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.

COMC Card Show, Part II: I'm Kuenn to Ad to My Collection

Please ignore my attempt at writing a tabloid headline, but it was the easiest way to say that the other half of my COMC purchases focused on my Harvey Kuenn and Joe Adcock collections -- mostly Kuenn but the Adcock stuff is pretty damn cool.

Let's get started with vintage. I tried to select the best looking specimens of some older cards that wouldn't cost me more than about $1 or so.  For Kuenn, that meant a bonanza of 1960s Topps cards:

It appears that Harvey had a chew of tobacco in his left cheek in every one of those photos. At least it does to me. Perhaps it's because I don't think I ever saw a photo of the guy without tobacco packed in his cheek. 

I also picked up two normal Topps cards from the early 1970s on which Harvey is pictured as a coach:

Harvey looks like the long-lost orange member of RUN-DMC in that top photo with those big boxy glasses. And the tobacco-filled left cheek even comes through on the 1974 tiny Harvey photo. 

Now, I also got some more recent Harvey cards as well -- cards from the 2000s:

The two Bowmans are from the 2001 "Bowman Rookie Reprints." One is the normal version, and one is the Chrome version.  Chrome reprints of vintage cards just seems stupid to me.  The other two cards are from two SP Legendary Cuts sets five years apart -- from 2002 and 2007.

And all that is really nice and all.  But you know when you're talking about me and my collecting that there will be oddballs.  The odder, the better.

The older the better, too:

Such as a 1962 Post Cereal card. I have to admit that this scan makes the card look in a lot worse shape than it really appears in hand.  But, come on -- the card is 53 years old. You try looking in mint condition when you're 53 years old.

I picked up a bunch of TCMA cards as well. Five, to be exact:

As you can see, TCMA was not above reusing photos themselves. The top photo of the repeated three is from the 1979 TCMA "The 1950s" set.  These two "Baseball's Greatest Hitters" cards are actually parallels from 1982, I suppose -- one's on regular gray/tan cardboard while the other is on white cardstock.  The card picturing Harvey with the Brewers is actually from the 1975 "The 42" set and not from the nearly identical 1975/6 SSPC set. And finally, the Kuenn in the middle is from TCMA's 1981 set commemorating the 1962 San Francisco Giants.

I did not realize that Harvey Kuenn made a Cramer's Baseball Legends set until this round of buying, but now I do know:

All of those are great cards and great additions to the Kuenn collection, which has now doubled in size. But, they are not the oddest oddball of ol' Harvey.  This one is:

Apparently, Cramer found that photo after the NuSash Replacement Window Company (which is still in business today) issued this card as card #34 in its "Great Plains Greats" set. Others in the set include Burleigh Grimes, Jake Beckley, Jim Bottomley, Cap Anson, Cool Papa Bell, and Yogi Berra, to name a few, and it was released in 1975-1976.

All told, I added 21 total cards to my Harvey Kuenn collection, bringing the overall total to forty-three.  Not bad for a PC I started in May.

Now, on to Joe Adcock.  The Adcock collection started with a solitary 1957 Topps card of his that I've had for at least 35 years now.  I only added three cards this time around, bringing my total cards in that collection up to sixteen.  But I did add three nice cards.  Let's go newest to oldest.

Newest:  2007 SP Legendary Cuts

I am in favor of cards of players from before 1960 appearing in black-and-white photos that are cropped to make them look like art or museum pieces. It shows an appropriate level of respect, I think.  Good job, Upper Deck.  

Still new but older than the SP:  2002 Topps Super Teams Retrofractor

It's shiny and serial numbered (to 1957). So, it's got that going for it. Otherwise, well, I like the Super Teams concept and wouldn't mind seeing it return somehow.  Or maybe, let's do a "Super Crappy Teams" set. Include cards only for teams that lost 100 or more games. Now that would be craptastic!

Finally, here's the last addition to the Adcock collection.  It's not old -- well, it's 25 years old, so that's still relatively recent to me -- but man is it cool:

And now I know that Joe Adcock was a true Southerner. Born in Coushatta, Louisiana, and given the name "Joseph Wilbur", his family shortened both names and, at least for his college years in Baton Rouge, he went by that handle.  

The card back notes that Joe Bill attended LSU on a basketball scholarship from 1945 to 1947. But, the basketball coach at the time was also the baseball coach and asked Joe Bill to come out to play baseball. Adcock was 6'4" tall, but he was the Tigers center -- a full foot smaller than the LSU basketball center when this card came out -- some guy named Shaquille O'Neal.

I want more cards like this one.  By that, I mean that we should get some card sets of guys who became famous playing one sport shown playing another -- say, Joe Montana as a track guy or Mike Trout playing football.  Multisport athletes fascinate me.

So, even though it shows Joe Adcock playing basketball for an SEC team that isn't Georgia, it's still my favorite card I bought in this round of COMC Card Show.

Thanks for reading.