The publication in June of 1991 of the story on Nokona glove making and our program to make reproduction of its gloves had the germination of a chance conversation with Jim Storey, then president of Nocona Athletic Goods. When we told him were looking for a direct mail marketing program, he mentioned that many old Nokona glove users often asked if the company could re-make its old gloves that they loved. So, the project began with many twists and turns.
Beneficially, it resulted in Nocona Athletic Goods being put back on the map as one of the last of the American Made glove makers and helped them out of a recession of sorts trying to compete with foreign made gloves which had simply shut down domestic plant after plant.
The shock immediate shock wave of the the S. I. story was tsunami in effect. We took 13,000 phone calls in a month. Nocona had about that many and were swamped. In short, we were swamped with requests that it took five or six months to fill.
It gradually segued into a new interest in old baseball gloves and eventually spilled over into bats and vintage baseballs through the decade of the 1990s.
A new era of collecting baseball gloves had dawned.
Monthly Archive for January, 2012
There were several little side notes to the “big” glove finds.
1. The Baltimore or Dr. Mace find. John Graham and I were able to buy about a half dozen of these gloves, some still in their original boxes from a Fort Worth Texas collector who had about 20 or 30 of them and who had owned them for some time (he told us that some of the boxes he had simply fell apart in his cellar where he had stored them. I still have my Mac Goldsmith Eddie Miller. I believe I see five of these glove finds listed under a five glove lot on ebay for about a Grand apiece. Been listed for more than a year though with no takers. Dr. Mace must have purchased more than a hundred of these, I believe which were in an auction held by veteran dealer Lew Lipsett. If memory serves. These gloves can be viewed by Jim Mace’s book on glove collecting.
On the Kansas find, one might assume from the five glove, $5 thousand dollar listing that those hundred or so gloves would set up a nice retirement. We tracked these gloves for more than a year after being tipped off by a Sporting Goods rep. but the original owner denied their existence up until his warehouse owner sold them off. A lesson learned there that I’m sure has been repeated in many antique find situations.
Collector Dan Creed of Chattanooga was able to land about 30 of the emjay find gloves. Dan drew some publicity on this including a page in our Glove Collector Newsletter. Some of these gloves still make the rounds. Oddly the warehouse (see Locker Wars on TV) confiscated the gloves and had some of them in a yard sale in Kansas.
Question now is WHEN does the next big glove find emerge???
We often wonder when we might get into another “big” glove find with multiples of mint/near mint gloves from old Sporting Goods stores or warehouses. There were several of these glove mines discovered in the late 1980s and 1990s. The biggest of these was what we’ve termed the “Kansas Find” in a warehouse just out of Wichita Kansas. Dave Bushing and I finally peeled back the layers of discoveries that kept popping up here and there and reached the man who had possession of the gloves, about 400 of them, mostly of the gloves of the 1950s including 40 some odd Duke Snider DS Rawlings models. When we assembled them in Dave’s home in Chicago, a collector who came by, sighed, “Well, I just died and went to heaven.”
It was a momentous time but in a year or so all of them were sold off.
Only about a year before this I found a cache of gloves from a “closing down” sporting goods store in San Antonio named Potcherniks (sp). There were about 30 gloves in boxes including some Mickey Mantle gloves.
Other discoveries of course was the late 1980s of a warehouse in Baltimore where some 100 plus gloves were uncovered and sold with Dr. Mace buying hundreds of these and his son, Jim, later published a book covering and posting pictures of these gloves. The book still makes the rounds on the internet sales.
Others that come to mind are the “EmJay” gloves (Denkert made I think) that came out of North or South Carolina. We did a story on one collector who purchased many of these, Dan Creed. I believe there were 40 or 50 of these gloves that made it to market.
The only other “lot” finds I can recall was that a collector turned up about 20 or 30 mostly Spalding gloves, with several Sal Bando gloves and MacGregor Tony Perez models.
Before the Kansas discovery, we were kept busy producing Nokona replica gloves from Nokona which were becoming popular from an article “Sports Illustrated” did on the company and our project to reproduce these.
Soon, all we could concentrate on in the next few years was providing information on the baseball glove collecting hobby which was beginning to take off.
Next: Watching the hobby mature.
