Of course, with a shop full of histories of seafaring, naval battles royal, pirates, typhoons and other exciting stuff, I couldn’t help asking Greg what he collects himself. He replied: “I have a dealer’s mind-set. By definition this mentality steers away from collecting anything, or only collecting it to ultimately sell it. Thus my two major collections of works by Melville, my world-class local history collection, my collection of works by Gloucester poet Charles Olson – all sold! In my view, you can’t be a good dealer if you are also a collector, because you will always be working against yourself. I want to work WITH myself, FOR my customers, who are, and should be, the true collectors.

“Having said that, there’s one thing I collect: reference books. I’ve been collecting references of all sorts pertaining to maritime history for 35 years. By this time I’ve accumulated an excellent working library, and I take great pride in it.”

Images courtesy of Ten Pound Books Company | www.tenpound.com  

Print collectors in the Denver area will be interested to know that Christopher Lane, “Antiques Roadshow” appraiser and co-owner of The Philadelphia Print Shop (www.philaprintshop.com) – located, not surprisingly, in the City of Brotherly Love – will soon be spreading the love of prints to the Denver area: “My wife got offered a great job at Denver Children’s Hospital, so off we are going to the Mile High City! My partner (Don Cresswell) and I decided this would be a great opportunity to expand our business, so I am going to open a shop in the Cherry Creek section of Denver. I am moving out in September and the shop should be open sometime in October.” Chris told me that The Philadelphia Print Shop (West) will have carry the same material as the original shop as well as share the same Web site but that the Denver shop will focus on western images. “I will also probably start to pick up some antique shows in the western part of the county and am going to be exhibiting at The San Francisco Fall Antiques Show (www.sffas.org) on Oct. 28–31. A whole new adventure!” he added.

Images courtesy of the Philadelphia Print Shop | www.philaprintshop.com

See Christopher Lane on "Antiques Roadshow" (Las Vegas) on Mon., Aug. 2, on your local PBS station! And watch for his upcoming "What the Experts Collect" profile here on AmeriCollector.com!

Football fans will be drawn to 1960 Don Meredith game-worn Dallas Cowboys rookie helmet (now at $3,000; estimated to get $10,000+). “Any game worn gear from the first Cowboys season would carry tremendous collecting importance,” says Chris Ivey, director of Heritage Auction Galleries’ Sports Collectibles division. “It’s just the icing on the cake that (this helmet) happens to come from the locker of one of the greatest Cowboys of all.”

Some other choice lots that made my mouth water: a “Wahoo” Sam Crawford game-used baseball bat with a 1913 fountain-pen inscription from the Detroit Tigers outfielder to a collector (now at $15,000, estimated to get $50,000+); Ken Norton’s 1973 North American Boxing Federation heavyweight championship belt ,awarded for his victory over Muhammad Ali (now at $11,000; estimated to get $40,000+); and, speaking of The Greatest, a 1960 handwritten letter signed “Your Fighting Friend, Cassius Clay, U.S. Champ” written while the 18-year-old legend-in-the-making was training for the Rome Olympics (the return address on the mailing envelope, which is included and is also handwritten by Clay/Ali, says: “Cassius M. Clay, c/o Special Service, U.S. Olympic Boxing team, Building 5434, Fort Dix, N.J.”; now at $6,000; expected to fetch $10,000+).

The auction ends Thurs., Aug. 5.

Images courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries | www.ha.com

Check out the newly updated AmeriCollector.com Collector’s Calendar by clicking on “Calendar” (above), where you’ll find events of interest through December 2010 in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, California, Arizona and Nevada. It’s a work in progress: We’ll be adding more events to these lists as well as events in other states (we’re working our way eastward), plus a slew of online auctions. Keep watching for new listings in the weeks and months ahead!

(If this sounds a little macabre, I note that on the rare occasion when an original Daguerreotype image of Edgar Allan Poe is unearthed, it looks LITERALLY dug up, with the actual image deteriorating – as if poor Edgar literally lived with one foot in the grave; as if the lonely lover of dead Lenore and Annabel Lee and maybe Norma Jean suddenly gave up and decayed like a real-life Dorian Gray or a dejected Gomez Addams, who he actually resembled.)

Of course, this may not seem “cool” or aesthetically pleasing or even very nice to many people. And frankly, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything pleasant or romantic or uplifting about death and dead people – certainly not people who went before their time and most especially not dead children (who, in the 19th century, were sometimes posed and photographed posthumously as if still alive before being consigned to their graves) or soldiers sent to war for spurious reasons by self-serving old men, as has happened a time or two in history.

No: Notwithstanding the recent spate of young-love vampire films and the nice Goth kids at the local Hot Topic who dress completely in black, death is not the “cool” that the title of this post refers to.

What I mean is that there is something magical and – depending on the photographer’s level of talent – wonderfully artistic and revealing about old portrait photos. They are glimpses of people from an earlier time that we in the Internet Age can relate to more intimately than paintings, which are completely interpretive. After all, the lens lies less than the brush.

To see what I mean, check out some of the really good Web sites selling vintage photos, like J. Cosmas Vintage Photography (www.JCosmas.com), A Glimpse of Americana (www.AGlimpse.com), Jeffrey Kraus Antique Photographica (www.antiquephotographics.com), Remains to Be Seen (www.RemainsToBeSeen.com) and KaufmaNelson Vintage Photographs (www.KaufmaNelson.com). Professional photograph dealers routinely sift through thousands of unexceptional photos to offer what they consider to be the most humorous, moving, artistic or important images.

Or go to eBay and type “carte de visite” or “cabinet card” in the search box. (The carte de visite – French for “calling card” – was a common 19th-century business-card-size format consisting of a photo pasted on a cardboard photographer’s mount; cabinet card photos are larger, about 4.5 by 6 inches, and there are larger formats as well.) Compare the way the various images are set up, the way the subjects (including dogs!) are posed, the depth of the tones, the way props (guns, parasols, rowboats) are used. If you’re like me, the more you look at vintage photos, the more you eager are to find one that really resonates with you. And if you collect in a particular area, like baseball or bicycles or even DOGS – or if you’re interested in a specific country or state or town (photographers generally put their names and locations on their mounts) – add that to the subject box and see what comes up.

You may find a small, very affordable work of art by an obscure photographer that really speaks to you from over a century ago.
Now THAT’S history …

All images courtesy of J. Cosmas Vintage Photography, www.JCosmas.com

In case you haven’t yet recharged your memory with a morning Doubleshot at that other Washington icon (the one with the, uh, mermaid), D. B. Cooper was the guy who hijacked a Boeing 727 on Nov. 24, 1971, claiming he had a bomb. In that much simpler era, D.B. demanded – and got – $200,000 in ransom money and some parachutes, then bailed out somewhere north of Portland, Ore. Little else is known, although in 1980 a kid goofing around on the northern bank of the Columbia River came across $5,880 of the ransom money in deteriorating $20 bills half buried in the mud; and in early 2008 some more kids found what turned out to be the aforementioned parachute near the little town of Amboy, Wash., which no doubt can use the tourists.

I’ve heard speculation that Dan Cooper (what he actually called himself) couldn’t have survived his escape, given the weather, his light clothing and his apparent lack of skydiving expertise, but the FBI – which ought to consider recruiting more little kids to do their fieldwork – thinks differently: In 2001, they managed to pull a DNA sample from the black necktie that Cooper left behind, enabling them to eliminate at least one suspect, and they’re still actively seeking information. Check out their Web page on Cooper by going to www.fbi.gov and typing “D. B. Cooper” in the search box. (And if you call in a hot tip to the feds, tell ’em AmeriCollector.com sent you, because we need the traffic too.)

Someone else thinks Cooper made it out of the woods alive – and even got a sex change! In their book “D. B. Cooper: Death by Natural Causes,” Western Washington residents Patricia and Ron Forman recount how they befriended a woman who claimed to be the hijacker – a disgruntled pilot in her pre-transgendered life, she said. Sounds just like a John Waters film, right? The authors thought so, too, at first – but on digging deeper into their friend’s tale, they began to believe that it might not be as cockamamie as all that. Certainly, the OTHER Washington is full of people in elected positions with weirder résumés.

We’ll report further on this, you can be sure. Meanwhile, the Formans have a Web site with plenty of food for thought, where you can order a copy of the book autographed (by the Formans, not D. B. Cooper) if an unsigned copy from Amazon won’t do: Visit www.legendofdbcooper.com.

By the way, fellow collectors, you’ll be interested to know that those rotting twenties from Cooper’s loot were auctioned off by Heritage Auctions in Dallas in June 2008, with hammer prices going as high as $6,572. (A 1 x 1.3-inch fragment of a bill actually went for $358.50.) Talk about a high interest rate!

Photos courtesy of the FBI.

Of course, the writers of school textbooks tend to take a “macro” view of history, concentrating on wars and revolutions, sweeping social movements and worldwide economic changes, rather than how average people live their lives. That’s to be expected, given curriculum requirements and limited class time. And while it’s understandable that many collectors also focus on famous people and the events and trends they’re associated with, I think it’s good to remember that history’s “movers and shakers,” just like the rest of us, all come from someplace small – a neighborhood, a town, a city, a district – where regular folks work and play, go to school and go off to war, raise food and raise families … That’s all part of history too.

For this reason, I think “local” and “regional” collectors, like local and regional museums, perform a really important service: Because of their focus, their “micro” approach to collecting, they preserve artifacts of their areas' heritage that might otherwise be lost. Call them grassroots chroniclers or hometown Homers, to me it’s the local librarians, researchers, archivists, museum curators and, yes, collectors who do some of the most vital work in saving our history.

One such person is Marc Blau. Born and raised in Tacoma’s North End, Marc is a graduate of Stadium High School and the University of Washington (where he earned a B.A. in recreational planning and administration) who worked for Pierce County Parks & Recreation for 31 years (retiring in 2004), managed Sprinker Recreation Center and the Lakewood Community Center and is now a sales associate for Winning Seasons, a screen print and embroidery business in Lakewood.

But that’s not all: A sports enthusiast par excellence (French for “big-time”), Marc has long served on the Tacoma Athletic Commission (www.TacomaAthletic.com), which includes chairing the Tacoma–Pierce County Sports Hall of Fame; he’s co-founder and president of the Shanaman Sports Museum of Tacoma–Pierce County (www.TacomaSportsMuseum.com), located inside Tacoma Dome; he’s MC and co-chair of the Tacoma–Pierce County Baseball-Softball Oldtimers Association (www.OldtimerBaseball.com); and he’s assistant executive director of the State of Washington Sports Hall of Fame (www.WashingtonSportsHOF.com).

But wait: There’s more! Marc also co-authored (with Caroline Gallacci and Doug McArthur) a FANTASTIC 512-page hardcover book, “Playground to the Pros: An Illustrated History of Sports in Tacoma–Pierce County” (University of Washington Press, 2005), an unforgettable look at some 40 different sports played in the county: football, baseball, basketball and hockey, to be sure, but also boxing, bowling and golf, auto racing, boat racing, horse racing – even horseshoes and soapbox derbies. It’s jam-packed with great photos, and I guarantee that if you leave it in place sight when your friends are around, they are going to be all over it.

As you have probably guessed, Marc is collector of Tacoma and Pierce County sports memorabilia in addition to being a bona fide historian – my favorite kind of collector. Here’s what he told me about his interests:

AmeriCollector: How did you get started?

Marc: I started collecting back in 1984 when I came across some of my Bank of Washington cards of the Tacoma Giants and thought it would be fun to track down some other items related to the Giants, such as a T-Giants bobbin’ head doll and some old programs. I started tracking down former players, batboys, announcers, front office staff and ushers and things just mushroomed. I decided to collect all Tacoma-related items from their Pacific Coast League days and then started going backwards and learning more about when the Tacoma Tigers played in the Western International League from 1937 to 1951. Pretty soon I was tracking down photos and other artifacts back to the late 1880s. And then I started progressing into just about any sport in Tacoma–Pierce County. That is what led to the Sports Museum, which is located at the Tacoma Dome. My collection includes uniforms, stadium seats, autographed baseballs, bats, caps, jackets, trophies, tickets, schedules and much more. I do enjoy occasional items related to the San Francisco Giants and Pacific Coast League teams prior to 1958.

AC: What do you enjoy about collecting Pierce County sports-related items? How do you build your collection?

Marc: I enjoy the stories behind the artifacts, so most of what I have has come from players or family members, and there is a story behind each item. I used to attend shows, but no longer, and I rarely visit shops. I do participate in auctions on an occasional basis, but most of what I find is through friends, networking relationships and dumb luck.

AC: Is there a “holy grail” that you’re trying to find?

Marc: That’s pretty easy: a 1960s grey flannel Tacoma Giants jersey with “Tacoma” emblazoned across the front.

AC: What would you say is the highlight of your collection?

Marc: When the Phoenix Giants moved to Tacoma in 1960 and the Tacoma Giants played from 1960 to 1965, I became a diehard Giants fan and Dusty Rhodes was my hero. He hit something like 26 home runs in 1961 when the Giants won the PCL pennant, and I thought Dusty was destined to make the jump the following season to the big leagues. Heck, how was I to know, as a 10-year-old, that he was on his way DOWN, not UP, and that he had already enjoyed his glory days in the major leagues and World Series?

When I starting collecting, I was bound and determined to meet Dusty and I was fortunate enough to track him down in Boca Raton, Fla. I wrote him a letter and one night at the dinner table I got a call and the guy on the other end said, with a southern drawl, “Hi, Marc, this is Dusty!” It took me a few seconds to figure out who in the heck Dusty was. We had a great conversation and continued to keep in touch.

When Dusty moved to Henderson, Nev., we made a point of going to Las Vegas so I called and asked him if we could meet up. He was more than gracious about doing so, and when he walked in the Mirage Hotel I recognized him immediately. We spent two hours talking (well, he talked and I listened), and he was a heck of a storyteller. I was in heaven and got him to sign a few things for me, and then I gave him some photos and programs to keep from when he played in Tacoma. And, of course, I had a photo taken. I have my Dusty Rhodes bat on my Polo Grounds seat with a New York Giants jersey draped over it – a reminder of his glory years with the Giants.

Not many people can say they actually got to meet their hero? I count myself as one of the lucky ones.

AC: Any advice for other collectors of sports memorabilia?

Marc: Have fun, don’t be obsessed and don’t collect for investment purposes. Not everyone will agree with that assessment, but that is my personal mantra.

Images courtesy of Marc Blau.

Still agonizing over what to get Dad for Father’s Day?"Playgrounds To The Pros: An Illustrated History Of Sports In Tacoma-Pierce County" makes a great gift! Order it from Amazon.com for $39.95 or from the Shanaman Sports Museum for $46, which includes shipping and helps support the museum – a great place to visit for sports buffs. To purchase, go to www.tacomasportsmuseum.com and click on “Playground to the Pros” at the top.

Jack Johnson at least got a good film drama made about him (“The Great White Hope,” 1970, starring a pre–Darth Vader James Earl Jones) and a terrific Ken Burns documentary, “Unforgivable Blackness,” which first aired on PBS in 2005. Johnson successfully challenged a white boxing establishment that resisted letting a black man contend for a world title; in that sense, he was not only a seemingly unbeatable fighter and a sports “original” but something of a marketing master. However, there was at least one other black fighter who might have defeated Johnson and all other titleholders but never got the chance.

That fighter was Sam Langford (1886–1956), originally from small-town Nova Scotia, but he relocated to Boston to embark on a pugilistic career. He is the subject of the biography, “Sam Langford: Boxing's Greatest Uncrowned Champion” by local author Clay Moyle of Edgewood, Wash.

A boxing scholar and dealer in vintage books on boxing, Moyle is the right guy to rescue Langford from the oblivion that the fighter sank into during his own lifetime. Between 1902 and 1926, Langford fought some 304 bouts, winning 202 (130 by knockouts), losing 47 (nine by KOs) and drawing in 45. Both Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey were loath to get in the ring with him, but Langford’s inability to get a title shot condemned him to the obscurity of those who “coulda been a contender”: In 1944, he was discovered living, blind and penniless, in a fleabag hotel in Harlem. Asked how he could remain upbeat, Langford said he had his guitar … and his memories.

I really love it when someone with expertise and passion makes it his mission to right a historical injustice, and in my opinion that’s exactly what Clay Moyle has done. In writing “Sam Langford,” Moyle has recovered a lost body of knowledge and rescued a piece of our history. His book is a model for all serious collectors, whatever their fields. Order it from Amazon.com or signed by the author from www.prizefightingbooks.com.

Below, center and right: Sam Langford versus Iron Hague in England in 1909. Images courtesy of Clay Moyle.

Trow is featured on the Discovery Channel program “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed,” which I saw in December; the show is based on Trow’s book “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, 2009; distributed in the U.S. by Casemate Publishing), which I have just finished and also recommend. Here’s why …

Students of philosophy know the concept of “Occam’s razor”: Named for the medieval English Franciscan friar William of Occam, the “razor” – designed to cut through baloney in any era – is defined by our friends at Merriam-Webster as “a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.” Put more simply: Don’t reach for a complicated answer to a problem when there’s a simpler explanation available; or, as medical school students have been taught for generations: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

In “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer,” Mei Trow has done just that: waded into the morass of Ripper lore – rife with and blind alleys and “red herrings” (a favorite term among the Ripperologists, I note) – and come up with a logical suspect for the murders who was, unfortunately, written off as a mental incompetent and subsequently ignored at the outset of the original investigation.

That man was Robert Mann, a workhouse inmate who not only lived in the very part of London where most of the murders occurred but was employed as an attendant in the mortuary that served that area of the metropolis: Therefore, as a matter of procedure, Ripper’s gruesome handiwork would be brought to Mann’s workplace for forensic medical examination. Mann was not a doctor – far from it: His job was to unlock the morgue and take receipt of the bodies that the police brought in at all hours of the day and night. Like the eponymous Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, Fritz, in the original 1931 film, he would have done the heavy lifting for the investigating physician: washed the corpses, helped hoist them onto and off the slab, held the specimen jars waiting to be filled, cleaned up the mess afterward … In that capacity, he would also have observed trained surgeons at work, incidentally gaining some anatomical knowledge. And he would have had ready access to sharp instruments.

Mann would also have been called to the stand at inquests. This struck me as odd, and I asked Trow about it in my original interview last year on AmeriCollector.com (“The Ripper reexamined,” Dec. 30, 2009): Would his responsibilities in a mortuary gone beyond moving corpses around and cleaning up? Trow replied: “We know … that he was trusted to go out of the workhouse to collect corpses, so he is not merely ‘moving bodies around’ in the confines of his own mortuary. Anyone connected with the deceased, from relatives and friends to any eyewitnesses, the police and auxiliary staff (e.g., Mann), would be called to an inquest as a matter of routine.” In fact, Mann was called to testify at the first two Ripper inquests but was written off as disoriented and incoherent and therefore an unreliable witness.

In other words, while Londoners lived in fear of – and London’s finest frantically searched for – a babbling maniac (the “disorganized killer” of modern police parlance), the authorities actually dismissed the very first babbling maniac they encountered: one who could look forward to being physically close to his victims again and again and again.

Certainly, with over a century of criminological advances to draw on – including the relatively recent observation that serial murderers operate close to where they live and/or work – Trow can take the long view of the Whitechapel murders in identifying Mann as the killer, which he admits may never be proven conclusively. Nonetheless, the Ripperological community is a meticulous one: While police blunders are often cited, it’s interesting to note not only that no one has proposed Mann as a possible perp till now – I mean, why not check out EVERYONE with a tangible connection to the crimes, instead of Freemasons and Queen Victoria’s nephew? – but that Ripper investigators through the years have suffered from the same nearsightedness as Jack’s contemporary pursuers. It took Trow, wielding Occam’s discerning blade, to finger Mann as a geographically logical choice; as someone who would know bureaucratic procedure well enough to anticipate reunions with his victims in his morgue; and who would benefit, intentionally or not, by acting naturally when investigators shined their light on him, earning him his “REJECTED” stamp early on and enabling him to “hide in plain sight” from then on.

It’s not a novel concept, only one that’s newly and elegantly applied to the world’s most enduring murder mystery. Trow himself noted in our December interview that “the idea of a disturbed mortuary attendant first surfaced in the profiling carried on in 1988 by John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.” He also recounts in “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” how David Canter, author of “Mapping Murder: The Secrets of Geographical Profiling” (Virgin Books), once submitted a screenplay to a film company “in which the offender was as banal as his motive”: “It was turned down, said the company, because ‘the audience would feel cheated by such a denouement. They would want to learn that it was all even more complicated than they could have imagined, not less so.’ And so it is with Jack. This does an appalling disservice to the truth. Murder is very rarely exotic and conspiratorial; the only thing that is bizarre about serial killers is the crimes they commit. Everything else IS ordinary” (emphasis in the original).

Historians – and, I think, collectors as hobbyists and as “history detectives” – can greatly benefit from the levelheadedness of Trow’s work. You may not agree with his conclusion that Robert Mann was responsible for the “ ’orrible murders” in London in 1888 and possibly a couple more in 1889, but you’ll learn a thing or two from his mind-set and methodology, such as trying to get into another person’s frame of mind, accepting that people are usually guided by commonplace motives and, certainly, that they often make simple yet enduring mistakes. Fiddle with the key words in an eBay search, or type in common misspellings for a personal name, and you may well be rewarded with an item that other people miss; imagine where a folder may “logically” be misfiled and you may unearth information that has been long lost to other researchers.

This is a good, fast read that, thankfully, forgoes the usual lurid police photographs of the victims, which are on any number of Web sites anyway. Give “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” a try, and mind those hoofbeats …

Photos from “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” courtesy of M. J. Trow

Have you read "Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer"? We welcome your impressions of Mei Trow's book. Please post here or send them, along with a line or two about yourself, to LetsCollect@AmeriCollector.com.

JACK THE RIPPER: QUEST FOR A KILLER

“Once again we saw very spirited bidding for fresh, high-quality material,” says Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Autographs, located in Stamford, Conn. “Collectors and investors never really left the autograph market – on the contrary, they see better material as a good investment and a potential hedge against inflation, and as a result, we’re seeing prices that at times exceeded our estimates be a factor of five or ten times.”

I’m not one to recommend collecting as an investment: As Elyse Luray of “History Detectives” says (AmeriCollector.com, Jan. 27), “BUY WHAT YOU LOVE – hands down, buy what you love.” But there is buying dumb and buying smart, for as Elyse also points out: “BUY GOOD … I hate to tell to buy things for value, but if you do ever need to sell your collection or want to sell your collection, you want to have things in it that are actually the best of the best. If you can’t afford to do that in the beginning, then ‘buy up’: Buy what you can afford and then trade it when you can get to the next better piece.”

I myself have won several lots in Alexander Autographs’ past few auctions, including two in the last one, and each time I felt I got great value – which is why I recommended checking them out. While I encountered a couple of glitches with the live bidding part of the recent auction – for example, it wasn’t clear to me that live bidding, which was handled by Artnet, required separate registration (on the other hand, I was approved in less than an hour while the auction was already in progress); and one of my live bids was inexplicably “withdrawn” and I had to reenter it (I won the item in the end) – others apparently were apparently as eager to bid as I was and hopefully got similar happy results.

Here are some of them:

• A letter by Abraham Lincoln to the secretary of the Navy confirming an appointment to the Naval Academy sold for $28,000.
• A large autographed photo of General George Patton took in $6,000.
• A signed photo in silver presentation frame from Adolf Hitler to General Gerd von Rundstedt went for $55,000.
• A written wartime bet between Dwight Eisenhower and British general Bernard Montgomery (signed by both) over the date Germany would surrender fetched $26,000.
• The signed contract I described on Jan. 19 in which Michael Jackson transferred his rights to “We Are the World” sold for $14,000.
• A biography of Albert Einstein signed by him got $4,750.
• A George Gershwin letter with a quote from “Rhapsody in Blue” made $8,000.
• A menu signed by Walt Disney hammered at $1,900.

Watch AmeriCollector.com for news of Alexander Autographs’ next auction, or visit their Web site: (www.AlexAutographs.com).

Part I of Alexander Autographs Auction: www.americollector.com/alexander-autographs/

Image courtesy of Alexander Autographs.

Your comments are always welcome and appreciated.

Chinese workers were instrumental in the construction of the nation’s transcontinental railroads in the 1860s and ’70s. By the early 1880s, however, the major railroad lines were nearing completion, and Chinese laborers were moving to the cities of the West to find other work, according to Ed Echtle, a Pacific Northwest historian specializing in Asian immigration. As other immigrant groups arrived from Europe, the competition for labor intensified. Unions began to organize unskilled workers and tapped into their aversion to the Chinese.

Anti-Chinese discrimination became federal policy in 1882 when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. immigration law designed to bar a specific nationality.

The Chinese became kind of a scapegoat for low wages because they were charged with working for less, undercutting white labor,” Echtle said. “And then in the 1880s there was an economic downturn, which sort of exacerbated things, so that the Exclusion Act was a political response to the pressure from constituents to ban unskilled Chinese labor from coming in to compete with white labor.

Yet, it was not all about labor and wages: Newspapers at the time alluded to foreign heathenism, to rats and squalor in the Chinese sections of towns, to foul smells that nauseated patrons at neighboring white businesses, to opium use and prostitution. A spark was being struck, and many Tacomans – from underemployed railroad and mill workers to smug storekeepers and social-climbing politicos – were eager to grab torches.

On Sept. 28, at an anti-Chinese rally in Seattle, it was resolved that the Chinese had to get out of Washington Territory by Nov. 1, and white-owned businesses were called upon to dismiss their Chinese employees. In Tacoma, where only a few people (Washington pioneer Ezra Meeker was one) spoke out against the agitators or defied their demands to fire their Chinese workers, about 450 Chinese boarded trains or ships or left by other means; the remaining 200 were marched out to Lake View on Nov 4. Historian Murray Morgan in his book “Puget’s Sound” described the procession: “Teamsters cracked their whips, the wagons lurched forward. The elderly and the sick Chinese were permitted to ride. The rest trudged after the wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold rain, duffle slung on poles over their shoulders or in laundry bags on their backs. Their sandals sucked mud; some took them off and went barefoot. Many were crying. Armed whites on horseback rode beside the refugees, herding them like cattle, and a guard of club-carrying whites brought up the rear, urging on the stragglers.”

They spent a miserable night, some in the station waiting room, where there was a single stove, others in freight sheds. According to Jules Alexander Karlin in a 1954 article in Pacific Historical Review the Chinese would maintain that the ordeal drove one woman, a merchant’s wife, insane, and that two of their number later died from their prolonged exposure to the weather.

Two days later, arsonists set fire to the vacated Chinese shops and dwellings of Little Canton. Tacoma’s Chinese community was effectively erased.

* * * * *

Tacoma was by no means the only American city to evict its Chinese residents; in fact, as University of Delaware professor Jean Pfaelzer reveals in her book “Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans” (hardcover published by Random House in 2007; paperback published by University of California Press in 2008), there were nearly 200 expulsions of Chinese populations from American communities in the American West and Northwest from the early 1850s to 1906.

White Protestant nativists – as well as immigrants whom the nativists vilified – were vocal in their objections to Chinese living in their midst, even as the latter were helping to build the railroads, working as launderers and domestics and laboring in mines, in canneries, in logging camps and on ranches. Notes Pfaelzer, “The white man’s racial rhetoric was, in fact, about himself: the Chinese worked too many hours; the Chinese worker was drugged on opium; the Chinese worker was slovenly; the Chinese debased the town and created the need for civic jobs; the Chinese ate rats; the Chinese were renters; the Chinese lived in overcrowded housing; the Chinese demanded the right to own property; the Chinese were expected to send scarce money back to their homeland. The Chinese were also derided as “sojourners,” people with unbreakable ties with their empire across the ocean and incapable of assimilating and becoming good, loyal American citizens – even if white Americans would have them. The assaults on life, liberty and property that resulted from this mind-set ranged from the spontaneous to the systematic: from armed gangs of resentful white prospectors evicting their Chinese counterparts from the California gold fields, to average citizens joining in boycotts to deprive their resident “celestials” of their livelihoods.

For example, in Eureka, Calif., in early 1885, an unfortunate incident in which a city councilman was shot to death during a dispute between two Chinese turned into an excuse for vigilantes to round up more than 300 Chinese residents, imprison them in warehouses, then force them onto ships bound for San Francisco. The eviction conducted in Washington Territory in November of that year would follow Eureka’s model.

By contrast, in late 1885 and early 1886, the white citizens of Truckee, Calif., sought a more peaceful means of expulsion by boycotting Chinese businesses and those that employed Chinese workers. Never mind the fact that Truckee’s Chinese were “renters, shoppers, and low-paid laborers, and white agents made money from their legal, real estate, and commercial transactions,” and that “seemingly, this interracial relationship benefited everyone,” writes Pfaelzer: The so-called Truckee Method, while slower than the Eureka Method, achieved the same goal.

Pfaelzer’s scholarship is exemplary, not just because it reveals that expulsions of Chinese were common exercises in ethnic cleansing – rather than just a few isolated incidents – in small towns and large over a period of more than 50 years, but because most of this information was there all along for the sifting, in newspaper accounts and public documents. No newly uncovered treasure trove of documents, no long-buried diaries suddenly brought to light: Rather, Pfaelzer took what others missed and added an essential and long-overdue chapter to our nation’s past.

But Pfaelzer gives us much more than a litany of shameful events: She shows that beleaguered Chinese were willing to stand up for themselves by using the legal system to sue for reparations, by testifying to the injustices that they were subjected to, by striking for fair wages and refusing to supply goods to hostile businesses – even purchasing arms to defend their homes and their lives. Certainly, the Chinese understood the rights and duties that American citizenship entailed; what they were denied was the paperwork that would give them that legal status.

Purchase Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans

The first time I ever visited Seattle, in 1992, I went into a T-shirt shop to buy souvenirs and struck up a conversation with the salesgirl and another customer, both Puget Sound natives. Being from out of the area, I asked what Washington State was like, and for some reason the conversation drifted to serial killers: The salesgirl, I think, remarked that (at that time) Washington had an estimated higher percentage of them than any of the other 49 states. When I asked why, the other customer cited factors that seemed to conducive to multiple murderers: the rain, the many heavily wooded, unpopulated areas … and the belief that it’s more “socially acceptable” to be a loner in the Northwest than elsewhere.

But I didn’t mean to cast a pall on your day: This blog is not about crime. However, I can’t help but think the above observation helps explain another scary (sort of) Northwest phenomenon: that large, hairy walking cliché we know as Bigfoot, Sasquatch (from a Salishan term for “wild man”) and Skookum (another Salishan term, translated as “mountain giant” or “mountain devil” – although in the Chinook language it can be an adjective with such nice connotations as “big,” “strong,” “dependable” and “hardworking,” like Mr. Clean or Fess Parker, star of the TV series “Davy Crockett”).

It’s easy for us world-weary twenty-first-century Internet travelers to call the Sasquatch stories a lot of bunkum (NOT a Salishan word), although the Indian legends may go back millennia, and reported sightings by white people – starting with fur traders in British Columbia in the 1880s – are certainly reliable if it could ever be proven that the eyewitnesses weren’t drunk and/or lonesome and in need of companionship, if you know what I mean.

Or maybe that’s the key: I note that two of the more prominent Sasquatch Web sites – the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, or BFRO (www.bfro.net), and the Seattle-based Sasquatch Information Society (www.bigfootinfo.org) – both report a preponderance of the nation’s “sightings" having been made in Washington State (most of which involve just footprints, says the Sasquatch Information Society, with the notation “Record has not been validated or is being studied”), and a plurality of those occurring (in descending order) in Skamania, Pierce, King, Snohomish and Lewis counties. In fact, only last August, according to the BFRO, a King County man reported seeing a “large, hair-covered figure while riding on train near the Cascade Tunnel.”

August, of course, was the month that the Washington State Liquor Control Board hiked the price of booze 6.5 percent, so clearly someone got a few shots in before last call. Expect a hell of a lot more sightings once the state legalizes pot.

And yet, goofiness aside, look what happened with Roswell and so many other cockamamie UFO sightings: Those people all insisted they KNEW what they had witnessed, with the conspiracy theorists among them asserting that the government was covering up close encounters of the third kind (not just Jack Kennedy’s and Bill Clinton’s). Meanwhile, the more cynical among us – including myself, standing uncomfortably alongside conspiracy theorists on the other end of the spectrum – were convinced that there was nothing extraterrestrial about flying saucers. We WERE still fighting the Cold War, weren’t we? No doubt, the Pentagon was up to something – and covering it up, for obvious reasons...

We were ALL right, to a greater or lesser degree: Most of the documented sightings of flying saucers WERE real – they just weren’t alien craft – and the military DID have something under wraps all those years. Turns out, the Nazis had been experimenting with the aeronautical possibilities of flying discs and flying wings for some time. In the spring of 1945, as the Third Reich crashed and burned, U.S. forces captured as many eager German weapons scientists and as much of their research as possible before the Soviets could; then OUR scientists picked up the ball – or the Frisbee, in this case – and ran with it for a few decades. (Behold: the Stealth bomber.)

Getting back to Bigfoot: Did the hunters and trappers and trekkers and picnickers really stumble across the spirits of Native American lore in those dripping Northwest forests – or were they the spirits in a bottle of backwoods hooch, the bugbears of white people with overactive imaginations and too much free time? Were they sightings of true biological missing links – a human subspecies that refused to go extinct – or of some ageing hippies who missed the exit to Olympia and decided to homestead in the woods? And is the correct plural “Bigfeet”?

We may never know for sure, but anyone with a passing interest in huge unidentified bipeds will surely find the new exhibit “Giants in the Mountains: The Search for Sasquatch” at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma (Jan. 23 to June 27) intriguing, entertaining and educational. Taking a broad look at “the Sasquatch phenomenon” (per the museum press release), “Giants in the Mountains” draws on all the various aspects of the subject – the legends, the sightings, the hoaxes and the legitimate scientific research – and includes visuals ranging from Native American artifacts to contemporary artistic depictions to physical evidence collected by the late anthropologist Dr. Grover Krantz and Idaho State University professor/Discovery Channel expert Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum.

I asked “Giants of the Mountains” curator Gwen Perkins, specialist for school and online programs at the Washington State History Museum, about the exhibit:

AmeriCollector: There was a Sasquatch exhibit at the State Capital Museum in Olympia a couple of years ago. Is this different?

Gwen Perkins: “Giants in the Mountains” is the same exhibit that was at the State Capital Museum. However, we have added new artifacts for the show, due to the increased space in Tacoma. Among some of the new things visitors will see will be more casts from Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, a “tree twist-off” and native masks from the collections of the Washington State Historical Society and the Burke Museum. We were also fortunate to be able to include illustrations by artist Rick Spears, illustrator for “Tales of the Cryptids.”

AC: Do you have a personal historical or anthropological interest in the Sasquatch legends and sightings? Did you volunteer to curate this exhibit?

Gwen: The exhibit itself was actually organized by the Washington State Historical Society, with myself as lead curator.

The idea of doing a Sasquatch exhibit was birthed after I had done a significant amount of research for one of our school programs here, in which a professional actor portrayed Dr. Grover Krantz and allowed students to ask him questions. Not long after that, the State Capital Museum in Olympia was trying to decide on a major exhibit for their museum. Sasquatch was suggested, due to the popularity of that presentation and staff members’ interest in the subject.

The exhibit premiered in Olympia in 2007. It did very well at that museum and so we wanted to bring it to Tacoma in order to give more people a chance to see it, examine what’s on display and draw their own conclusions. We’re all excited to see it back, particularly those of us who were involved in the original exhibit curation and programming. The Sasquatch community is a great group of people: One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about this subject is the opportunity to connect with visitors from across the nation.

The exhibit also coincides with another on display called “Icons of Washington History.” After all, what better icon of the Pacific Northwest can you think of than Sasquatch? (That’s my opinion, of course.) But one of the other points of the exhibit that I wanted visitors to understand is how far-reaching stories of Sasquatch really are, not only in terms of place but time as well. So while it’s seen as a regional story to many Washingtonians, the exhibit itself also explains that there have been stories and reported sightings of this being that go back hundreds of years.

AC: Does the exhibit lean toward belief or skepticism, or does it intend to present both sides of the subject and let the visitor decide?

Gwen: The exhibit does not take one point of view or another. We present the story of this being and leave it up to the visitor to draw their own conclusions.

AC: Have there been any recent sightings, and what individuals or agencies keep tabs on these?

Gwen: Sightings of Sasquatch are reported constantly and across the nation. One of the organizations most diligent in tracking these sightings is the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. They have a web site where they track sightings across the nation: As I type this, Washington has had 479 reported incidences since September of 2007. BFRO is just one of a number of groups that shares information. There are several websites and blogs devoted to Sasquatch: Cryptomundo (www.Cryptomundo.com), Bigfoot Times (www.BigfootTimes.net), Oregon Bigfoot (www.OregonBigfoot.com) and North American Bigfoot (www.NorthAmericanBigfoot.blogspot.com), just to name a couple. These groups aren’t all in the Northwest, either: One of the most active is located in Texas – the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservatory (www.TexasBigfoot.org).

AC: What do Native Americans of the Western Washington tribes think of the interest in Sasquatch? Are there any investigators/proponents among them?

Gwen: I think that you will find there is just as much diversity of opinion among the tribes as in any community as to whether or not Sasquatch exists but also as to which form this being takes. I have met some who are out there actively investigating Sasquatch but many more who perceive this being as part of the environment and the natural cycle of life. I have also met Native Americans who were not believers as well.

Decide for yourself. The Washington State History Museum is located at 1911 Pacific Ave., in downtown Tacoma, right off 1-5. Hours are Wed. to Fri. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (with extended hours and free admission every third Thursday from 2 to 8 p.m.); Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults; $7 for seniors (age 60 and above); and $6 for students and military with valid ID. Children (age 5 and below) and members are FREE. For more information, call (888) BE-THERE or visit www.WashingtonHistory.org.

Drawing by Rick Spears/Darby Creek Publishing and are from "Tales of the Cryptids" by Kelly Milner Halls. (Rick Spears)

Images courtesy of Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, author of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science

Washington State History Museum: Sasquatch Press Release

Purchase Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, by Dr. Jeffery Medlrum

All of this is good news for sellers, the needy and the greedy alike. For buyers, it means that great deals are going to get harder to find: If you’re actively building your collection – and who isn’t, at least in spirit? – this is the time to be vigilant.

In the coming months here on AmeriCollector.com, you can look forward to notices of auctions worth checking out both for the uniqueness of the lots and the chance to nab a fine item at a good price.

This week, have a look at the R & R Auction (www.rrauction.com) January autograph auction, which closes Wed., Jan. 13 (the 10-minute rule starts at 10 p.m. EST). The buyer’s premium is 20 percent, and there are both high- and low-end items and, as of this writing, plenty that have no opening bids (which usually start at $100). Here’s a sampling across the price range:

• A pretty unbelievable album of autographs collected by the wife of a major general in the Civil War, containing more than 200 signatures of 19th-century notables. The collection includes three presidents, officers on both Union and Confederate sides, statesmen, authors and other. Among them: Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Johnson, James A. Garfield, John C. Fremont, William T. Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, William S. Rosencrans, Carl Schurz, Daniel E. Sickles, Henry W. Slocum, Lew Wallace, P. G. T. Beauregard, Nathaniel P. Banks, Henry Ward Beecher, Salmon P. Chase, Schuyler Colfax, Horace Greeley, Edward Stanton, William H. Seward, “Billy” Sunday, Gideon Welles and Thaddeus Stevens. Now at $1,612; next bid $1,774.

• A copy of mobster Mickey Cohen’s autobiography “In My Own Words” with an autograph note to a collector tipped in. Cohen had been a prizefighter in an earlier life, and I think it ironic that his handwriting – like that of some other pugs, like Jack Dempsey in his younger years – has a loopy, schoolgirlish look. Who woulda thought it? Now at $100; next bid $110.

• A great Walt Disney signed typed letter, on his personal letterhead and dated Dec. 1, 1941, to Louis Desser, managing editor of the Hollywood Star-News. It talks about the newspaper’s good review of “Dumbo,” and Disney encloses payment for a three-year subscription for Spencer Tracy’s son, a private-school student. Now at $2,716; next bid $2,988.

• Various Charles Schulz signed items, from inscribed “Peanuts” books (bidding unopened at $100) to a hand-inked comic strip panel from 1971 featuring Snoopy at his typewriter (now $15,700; next bid $17,270).

• Seven pages of diagrams annotated by former Major League catcher/OSS agent Moe Berg and Swiss physicist Paul Scherrer detailing atomic chain reactions. Dated Dec. 26, 1944, this precedes the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan by eight months. An amazing piece of World War II and science history (now $888; next bid $977).

• Beautiful satin-finish 8x10 color photo Yankees sluggers Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, signed in blue felt-tip (now $862; next bid $949).

• Two signed 8x10 photos of Michael Jackson, one with him posing with a whole bunch of cops (both now at $267; next bid $294).

• A 1955 songbook titled “The Elvis Presley Album of Juke Box Favorites,” signed “Yours, Elvis Presley.” Some condition issues, but on the 75th anniversary of the King’s birth, it already has 19 bidders (now $1,952; next bid $2,148).

• A George Gershwin cancelled personal check for $25, dated Oct. 26, 1935 ($294; next bid $324).

• A black-and-white 11x14 portrait of star-crossed Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer, inscribed in fountain pen “To Fred, with all love and gratitude, Frances” (now $900; next bid $990).

A framed autograph, especially a photo, makes a great Valentine’s Day gift. Remember, you have to register to bid.

Photos courtesy of R&R Auctions, www.rrauction.com.