One Card at a Time: November 2024 Pickups

In case you missed it, here were some of my favorite pickups from October. Now, onto November.

I recently wrote about picking up the final two cards for my N28 Allen & Ginter Champions set, Cap Anson and King Kelly, here. Those pickups came this month, but before I could my list down to two, I needed to grab an Annie Oakley, which was the third card I needed to finish the set.

Oakley is pictured in this multi-sport set as a rifle shooter. Even if many collectors would classify this as a non-sports card, Oakley’s card is one of the more valuable non-baseball subjects in the entire set. Along with Buffalo Bill’s card, her card is priced as if it were a baseball card.

Anson and Kelly finished off my N28 set but finally picking up an Oakley was very important as well. I’d seen several of her cards available this year with most overpriced. This one was reasonable, based on what they often sell for at auction so I was glad to get it by year’s end.

Speaking of non-sports, one of my favorite pickups in that category this month were these two variations of the Currier and Ives ‘A Crack Shot.’

I’d already had the version showing an Uncle Sam depiction with an American flag holding a rifle and smoking. That is the one more commonly seen. the one I purchased was an upgrade over the card I already had.

The less common version pictures practically the same image, minus the cigar. The only other real differences are all pretty small. The American flag stripes are slightly different. The ground is a bit different with a small plant or patch of brown grass shown in the cigarless card. The background, too, is slightly off. But in general, it’s the same card just without the blatant cigar smoking.

This was the first one I’d seen for sale since I learned of the card a few years ago and I was glad to buy it.

Like the Oakley card, another one bordering the sports and non-sports line is this card of famed aviator Wilbur Wright.

While I’m certainly a bit of a collector of Wright Brothers cards, this was a set that I knew little about — the 1914 or 1915 Cadbury’s Cocoa Inventors cards.

There’s good reason for that. The cards are very difficult to track down. Even on a site like eBay that offers most types of cards, there are few to be found.

Wright’s card would have been a bit of a tribute if this is truly a 1914 or 1915 issue as it is currently believed. He passed away in 1912 but that fact is left out of the biography on the back of his card, which only notes his achievements. Many sets reused biographies from previous ones and that could be the case here as it seems a bit strange to not mention his death.

I’m always a sucker for print errors and found two last month from non-sports gum card sets that fit the bill.

First is this card on the left for Admiral Harold Stark from the 1942 R164 War Gum set, who was a Naval officer in World War II. The other card on the right is a cartoon from Dick Tracy Comics. These cards were issued by Walter Johnson Candy (not that Walter Johnson) in their 1930s Dick Tracy set.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be much interested in either card. But I was very interested in these particular ones that were printed with only yellow and black ink. The full-color versions of the cards is how they were intended to be printed, but these are missing both the red and blue ink allotments and are quite rare.

Closing the book on non-sports in this writeup, I nabbed a literal boatload of such cards from a couple of auctions, as shown here (save for the E90-1 baseball card shown, which was part of the overall mail day).

Plenty of highlights here, but I’ll call out a few. My favorite item in this group was a near-complete 1910 E54 Circus Caramel set. Like many of the American Caramel sets from around 1910, this is a tough one. eBay typically has a few singles but not much more than that and some of the prices are outrageously high. Finding this many together at once is very difficult and the lot included 18 of the 20 cards in the set.

I also picked up a whole slew of the T107 Helmar Seals cards, which included a few that I needed. I’ve been building that 150-card set for a couple of years and am nearing the end. This group didn’t get me there as I’m still missing three cards, but I’m closer than I was.

A near-complete Stollwerck Chocolate album was there, giving me about 100 new cards, and I also picked up roughly 350 strip cards of actors and actresses from the 1920s, including a bunch of Charlie Chaplin cards to help me complete one of his (at least) two strip card sets.

The lone ‘sports’ cards in the group were pickups needed for my pursuit of the N162 Goodwin and N184 Kimball Champions sets.

Of course I’m not going to close without at least a few sports pickups.

The biggest was this 1910 E91C American Caramel card of Hall of Famer Tris Speaker. As I wrote recently, this one of the handful of cards that are considered to be a rookie of sorts for him.

I’d already had the card as part of the E91 set that I finished earlier this year at the National. But that card was in lesser shape and an Authentic grade. It was one of the last cards I needed to complete the set, but also one of the first cards that I wanted to sorely upgrade.

I was glad to pick up this low-grade SGC 1 as a replacement. This one is still a lower-grade card but still more presentable than the example I previously bought.

A second sports card I added last month was this N162 Goodwin Champions card of boxer Jack Dempsey.

This isn’t the Dempsey that most collectors are familiar with. That Jack Dempsey was a fighter in the 1920s. This Dempsey was a 19th century fighter known as ‘Nonpareil,’ which, in French, meant unrivaled or unable to be matched. As was common practice at the time, the latter Dempsey (actually named William Harrison Dempsey) took the name Jack from the this original Jack Dempsey. In nearly 70 recorded fights, Dempsey lost only three — all at the tail end of his career. From his first fight in 1883 all the way until 1889 (these cards are believed to have been issued in 1888), Dempsey had been unbeaten.

This nice-looking example was a COMC grab as I continue to work on building the set.

A final sports card pickup came from another set that I’d never heard of — the McLaughlin Brothers Who’s Who Card Game.

I’ve researched these since picking up this graded card of the football player in the set (I also grabbed a card of the tennis player), but have found next to nothing. It is mostly a non-sports set with a few sports subjects sprinkled in.

When I first saw this card featuring an early football player, I knew the image was familiar. And sure enough, when I scoured the images of football postcards I had, I found a colored version of this same picture used on one of those. All of the subjects have names and the name of the football player is Mr. Rushgood.

SGC did not date the year of these cards, though listings for them on eBay and COMC promote them as a 1914 set.

These cards seem to be few and far between. The only listings for them are those also listed on COMC and, in all, there are only about a dozen for sale. The only other sports card I have found in the set besides the football and tennis players I purchased is one for a rower.

One small mystery is in the name of the producer. While SGC has graded these as McLoughlin Brothers cards, the actual listings for them currently on COMC/eBay state they are McLaughlin Brothers cards. The name does not appear anywhere on the cards (backs are blank), so without any sort of box or accompanying material, it is difficult to determine which is correct.