best shots and had a knack for being at the right place at the right time. If you have seen my video about Ty Cobb stealing third base, you will know exactly what I am talking about.

Like most people, Charles Conlon did not anticipate his future calling, but he was certainly, once again, in the right place at the right time. He was an amateur photographer who took photos as a hobby, but nothing suggests he had any ambitions of pursuing photography full time.[1] Nonetheless, in 1904, while working as a proofreader for the New York Telegram it was suggested to him by his editor that he take a camera to New York’s ball parks to capture some shots.[2] It was this singular suggestion that put Conlon on a pathway to becoming the preeminent photographer of early 20th century baseball, capturing the likes of Christy Matthewson, Ty Cobb, Nap Lajoie, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and too many others to name.

Like many other items of historical significance, it takes some time for their importance to be realized. History is funny that way, but it is why I subscribe to filmmaker David Hoffman’s mantra that “ordinary is extraordinary.” Essentially that history is always in the making and just because something seems insignificant now, does not mean that it will not have significant in the future. This is also true in the case of Charles Conlon and his photography.

You are probably asking yourself, if his work was so good, then why was it underrated for so long, right? This is not an easy question to answer, and I am not sure if any one answer could satisfy the question. However, I am inclined to believe that it was because his contributions to society were available in everyday life that is a key reason for this. People tend to take every day occurrences for granted because we are distracted by the big, the bold, and the fascinating. It sometimes takes time to realize the value of things that seem rudimentary.

For all intents and purposes, Conlon remained relatively underappreciated for nearly 50 years. It would not be until around 1990 when the Sporting News discovered their treasure trove of Conlon’s work tucked away “in the morgues of the Sporting News offices.”[3] There they found over 8,000 negatives of his work, and people began to realize just how many significant events this one man had captured for us to enjoy indefinitely. Moreover, it was realized just how close he brought his viewers to the action.

According to Steve Gietschier, who started working at the Sporting News in 1986, when the “collection” was found, it was in complete disarray. Steve said it was so chaotic you would be hard-pressed to even categorize it as a collection. He said they were all sitting in a filing cabinet outside of the vault used to store the Sporting News’ significant items. The vault was apparently so full that they opted to leave the cabinet out where even visitors could come in and handle them. This was how little Conlon’s work was thought of over time.

Conlon was always there close to the action and he had a way of snapping photos that gave observers the sense that they were a part of the action. It is also said that his photos had a unique way of “channeling the viewer’s attention directly to the player’s facial expression.”[4] I believe that this is why his portraits are so captivating. Most portraits are relatively boring in my opinion, but Conlon had a way of capturing his subject’s emotions in a way that makes them just as interesting as their action-shot counterparts. You can pretty much look at a Conlon picture and know that it is a Conlon photo even without any context. It is quite amazing!

It is said that over time Conlon resorted to getting rid of images simply because he didn’t have the room for them in his house.[5] Nonetheless, sometime between 1942 and his death in 1945, Conlon, whose house was stuffed to the gills with all of his negatives and plates, sold his negatives to the Sporting News. However, even Gietschier could not find a bill of sale or anything, so it is not even known how much, if anything at all, was paid for the items. However, they did the right thing, and hired conservator Constance McCabe to make prints of the old, delicate negatives.[6] The results blew away McCabe who was awed at the artistry of Conlon’s photography. She was so excited she shared the news with her brother, Neal (an avid baseball fan), which led to the 1993 publication of the book Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon.[7] There were so many photographs and the book was such a hit that the duo created a sequel to the book The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball Photographs.[8]

However, even before that book was published, the Sporting News released a 330-card set in 1991 that showcased Conlon’s work called “The Conlon Collection.” The following year the Sporting News was approached by a small card company called Megacards of Fairfield, Iowa. Though they had never produced on a set-level scale, they were intrigued by the Conlon collection. Megacards and the Sporting News agreed on a 4 year deal that was supposed to contain a 330 card set for each year. The sets did well the first couple years, but like most other baseball cards, took a hit during the strike. Therefore, in 1995 Megacards only released series 1 of the set that consisted of only 110 cards. In all there were 1,430 cards produced for the Conlon Collection series with 330 of those being produced by The Sporting News, and the remaining being produced by Megacards.

If you are not familiar with the Conlon Collection sets, they are fantastic! The photography is phenomenal, and the back of each card showcases a significant event of that player’s career. The sets are also one of the earlier sets to include autographs as 20,000 packs from the 1992 release offered autograph inserts from the likes of Johnny Mize, Bob Feller, Bobby Doerr, Enos Slaughter, Johnny VanderMeer, Hal Newhouser, and Marty Marion.[9]

So far so good, right? We have the collection found, it is undergoing restoration, and cards and books being made to honor Charles Conlon and his contributions to history and baseball. Well… I wish things could continue to go in this direction, but life unfortunately doesn’t always go that way. Which brings us to the next step in the collection’s journey, and an unfortunate one.

John Rogers' T206 Honus Wagner (click for more info)

The Sporting News was sold by Times Mirror to Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), and from there it would be sold to the American City Business Journals (ACBJ) in 2006. Originally, the Sporting News was to remain in place in St. Louis, but when the execs at ACBJ changed their minds, the offices were moved to North Carolina. Before the move, the Sporting News sold off its entire photographic archive, including the Conlon collection, to John Rogers in 2010. Perhaps you have heard of him: Rogers is the Arkansas entrepreneur who shelled out $1.62 million for a PSA 5 T206 Honus Wagner in 2008.

Rogers owned a photo archiving business called Rogers Photo Archive. Essentially what they did was make deals with the owners of photographic materials, the items were shipped to him in North Little Rock, Arkansas where his company cleaned and restored the prints. They took the cleaned prints and scanned them at 300 dots per inch (dpi), before returning a hard drive to the publication or owner as a completed archive. The company kept the original prints stored in the Rogers archive where he then created prints that were sold to the public via eBay. The Rogers company would basically put in the contract that they now owned the photos in exchange for their digitizing services. [10]

John Rogers

However, the Conlon collection is a bit different in that Rogers owned the images outright. He went to work with the collection creating “museum quality prints”[11] that are available for public sale, but also intended to “monetize the rights through the licensing of the images.”[12] Additionally, for what he deemed as the “150 most-memorable” images, he is creating a line of Platinum-Palladium prints.

According to the Library of Congress, “The platinum printing process was popular in the late 19th century. It used platinum and/or palladium salts instead of silver as the light sensitive material. These prints are characterized by their ability to reproduce a long scale of tonal values. It is a very permanent image, and was highly valued for this reason. Later the process was appreciated more for its aesthetic qualities, and became favored among art photographers. It is usually characterized by soft, gray tonalities, but it is possible to change the color of the print during development or by toning the finished print.”[13] That sounds pretty sweet to me!

In any case, I do not see any issues with buying a collection in order to get profits, and it seems like his company is adept at preserving photographic imagery and negatives. However, it would be other issues that cause alarm in the case of John Rogers that will take us to the next stop of the Conlon collection’s journey. So, let’s take a little closer look at John Rogers.

Rogers’ photo archival business concept was attractive to newspapers who had to weigh the options of either paying their staff to digitally archive or sending it over to sending them over to a local historical society. While these are arguably the safest options for such an endeavor, most newspapers had to think about the man-hour and equipment costs to do it themselves, or hand it over to a historical society who are often just as strapped for personnel and resources as the newspapers themselves. This made a company like Rogers Archival a premium option. Rogers offered them something they pretty much could not accomplish themselves.[14]

Unfortunately, what Rogers promised to deliver would oftentimes go unfulfilled. It seems that the shadow side of his business ventures ended up with a bright light shone on it as the accusations and law suits began piling up around 2014. Rogers found himself in quite a mess that compounded pretty quickly.

Rogers kind of took the collectibles and photography worlds by surprise. For the most part, people were suspicious of him from the get-go as he came out of obscurity at the age of 35 to buy that T206 Honus Wagner.[15] Then he turned around and started buying up all of these newspaper archives. That kind of money does not generally come out of obscurity. Their suspicions were not unwarranted, and over time complaints about shady business practices and illegal activity began to mount until he wound up getting federal attention. He had his “home and businesses… raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into bank fraud and counterfeit sports memorabilia accusations.”[16]

By 2015, Rogers was facing over a dozen lawsuits in excess of $90 million all together.[17] Over 20 newspapers filed lawsuits against Rogers Archival. Grievances ranged from not fulfilling agreements, to partially fulfilling agreements, to delivering archive materials “to unknown third parties and selling some of the material on eBay.com.”[18] However, it must be remembered that in the agreements these papers made with Rogers, they agreed that Rogers Archival would maintain control of the images as payment for the archiving process, and would then give the owner a percentage of the profits, at least that is what Rogers claimed.[19]

In addition to being a photo archivist, Rogers was also a sports memorabilia dealer which was another business venture that has left Rogers in disgrace. To make a long story short, in 2017 Rogers admitted in a plea deal that he carried out a fraud scheme between 2009 and 2014 through both his Rogers Archival and his Sports Card Plus.[20] It is a muddy mess, but we will try to unpack this simply and quickly.

Rogers ultimately ended up in court, and admitted that he would forge fake contracts to give the illusion that he had secured “certain collections of sports memorabilia and newspaper photographs.”[21] He did this in order to trick investors into investing into his company. He also admitted that he had sold fake sports memorabilia that he had either created himself or altered to feign their authenticity. He used much of these profits and collateral in order to secure loans such as a $100,000 loan he secured from an investor using a fake Heisman Trophy.[22] In all, it is estimated that he received around $4 million from various investors and financial institutions by using these fake contracts and counterfeit memorabilia.[23]

I am sure you are probably asking what this has to do with the Conlon collection, so let me explain. Rogers had been neck deep in legal battles for a few years, and has to fund this somehow, not to mention that it is estimated that he is “facing $50 million in creditor and investor claims.”[24] Well, the judge who was overseeing his case in court gave Rogers the green light to sell off the Conlon collection of glass-plate negatives. According to the receiver Michael McAfee, who was appointed by the court to oversee and arrange the sale, the proceeds will go to pay off Rogers’ creditors.[25]

Ultimately, Rogers was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his sports memorabilia and fraud endeavors. An extremely light sentence for a 44 year old con man who spent a decade defrauding people. He made a plea deal on one count of wire fraud which in itself has a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.[26] He was free on bond as his sentence pended until he was found continuing to sell fake sports memorabilia even after making the plea deal.[27]

It is highly unlikely that much of this money will be recouped as he duped countless people. He owes Mary Brace, owner of the George Brace Collection, $780,000 alone for a breach of contract judgement.[28] Mary sold him the collection in 2012 for $1.35 million, but filed a lawsuit in 2014 when Rogers missed am $85,000 installment.[29] However, she is just one in a laundry list of people to whom he owes significant amounts of money. Not to mention that the 27 boxes of negatives from the Brace collection were seized by the FBI and auctioned for $46,000 in 2016.[30]

The Conlon collection went to Heritage Auctions with a starting bid of $250,000 on August 27, 2016, but with 23 bids that number skyrocketed to $1,792,500.00. The winning bidder? He or she remains anonymous. That’s right! No one seems to know who owns it or where it is. This is unfortunate. I am hoping that it is safe and secure somewhere so that it can be preserved for ever, but unfortunately we do not know.

As collectors we all wish for that Holy Grail, but to me I think there are some things that are better suited for museums. This would be one of those things. I am sure that every one of us would want nothing more than to get our hands on something with provenance like this, but I am not sure that it would be the right or best thing to do.

Oddly enough, the aforementioned George Brace collection went to yet another digital archiving company, but I am unsure to whom that is. Chicago Tribune writer Jason Meisner tried to reach out to the person, but the article does not provide a name, only that they could not be reached for comment.[31] All that it states is that the person owns a digital archiving company in Lake Barrington, Illinois.

Nonetheless, I do not like to bring up problems without offering solutions, and fortunately at least one solution does exist. One thing that can be done if you ever find yourself in possession of something like this is putting it on loan to a museum. This does a couple of things. First, it ensures that the item is preserved and stored by trained professionals. Second, it can be put on display for the world to enjoy. Most museums will accompany the item with a card stating that the item is on loan and who from while on display, therefore, giving you the credit.

I suppose this is easy for me to say because I own nothing of any significant intrinsic value, but it is something that is not uncommon. I saw this a lot when I worked in the Augusta Museum of History, and thought it was a great idea. History is something that should be shared, and it pains me to think of how many things are sitting unloved and unappreciated in safety deposit boxes.

In any case, I would be curious to know what your opinions are on this topic. Let me know down in the comments!

Christopher Brandon

The Conlon Books

For Conlon baseball card collectors, or for those who do not want to invest in a baseball card collection, two books about Charles M. Conlon are worth the smaller investment to own a piece of his photographic mastery.

 

By David Davis

smithsonian.com
August 31, 2011

 

In 1839, around the time that Louis Daguerre announced that he had perfected the photographic process that would bear his name, the game of “base ball” was spreading up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. By the turn of the 20th century, with the advent of the hand-held camera and the proliferation of newspapers and magazines featuring black-and-white photography, the sport was becoming the national pastime.

Born in 1868, Charles M. Conlon was a proofreader at the New York Telegram when he began shooting pictures as a hobby. He started to frequent baseball stadiums in the first decade of the 1900s at the prompting of an editor. Using a Graflex camera, he soon filled the pages of the Telegram, as well as prestigious baseball publications including the Sporting News and the Spalding Guide, with evocative, intimate portraits. By the time he snapped his last picture, in the early 1940s, Conlon had become one of baseball’s foremost documentarians.

Photography evolved radically and rapidly after Conlon’s death in 1945. Camera, film and lens technology advanced, and color pictures became ubiquitous in glossy publications such as Sports Illustrated. The glass plates of Conlon and baseball’s other pioneering lensmen (including Louis Van Oeyen, Carl Horner and George Grantham Bain) were relegated to newspaper morgues.

But Conlon’s work was rediscovered in 1990. The Sporting News, which had acquired the surviving glass negatives shot by Conlon, hired photo conservator Constance McCabe to print pictures from them. She told her brother Neal about them, and the Los Angeles-based baseball researcher found himself “blown away,” by both Conlon’s artistry and his anonymity.

In 1993, the brother-sister duo published Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon (Harry Abrams). The book was a revelation, a time machine to the era of wooden ballparks, day games and legal spitballs. Golden Age was the visual equivalent of Lawrence Ritter’s Glory of Their Times, the groundbreaking oral history of professional baseball’s early days.

Roger Angell, the New Yorker’s longtime staff writer, has called it “the best book of baseball photographs ever published.”

Nearly two decades later, Neal and Constance McCabe have teamed on a second volume. The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball Photographs (Abrams). Published to mark the 125th anniversary of the Sporting News’ first issue, it is the rare sequel that may trump the original. The stars—Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Bob Feller—are well represented, but there’s plenty of space for the likes of Walt Cruise, George McQuinn and Paul Krichell. Their careers were forgettable, but their likenesses, as seen through Conlon’s lens, are not.

Conlon Baseball Cards Were Special

Andrew Godfrey, April 19, 2009

Charles Conlon baseball cards don’t have all the flashy borders and artwork of  the baseball cards today. The cards centered on the face of the players in most cards.

These were faces of players that had worked most of their life on farms and coal mines and many other trades.

Cards from the 1991 Charles Conlon baseball card set reproduced from his original photos.

The faces on these players say it all with most of them looking very serious including the Casey Stengel card.  I wish they would make cards like this today for the modern players.
Most cards today have action photos which don’t focus on the player’s face. As far as I know nobody has produced any baseball cards similar to the Conlon cards.

If you want to capture the feeling of what it was like to play baseball in the first half of the 20th century this book; Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon will take you back to this time period by letting you look at the players of the past who showed on their faces the lines of a hard scrabble life before and during their years of playing baseball.

These players weren’t playing for millions of dollars like the players of today. They played for the love of the game and to be able to put food on the table for their families.

Babe Ruth was the only player getting paid well during this era. The owners were getting rich while the players got by on what little pay they received from the owners who were hard to bargain with at contract time.

Still a few cards I'm looking for...

As with most trading card collections, there's always a few cards your still trying to get, or trying to determine if there's something out there you didn't know about.

I recently "repackaged" my cards and took the opportunity to make sure I had everything I thought I had. In the process, found that I need seven(7) cards to complete my collection.

Since I've been fortunate enough to have over 63,000 people view this Blog, I thought I would post those cards and maybe can hook up a purchase if they might be floating about.


Promo/Prototype Card
# 662
Lefty Gomez (with "PROTOTYPE" printed across the back)
There were only 10,000 of these cards printed in 1992 and they were distributed mostly to dealers. With 26 years under the bridge, how many still exist is a reasonable question. I would be willing to pay $50 for this card. Simply contact me at "BigCity@CityGate.Net".

with "PROTOTYPE" across the back

From the 1991 set, 1st or 2nd printing (see description)...

Card 143 - Herb Pennock
Card 145 - Babe Ruth '1916 Champs'
Card 184 - Moe Berg
Card 186 - Steve O'Neill
Card 189 - Marty McManus
Card 268 - Pie Traynor ATL

PS: Thanks to all of you who have found this Blog, and I hope the information here has been beneficial.

Today I want to add an article written by Steve Gietschier, and posted on the SABR's Baseball Cards Committee Blog. It provides some interesting "backroom" details of the Conlon collection while in the hands of the Sporting News.

Please note that the article was written prior to the sale of the collection to an anonymous buyer in August 2016, for $1.79 Million.


THE ORIGIN OF THE CONLON COLLECTION

By Steve Gietschier

When I began work at The Sporting News in 1986, the negatives and photographs taken by Charles Martin Conlon — it would have been a misnomer at that point to call them a collection — were in complete disarray. The glass negatives, about five thousand, if I recall correctly, were stashed, row by row, in an old file cabinet that sat just outside a room guarded by a bank vault door. My predecessor as the keeper of TSN’s historical treasures was a Red Sox fan, and so the combination to the vault door was 4-0-6. Get it? But note that the old file cabinet was outside the bank vault door. That’s true. The room behind the door was so chock full of other stuff that the glass negatives were not given even this low level of protection. They were there for all, even visitors, to see and, in fact, to handle.

Conlon started taking photographs in 1904, and he used glass plates because there was no plastic film yet. His early images were recorded on 5×7 plates, but after a while, he switched to the 4×5 size. We can only imagine how difficult it was to transport his equipment—a large Graflex camera, a tripod, and a box full of glass plates, very heavy—from his home to the ballpark. It is no wonder that he frequented the Polo Grounds and later Yankee Stadium, but never the far away Ebbets Field.

Sometime in the 1920s he switched to plastic film, the earliest iterations of which were quite unstable. These negatives, another few thousand, were not kept with the glass plates in their special file cabinet. Instead they were interfiled with all the other TSN photographs, more than 600,000, in brown envelopes, arranged alphabetically by players’ last names and stored in file cabinets that were supposed to be fireproof. Sure.

But that’s not all. We also had hundreds of prints made by Conlon himself. They were easily identifiable because his handwriting on the back was so distinctive. And they were filed with all our other photos, too.

Truth be told, Conlon was, at the time, a hidden treasure, an undervalued resource. I had never heard of him, frankly. And the folks who ran TSN knew that his work was precious, but they did not care enough or know enough to protect their investment. Maybe that’s why they hired me.

Perhaps we should mention here that Conlon stopped taking pictures in 1942 and died in 1945 and that sometime during that interval he sold all the negatives he still had—countless others he had destroyed—to TSN. But there was no bill of sale that I could find and no paperwork documenting this transaction at all.

Somehow, TSN had convinced the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, to mount a Conlon exhibit in 1984. In addition, TSN had worked with a St. Louis financier to produce a rudimentary set of baseball cards, but that was it. But these projects used the glass negatives themselves to make prints, even though they were fragile, of course, and dirty besides. Thus, one of my first goals as TSN’s first—and last, as it turned out—professional archivist was to bring all the Conlon stuff together in one place, to make it a collection, and to inventory all that we had.

I ordered special acid-neutral envelopes and boxes and began the time-consuming process — two hours every work day — of identifying, dating, and re-housing every negative. That alone took months. I don’t remember how many. Sometime along the way I contacted Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, one of America’s foremost archival conservators, and asked for advice on how to care for this collection. She referred me to Connie McCabe, a conservator at the National Gallery of Art. Connie was co-owner of a photographic conservation business, Photo Preservation Services, Inc., and she suggested that TSN contract with it to do what had to be done. Connie’s recommendation was standard operating procedure for large photographic collections: clean the negatives, develop each one into what are called inter-positives, and from these, create a new set of reproduction duplicate negatives. This set could be used for whatever purpose TSN wanted. But more importantly, the original negs, both glass and plastic, would be safe and protected, no longer subject to the wear and tear of use or curiosity seekers.

We began this process with a perilous journey from St. Louis to the Washington suburbs, the negatives, in their boxes, resting in the tailgate of a rented Ford Taurus station wagon. How else to get them to this destination? I remember distinctly praying to avoid a rear-end collision, an event that surely would have brought my career at TSN to a premature end. We made the trip safely, PPS did its work over quite some time, and we brought everything back to St. Louis safely again.

Truth be told, we had to convince Connie McCabe, not a baseball fan, that these negatives were worth her firm’s time. Only when she saw them did she agree that Conlon was not only a great baseball photographer but a great photographer, period. She, then, in communication with her brother Neal, said much the same thing, “You’ve got to see these photos.” He, a true fan, similarly demurred until he visited her in Washington and saw them for himself. Thus was born the sister-and-brother partnership that became the author team for Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).

But how does an idea of a book become a book? It’s not easy. TSN had a book division at the time, run by a woman named Sandy Dupont. She listened to our idea for a book of Conlon’s photographs and nearly dismissed it totally. But she did suggest that we talk with folks at Harry N. Abrams, a publisher of art books and another Times Mirror company, as was TSN. The Abrams people were enthusiastic enough to agree to do the book, but they assigned an editor who also knew nothing about baseball.  And when the book was finally published and Abrams had a launch party in New York, they decided not to invite the authors. Instead, I was invited to speak for the book, and I did so, even appearing on the sports segment of a local television news program.

My memory tells me that Baseball’s Golden Age got a very positive review in the New York Times Book Review. Was Jonathan Yardley the reviewer? Maybe. At any rate, the book did well. It went into several printings and is, I believe, generally regarded as the best book of baseball photographs ever printed. I commend it to anyone and note, especially, Neal McCabe’s wonderful introduction, “The Base Ball Photographer.”

Somewhere along the way, maybe even before the book was published, two entrepreneurs in a baseball card business called Megacards contacted TSN. They had never produced complete sets of cards from scratch, but the Conlons had attracted them. They proposed — and TSN agreed — to issue one series of 330 cards a year for five years. These became the famous Conlon Collection sets. The first two sets sold well, but the third set ran up against the great strike of 1994-1995, and was cut from 330 cards to 110. And that was the end of that.

In the years after Megacards, various other business proposals came our way, but none of them did very well. We even arranged an exhibit of Conlon prints at a fancy downtown art gallery in Manhattan, but it generated few sales. Conlon remains, I think, an undervalued resource. A second book, The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball Photographs (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2011), did considerably less well.

How to bring this story to a close? Times Mirror sold TSN to Paul Allen (yes, the co-founder of Microsoft), and Allen later sold the company to American City Business Journals, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. The ACBJ hierarchy told us that TSN’s editorial offices would remain in St. Louis, but in 2008, they changed their mind. The company would move to North Carolina, and I was not invited to go along. We packed up everything, and off it went.

Subsequent to the move, TSN sold its entire photographic archives to a fellow named John Rogers in Arkansas. You may have heard of him. He is in significant legal trouble on numerous fronts. Where are the Conlons now? I’m not sure. Perhaps in Arkansas. Perhaps under the custody of federal court officials. What will become of them? Who knows?