COMC Black Friday #3: Joe Adcock

Yesterday I posted about the Warren Spahn cards that I picked up off COMC around Thanksgiving. I had intended to combine Spahn with Joe Adcock's cards because of their playing for the Milwaukee Braves together and all. As I wrote about the three Warren musicians, though, stopping with them made a ton of sense.

So, today, let me finish my thought, so to speak. We had Warrens introducing Warrens yesterday, and I was going to do the same for Adcock -- have Joes introduce Joes.  But, today it's time for a different tack. I am going to intersperse baseball cards with some serious history. Apologies for either "boring" you with history or making the trite decision to include baseball cards with much more serious discussion.

Adcock was born and raised in Coushatta, Louisiana -- about 45 miles south of Shreveport in a rural area with a checkered past and a pretty dire-sounding present.

1978 TCMA The 60s I

1989 Swell Baseball Greats

Starting with Coushatta's dire present, well, how bad is it? Well, a population which has declined from a high of 2,299 in 2000 to an estimated 1,852 in 2015, caused almost certainly by the fact that nearly half the population -- 49.7% -- live below the poverty line. That includes 64% of the population in Coushatta who are below the age of 18. The median income for a household in 2000 was $18,958. That's the midpoint. Seriously.

W461 Exhibit

1982 G.S. Gallery All Time Greats

It is worth noting that the area today is represented by Republican Gerald Long -- a 72-year-old whose family history in Louisiana is long and quite checkered itself. Gerald's third cousin is the infamous Kingfisher himself, Huey Long. Huey was a populist demagogue whose platform was based around wealth redistribution under the "Share Our Wealth" program. Gerald, on the other hand, is the only member of the Long family to have been elected as a Republican. 

The area is a very conservative area and is noted as being the last parish in Louisiana to issue same-sex marriage licenses in 2015. Parish Clerk of Court Stuart Shaw had sided with then-Governor Bobby Jindal to defy the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. But that ended soon thereafter.

1963 Topps

1961 Nu-Baseball Scoops

Coushatta's checkered past came during Reconstruction, when the local White League got very active. Wikipedia informs me that the White League was "an American white paramilitary organizations started in 1874 to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and political organizing." What differentiated the White League from the Klan was the fact that it operated openly. People in the community knew exactly who they were and what their goal was -- the overthrow of the Republican Reconstruction governments in the south.

1956 Topps

1955 Bowman

In Coushatta, the White League forced 6 Republicans from office in August of 1874 and then killed all six before they could leave the state. These people included the brother and three brothers-in-law of Marshall H. Twitchell, a "carpetbagger" from Vermont who moved to the area after the Civil War and married a local woman. He became a successful cotton planter and was elected to the state legislature, and he appointed his family to the local offices in which they served.

The White League also killed between 5 and 20 freedmen (depending on what source you use) who had been escorting the Republicans from the state. This later became known as the Coushatta Massacre. President Ulysses Grant had to send in federal troops to pacify the Red River valley area where Coushatta is located, but the damage was done: voting by Republicans decreased and the Democrats took over the state legislature in 1876.

1982 TCMA Baseball's Greatest Sluggers

1978 TCMA The 1960s II

What followed? The Democrats took over in Louisiana for the better part of the next century and disenfranchised poor whites and African Americans to maintain control of the state. In fact, starting in 1876, it took until 1980 for Louisiana to elect a Republican governor. The chair of the Louisiana senate was a Democrat from 1877 until 2000. Both the State Senate and the State House of Representatives had a Democratic majority until 2011. That's how strong Reconstruction and its fallout were.

1962 Topps

1961 Topps Stamp...same photo (and same photo as used in 1962)

To be fair, Adcock and his family benefited from this. His family owned a farm and his dad was Ray Adcock -- the longtime sheriff of Red River Parish. His dad was sheriff starting in 1940 and ending in 1952.

To be fair to Joe, it wasn't like he got a ton of benefits. Joe grew up in a time where most people in the Parish did not have telephones -- as one source states, before 1950, only about 30 to 35 percent of parish households had telephones. Due to African American migration outward, population in the Parish declined steadily from 1940 onward. Adding insult to injury for the area, the Red River flooded at historic levels in 1945. By that point, though, Joe found himself at LSU on a basketball scholarship -- he clearly was a lucky boy to get out as he did.

2005 Upper Deck Classics

It's easy (at least for me) to forget at times where baseball and its players fit into the history of our country. This post originated simply because I was curious about the place where Joe Adcock was born, raised, and, in 1999, where he died. It turned into a history lesson for me -- and I hope you didn't mind coming along for the ride.

What's on TV?

These days, the answer to "what's on TV?" is pretty much, "what do you want to watch?" With hundreds of cable/satellite channels, Netflix/Amazon Prime, internet-based networks, and even TV from overseas, the only things that limit the answer to the question "what's on TV" are your language skills and your imagination.

In the 1950s, that was not true. People had three or four TV stations -- tops -- and that was it.  Indeed, color TV was quite a novelty.  I guess that's why Bowman decided to use TVs for its card design in 1955, its final season as an independent card issuer.  

I've always loved that design, so I was pleased to find a few 1955 Milwaukee Braves to buy at the last card show I attended:

This Bob Buhl has honest-to-goodness sharp corners.  It's too bad that there are other imperfections.  But those sharp corners made me think there's a strong possibility that those corners came from trimming. I measured the card, though, and it comes out right.  Still, as anyone who's tried to collect a top-condition set of 1955 Bowman will tell you, finding these cards in good condition and well-centered is nearly impossible.  

Later Braves TV Announcer Ernie Johnson has some dodgy printing going on, and the corners are more rounded.  Maybe it's just the coloration, but Dittmer and Johnson both look to be night game cards.

And then, there was the 1955 Bowman addition to my Lew Burdette collection, which doubled in size thanks to that relic from Monday's post and the cards I picked up in McDonough.  The Nitro, West Virginia, native's card has a little writing on it, so it was a throw-in to the purchase.  I don't mind that much.

Adding to the large card glory was a single 1955 Topps Card:

Melvin Earl Roach, the card back tells me, was a slugger from the University of Virginia. Rather than having me tell you about it, have a look for yourself:

I love these old cards.  It reminds me that people in the 1950s thought that the Ozarks made people grow beards and dress like members of the Three Musketeers...without shoes, of course.

The vendor from whom I bought these four cards was seriously excited to have someone interested in his old Braves vintage cards.  He was an older gentleman, and he gave me a pretty good deal.  It was MUCH more than I wanted to spend on cards at the show, but I have to be honest -- vintage in good shape and without having any "drawn-on-beard" parallels was worth it.  Well, there was one card I am disappointed in condition-wise:

The paper loss at Hank's face is the part that disappoints me.  Still, if it were in great shape, this card would be a lot more expensive, so I'm not really complaining.  Especially with all the nice cards that came along with Hank:

A quintet of 1957 Braves, all in very good shape with some centering issues.

I know I got more from this seller besides these, but I'm pretty sure that I mixed up the cards I bought with others before I scanned them.  

Oh, wait.  There were two cards for player collections:

It's a late career Mathews along with a Burdette in his pomp -- the 1958 Topps card issued the year after he won three games in the 1957 World Series against the Yankees.  

Whew.  What a great pack of vintage.  

I picked up some other, random Milwaukee Braves of a more recent vintage.  The same guy who had the 20 items for $20 table had some boxes of all Braves along with some boxes of inserts available being sold at 100 for $15.  Here's what I grabbed from that:

Three Joe Adcock cards -- two from SP Legendary Cuts with the exact same photo used on consecutive year's sets and a "Swingin' for the Fences" card from the Ted Williams set in the mid 1990s.

Two Warren Spahn cards -- including a Chasing History that I was shocked I did not have. The other Spahn there is from the 1994 Topps Baseball Archives Ultimate 1954 Series. This Spahn is a "Gold Parallel" version.  

Indeed, most of the cards I found from that set were the Gold Parallels:

Only poor Johnny Logan is a "normal" card.  All the rest are from the Gold Parallel.

Which means, of course, that I need to find the "normal" cards.  

The final pickup from this same guy was one that was an impulse buy: the 1988 Pacific Legends Series 1 set.

But, with three of my "vintage" PC guys represented, I had to get the set.  And, other than the Milwaukee Braves represented in the set (which may be only Felipe Alou), the rest of the cards have started getting parceled out into packages that all were sent out yesterday. If there are certain cards from this set that you want, let me know and I may still have them to send to you.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with me through four days of card show posts!