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April 15: a date that always reminds me of death, taxes, and collecting … and whether money owed to the IRS will put a crimp in the latter, at least in the short term.

Sometimes I find myself lying awake at 3 a.m., wondering about this collecting impulse in general and the next hot item I’ll be sniping on eBay in particular. Is it just me, getting weirder in my own head like Ted Kaczynski in his shack in the Montana woods?

When you get down to it, collecting is a solitary journey. Sure, you can go to lots of shows and auctions and events; join clubs and chat rooms and make friends; trade information and items; but at the end of the day, it’s everyone doing their own thing within the framework of their individual lives.

Certainly, collecting is an important part of my life. Sometimes I have to restrain myself, but for the most part I collect systematically, reasonably and within my budget; it does not threaten my marriage; I do not receive hate mail from creditors; my little ones do not whimper from hunger in the wee hours because I blew my paycheck in an online auction.

Still, I can’t help wondering sometimes: Am I nuts?

Then I consider the popularity of “Antiques Roadshow” and note the newest collector “reality” shows – many of them spin-offs or rip-offs of “Pawn Stars” – and realize: I may be crazy, but I am not alone. There’s “American Pickers,” “Oddities,” “Storage Wars,” Auction Kings, “Auction Queens,” “Hardcore Pawn,” “Mounted in Alaska” … Some of these are bound to fizzle out, but “Antiques Roadshow” is an enduring classic, and I’m pretty sure “Pawn Stars,” a personal favorite, is here to stay as long as Rick Harrison and Company care to keep it going.

What’s next, then: a show about a pawnshop on the Jersey Shore run by “guidos” with a special interest in taxidermy?

Nope: It’s a return to basics, the logical next step after “Pawn Stars,” a show I never miss (see “Hardcore history: 6 Reasons I love ‘Pawn Stars’” in the Feb. 23 AmeriCollector). It’s called “American Restoration” (www.history.com/shows/american-restoration) and features the crew of Rick’s Restorations (www.ricksrestorations.com), a Las Vegas business headed by owner Rick Dale, one of the guys who the “Pawn Stars” folks routinely bring in to restore stuff for the shop. In that context, it means fixing up a damaged item to make it salable at a realistic price that will make the pawnshop a decent profit.

For me, this is one of the highlights of “Pawn Stars. That’s because, sooner or later, any serious collector of anything of real rarity and value or importance has to agonize over whether or not to purchase something with condition issues and have it restored (another thing I think about during bouts of insomnia). Do you pass on a one-of-a-kind item because it needs some TLC by a professional? Does the cost of repairs outweigh the rush of getting a treasure at a bargain-basement price? Is restoring the item at all going to compromise its integrity?

Rick’s Restorations specializes in “classic restoration,” which they define as “returning the classic object to its original state when it was new.” They point out the difference between “restoring” and “customizing”: “Customizing is to add or modify something that doesn’t make the object original anymore. To do a classic restoration, you must make sure that all of the parts being replaced are specific to the object you are restoring.”

I asked Rick some questions about his work. I expected some great answers, and I wasn’t disappointed …

AmeriCollector: Looking at your Web site, most stuff you routinely restore seems to be made partly or completely of metal, with or without moving parts, but not electronic: i.e., pre-1960 machines, appliances, non-wood or upholstered furniture, and toys. Is that accurate?

Rick: We restore everything that is made from metal, plastics, wood, upholstery, aluminum, fiberglass, composite, etc. We are up for any challenge! If it’s old we can restore it!

AC: How long have you been doing restoration work, and how did you get started?

Rick: I have been doing restoration since I was nine years old and I’m now 52. Ricks Restorations has been in business since 1982.

AC: What do you enjoy about restoring vintage items?

Rick: I enjoy the complexity of each piece: It feels like I was born in a different era. The smiles the customer gives me when he or she see the item when finished is pure joy and satisfaction in itself – and I make a living doing it! We are restoring history and memories all at the same time.

AC: You guys are obviously sticklers for historical accuracy: How do you get the colors and other details right when you restore items to as close to their original condition as possible?

Rick: When we tear down a project, there is always a clue in it that lets you know. If not, then the research begins on the Internet.

AC: How far do you go to fashion a part if you can’t find a usable original?

Rick: Most parts are available online somewhere or we buy a complete exact piece to replace parts. Last resort is to fabricate a part exactly.

AC: What kind of items do you especially enjoy working on?

Rick: I love restoring different mechanical items. The more complicated, the better! There is no challenge we can’t take on.

AC: What items pose the biggest challenge to you?

Rick: The biggest challenge is not breaking the item in the tear-down phase and making sure you don’t lose any parts. There is no instruction manual so reassembly can be difficult at times.

AC: What are some of the most interesting things you have restored?

Rick: The most interesting pieces we have done to date:

• a 1920s railroad train vacuum that has a mix of electrical motors and mechanics

• a 1940s coffee vending machine. There are more moving parts in this than a Swiss watch and it came from the first hotel built on the Vegas strip. You have got to see these episodes!

AC: On “Antiques Roadshow,” the Keno brothers always tell people not to restore old wooden furniture – that collectors like the “used” look – but a well-used Chippendale cabinet looks a lot better in your home than a rusted Coca-Cola vending machine. All the same, do you ever recommend NOT restoring something?

Rick: Sometimes . . . but it is truly up to the customer. We are restoring their memory. It’s not always about the money!

AC: I think I saw a “Pawn Stars” segment when you restored a soda vending machine to be used as a simple refrigerator, rather than a working dispenser. Do you often restore items to be used for somewhat different purposes than they were originally made?

Rick: Re-manufacturing something is always fun and challenging. You work with what you have because everyone has a different picture of what they want. It’s their happiness I want to provide.

AC: What do you yourself collect?

Rick: I collect nothing. With tens of thousands of pieces restored, I would need a city block to keep it all. After all, it’s a business!

“American Restoration” premieres Friday, April 15, on the History Channel: Check your local listings … and let us know what you think!

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Images and video courtesy of History Channel Press.

1. They’re current – and they’re hip.

2. They feature interesting stuff with broad appeal – but it’s still a “guy” show. Loyal watchers of “Antiques Roadshow” know the drill: Each hour-long program features one or two pieces of furniture, a painting, a couple of ceramic or glass pieces (often Asian), a sports item or firearm, some jewelry, a toy or doll and something distinctly American, like an NRA or War Bonds poster, plus odd item that may not fit into any category. Personally, I’m not fascinated by jewelry, dolls or ceramics – but that’s just me. The “Pawn Stars” guys tend to focus on the stuff that I personally find more exciting, even if I don’t collect it: antique weapons and militaria, motorcycles, pinball and slot machines, old lunch boxes …

There are good reasons for this, of course: Part of it is the personality of the “Pawn Stars” folks, Rick Harrison, “Old Man” (Richard Harrison, Rick’s dad) and Big Hoss (Rick’s son Corey). These guys run Gold & Silver Pawn Shop (also called Gold & Silver Coin Shop, www.GSPawn.com), a working 24-hour pawnshop in Las Vegas, with comic relief from Chumlee (Austin Russell, Big Hoss’ boyhood buddy).The Harrisons have a much better chance of selling a Kentucky long rifle than a stack of old issues of Vanity Fair or Playgirl. And while I don’t know the demographics, I suspect the viewership of “Pawn Stars” is mostly male as well.

It also comes down to numbers. The “Roadshow” has a huge pool of folks bringing in their treasures and trash, in cities around the country, and an army of appraisers to pick out the more interesting stuff – and they aren’t shelling out their own money to buy any of it. “Pawn Stars” is set in a working pawnshop in Las Vegas: They have a much smaller staff; they feature only items that they have an interest in selling in the store; and you better believe an item has to tickle their interest or be an easy sell for them to make an offer.

That’s the business of collecting right there – the buying, the selling, the haggling – and that’s something that “Antiques Roadshow,” by its very G-rated non-commercial nature, can’t match.

3. They show the importance of doing your homework. “Antiques Roadshow” appraisers are experts in their fields: They know what things sell for and, if unsure about an item, they research it online or consult their colleagues before their segments are filmed and they give a price range. On the other hand, again, they are not there to buy what people bring in (although I don’t doubt that some people contact them after the show), and therefore they’re not supposed to be have an interest in the sale or purchase of what they appraise.

The “Pawn Stars” people do. Therefore, it’s not only prudent for them to call in experts to describe and appraise the higher-end stuff – especially things that require restoration – but it provides a little drama, a little education, some basis for negotiation. That makes for great TV. It is also a constant reminder to collectors and sellers alike that it pays to know your, well, stuff before you make an offer or accept one. DO YOUR RESEARCH!

4. They’re pretty up-front about how much an item is worth. When the “Pawn Stars” guys know something about an item, they can be pretty firm in their bargaining, especially if the item in question is not that unusual, not that expensive and/or not in great condition. That’s understandable: As the guys explain, they need to make a reasonable profit; display space is limited and they don’t want the thing sitting around; and if it needs some kind of restoration, well, that’s got to be figured in. However, sometimes they do go out on a limb a little and throw out an offer on something they aren’t sure about, either on a hunch or an impulse. God knows, I do …

(On occasion, Big Hoss has risked a bundle on, say, a Chris-Craft runabout in need of major restoration, but it usually worked out in the end, and he gets a lot shrewder with every new season of the show.)

When the guys DON’T know the value of a potentially rare, high-end or counterfeit item, they call in an expert – and this is what makes “Pawn Stars” great TV. Everything is laid on the table, once an expert prices a piece; it’s just a matter of whether Rick and company want to buy it, and if they can make a deal. That’s when Rick invariably has to explain to at least one dummy on every show that he can’t purchase an item at the retail price and sell it for a profit.

I’ve noticed that Rick generally offers somewhere between 50 and 70 percent for stuff that he wants, with the higher percentage for really cool stuff that he takes a fancy to and feels he can sell easily. Most collectibles dealers won’t settle for that percentage, let alone tell you what they expect to sell an item for: As I have said more than once in this column, even so-called respectable dealers will screw an unwitting seller to the wall in a New York nanosecond if they can, paying only a small fraction of what they will resell the item for. So I can’t help but laugh when some guy brings in an old flintlock pistol, for example, and wants $500 for it, and Rick brings in an expert who says it’s really worth $2,000, then the seller gets miffed when Rick won’t offer more than $1,200 for the gun. Talk about chutzpah!

5. The show features restoration as part of collecting. The collector’s mantra: “Condition, condition, condition!” It’s ideal to get an item in perfect or near-perfect shape; in fact, the trick is to get stuff in as close to its original, mint-new state as possible.

Unfortunately, life rarely shakes out that way. Sometimes unique or hard-to-get pieces need some professional TLC to transform them from flea-market trash or junkyard rats’ nests to highly prized collectibles, and the “Pawn Stars” guys are quick to get master restorers in on the act. In fact, one of the best “Pawn Stars” spin-offs or imitations that I’ve seen is “American Restoration,” which features one of the guys who restores the “Pawn Stars” purchases. To me, this is one of the best things about the show: seeing a rusty old clunker transformed into a Big Daddy Roth dream machine, with flaring chrome exhaust pipes and liquid-fire detailing. For these guys, restoration is a labor of love – and the results are spectacular!

6. They love history! OK, a visit (real or virtual) to a Vegas pawnshop may not be the same as a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian or the British Museum, but I’m one of the few people I know who has been to both (as well as CBGB), and I barely got past the front door in any of those places. In fact, all I can remember of the British Museum was some Egyptian statuary and the Reading Room, where Marx (Karl, not Groucho) wrote “Das Kapital.” (I also remember the open sewer that was the pissoir at CBGB – and even less about the Smithsonian.) In the case of the two museums, that is a lifelong regret: I just didn’t have the TIME to see more – another reason to be thankful for the Internet: A virtual tour is the next best thing to visiting a lot of places in person …

But I digress. My point is that “Pawn Stars” absolutely screams history, even if it’s pop cultural history. And if you manage to retain a stray fact or two from the segment on the colonial lottery ticket signed by George Washington, or the recent one about the metallurgy book owned by Isaac Newton, that’s worth more than all those hours in a junior high school history classroom from which you took away zilch.

The Harrisons LOVE history: These guys have a certain amount of charisma, but they are not actors; yet, you can see enthusiasm pouring off them – even the normally saturnine Old Man – whenever they talk about an item’s place in history and its possible importance. They may not offer much for the piece, but that fascination with the past – priceless!

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History Channel: Wheels of Fortune

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Images and video courtesy of History Channel Press.

Coming soon! 6 ideas for improving Pawn Stars

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.”

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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.

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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!

<p>Anyone who doesn’t believe that auction catalogs can be collector’s items themselves should check out Heritage Auctions Galleries’ (www.ha.com) 2010 August Signature Sports Auction catalog with a hologram cover image of one of the auction items: a large 1932 photo of Babe Ruth whispering something to an amused Lou Gehrig and signed by both (current bid at this writing, $25,000; expected to fetch $50,000+)! This is only one of 86 primo items from the world of sports that are being auctioned off in conjunction with the National Sports Collectors Convention (www.nsccshow.com) in Baltimore Aug. 6–8.</p>

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.

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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!

Ever seen a ghost? The next time you look at a 19th-century portrait photo, look real hard: You may feel closer to the vale than you ever thought you would. Maybe it’s the moody monochromatic tones, the frozen stares – seldom a smile in those days (at least, not for the camera) – the realization that the person looking back at you was captured in one fleeting instant and is now long dead and turned to dust. Maybe it’s the fact that 120-plus years ago, most people had harder day-to-day existences, with fewer conveniences, and generally didn’t live as long as we do now … something we too often take for granted.

(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 …

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Purchase Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans