Tales from the Thrift Store vol.4

Since it had been over three months since my first visit there, and I have been dying (yes, literally) to see what kind of turnover they had in their videos section, I decided to alleviate my ever growing curiosity and head back to the Hilltoppers thrift store.

The trip ended up paying off, as there had been a healthy turnover in the videos section... which was awesome, but there were also a couple of non-VHS items to be had as well.

From my two visits now, I think I can say with some certainty that the store will usually have between 200-300 albums on hand, and while most of the stuff that people seem to be donating isn't my kind of music, I was at least able to still find one.

I don't remember this movie or it's soundtrack. I am familiar with, and like, two of these songs, so hopefully they'll be at least one or two more decent songs amongst the eight other tracks.

I found a small tote that was full of unopened McDonald's toys, most of which ended up being of the late 90's Beanie Babies variety (someone must have finally decided to give up on their "investment"), but I did end up digging out a couple of interest.

Lucy, and Sally/Snoopy, come from The Peanuts Movie, which I haven't seen... but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the toys! Plus, Lucy talks, so that's always a good thing. Dracula comes from Hotel Transylvania 2, which is another one I haven't seen (haven't seen #1 either), but it's Dracula, and he talks too, so how could I not buy it?

In the post that followed my first visit to this store, I spent some time talking about just how many videos there were to look through, but I didn't have any pictures to accompany my amazement... well, this time I do! The picture above is of the left side...

... and here is the right of the video's section. And remember too, these shelves are stacked two deep, so there's full rows behind everything that you're able too see in these pictures. Like I said in the previous recap of this place, there are easily over a thousand video's (plus a few DVD's) to search through. It literally takes me almost an hour just to go through everything, and oh what an hour it is. My search yielded fourteen videos this time, which isn't too bad. Ideally I'd like to find more, especially with such a large selection, but fourteen's still better than none.

I'm assuming that most of the people reading this aren't as into animal specials as I am, so I'm just grouping these four together, and not bothering with the backs. The "Predators" series was put out by Time Life, and The Trials of Life is one of David Attenborough's BBC productions.

I remember the animated series M.A.S.K., but I don't remember The Mask animated series. Even though I know I'm probably not going to like it, I still felt compelled to give it a try.

I saw this in the theatre back when I was a wee lad, and haven't seen it since. I think I was staying the night at a friend's house and his parent's took us along to see it. If I recall, it wasn't a very kid friendly movie, so I'm pretty sure neither my friend or I enjoyed it all that much. It will be interesting to see it again, this time through slightly older eyes.

Here's another one that I saw when I was around seven or eight (not in the theatre though), and then never saw it again.

It's always fun to find a Christmas or Halloween animated special that I didn't already have, especially since there aren't too many more of those left out there.

 One of the few Cary Grant movies that I haven't seen.

Does anyone else remember when this movie used to be on television like every single weekend for what seemed to be years? I haven't seen it since like '97 or '98, so I was overdue for another viewing.

 I bought this to be a back-up copy. It never hurts to have a sealed extra tucked away, just in case...

It seems like two-tape sets are becoming increasingly more scarce, I think a lot of times one of the tapes gets damaged or lost, so folks just end up throwing out the other one. Although, there were about a dozen two-tape sets in the videos section this time. Having seen all of these movies, the clips and trailers won't be of too much interest to me, but I'm hoping the interviews will be worth the price of admission.

Here is yet another one that I haven't seen since I was really young. In all my years of scouring through the video sections of countless stores, this was the first time that I had ever come across it on VHS.

And last but not least, I was able to find this potential gem. In case you can't read that, here's a better view:

I was kind of surprised to find this as most thrift stores don't put out recorded tapes. I already have a tape with the two-part Alf Thanksgiving special recorded on it, but wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to see what commercials may be on here. And even though it only says that Alf is on here, I was hoping there would be more, especially since most people back in 1988 tended to fill up blank tapes, as they were a little more expensive back then.

Overall, it was another pretty good outing, and I will certainly be going back to Hilltoppers sooner than later.


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TTM Triumph: Mike Woodson

The successes have been rolling in as of late, most being of 1989-90 Hoops variety, so let's take a quick look at one of said recent successes:

Mike was member of the 1979 Men's team that won gold at the 1979 Pan American Games. Even though he spent eleven seasons playing in the NBA, the former Hoosiers standout, is probably now best known for the 21 seasons that he has served as an assistant/head coach in the NBA.

As always, many thanks go out to Mr. Woodson for taking the time to sign my card.


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And then there were four

                     
Back in April of last year, I did a quick post about only needing fifteen more cards to complete my 2013 Panini Cooperstown Green Crystal Shard parallel set. Now, nine months later, I'm doing another somewhat quick post about being down to only needing four more cards to complete the set.

All of the cards being shown here today were part of my post Black Friday COMC shipment, most of which, had been sitting in my account for the last six months or so. Even though it's really tough to wait some times, I just can't bring myself to pay to have my stockpile shipped, when I know that free shipping will be available come Black Friday.

With these guy's out of the way, only Honus Wagner, Rod Carew, Mike Schmidt, and Jimmie Foxx are left. The first three on that list are currently available on COMC, but in my mind, are overpriced. And the fourth (Foxx), is conveniently the only card from the 100-card set that isn't for sale on the site. Now that I'm so close to completion , I'm hoping that it's not too much of a stretch to say that, barring some sort of catastrophe, I should have this set wrapped up by year's end... which I'm kind of excited about, primarily because it will be the first parallel set that I've ever completed.

There were a few other non-green 2013 Cooperstown parallels in the shipment as well, and since I'm not really wanting to do a separate post for them, I thought I'd shoehorn in a couple of red's, and a gold, here at the end of this one:

I still have a ways to go on the red crystal's, and even further so on the gold's, so I don't think it'll be too much of a stretch for me to say that these two sets will not be getting wrapped up by year's end.


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Panini really comes through

Less than ten days ago I was showing you the box of 2014 Panini Golden Age that I had gotten during the Black Friday sales, and as some of you may recall, that box just happened to be missing it's promised autograph... and now here I am, to show you Panini's response to said missing autograph.

In that original post, I mentioned my lack of success in trying to contact Panini via the telephone, in fact, after weeks of trying... and failing, I had pretty much given up on any further attempts to do so. After reading that, Matt (Bob Walk the Plank), was kind enough to leave a comment in which he suggested trying to contact Panini through @PaniniCSM on Twitter, which was something that I hadn't even thought about trying.

Honestly, I didn't expect anything positive to come out of this newly suggested Twitter route, but I went ahead and tried anyway... and much to my surprise, a response came less than 24 hours later.

This is where Joe White (hopefully he doesn't mind his name being used, especially since he is the hero of this story) enters the narrative. I don't know if he's the only person manning Panini's Twitter account or not, but he's the only company representative that I dealt with, so every time I mention Panini in the rest of this post (and the title for that matter), I'm actually referring to Joe.

Right off the bat, Joe offered to send a couple of 2014 Golden Age autos to replace my missing one, and while I certainly appreciated the offer, "a couple" wasn't necessary as I was only shorted one. Instead, I asked if it was possible to just get one that I didn't already have, and provided a list of the ten or so that I already had from the set. Joe said that not only was that possible, but that he would send a couple that I didn't have. There was that "a couple" again, sometimes you just can't fight generosity without coming across as being difficult, so I didn't try to push my "just one is enough" any further.

So just three days after the initial contact was made on Twitter, replacement cards were overnighted (I really don't like to think how much that ended up costing the company) to me, and I couldn't have been happier with the cards that Joe picked out:

Other than knowing of his World Series outings in 1964, and his involvement with the creation of Big League Chew, I wasn't overly familiar with Jim Bouton. I had no idea that he had authored numerous books, and that one in particular, "Ball Four", was considered such a classic as far as baseball related books go. Since finding out about it just a couple of days ago, I have already found and bought a cheap copy, that is now in transit. Hopefully it lives up to the hype!

The Brady Bunch was a show that I watched quite a bit of when I was growing up, especially after Nickelodeon started running it in syndication, so to get a card that was signed by Peter Brady himself was pretty cool. The only thing that would have been better, is if Mr. Knight had inscribed a few of these, I mean how great would it have been to get his signature with Pork chops and applesauce written somewhere below it :)

Lost in Space was another show that I watched a great deal of in my younger years, so getting an autograph of Will Robinson is pretty cool too. I have been a fan of The Twilight Zone for as long as I can remember, and anybody who's even slightly familiar with the show, has probably seen at least one of the three episodes that he was on, especially since "It's a Good Life" is one of the most famous episodes from the series.

Many thanks go out to Joe, not only for the great selection of cards he chose, but also for being so easy to deal with. Many thanks to Panini as well, mostly for having the good sense to hire someone like Joe, as I don't think that I have ever dealt with someone in customer service who was as efficient and pleasant as he is/was.


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Nehi to a grasshopper

I have been collecting issues of Prevue (sometimes called TV Prevue) -- which was a local TV Guide for the Portland area during the late 50's and early 60's -- for a couple of years now. Issues don't come up for sale online very often, and when they do, they're usually priced not to sell... which means that additions to my collection are few and far in between.

Recently though, I was able to acquire (somewhat cheaply) a needed issue from 1958, and while I fully intend to discuss this collection more thoroughly at some later date, today I'm just going to focus on a an ad for Nehi -- who at that point, was in their 34th year of existence -- that appeared on the back of the issue:

I find this ad interesting primarily because of it's showing Nehi's sponsorship of 910 KVAN, who under that moniker, would be off the air less than eight months after the date of this ad.

910 KVAN was an AM country music station that began broadcasting out of Vancouver, WA (which is right across the Columbia river from Portland) in 1939. KVAN's biggest claim to fame would be that Willie Nelson worked as a DJ at the station from 1956-58, taking advantage of his growing on-air popularity, he decided to self-finance his first single "No Place for Me", which was recorded in a studio at the station in 1957.

In April of 1959, the station changed it's name to KISN and flipped to a top 40 format, then proceeded to dominate the Portland airwaves for the next decade and a half. No station in Portland has ever been, or will ever be, as popular as KISN was during that time. Despite it's popularity, the station -- after years of problems with the FCC (primarily due to the station being moved to Portland a few months after the format change, but still being licensed in Vancouver) -- wasn't able to get it's license renewed, and signed off for the last time in September of 1976.

The station returned to 97.1 on the FM dial in 1988, with the call letters KKSN, but still used the KISN handle. The format stayed true to the original as well by only playing music from the 50's, 60's, and early 70's. This version of the station is the one I know, as it was one of three stations that I primarily grew up with (the other two being KUFO and KNRK). I have so many fond memories of that station, I even became friends with someone -- who would later become one of my better friends growing up -- thanks to the two of us being the only kids around who enjoyed the oldies.  It was a sad day, or rather night, for me personally, when the station went off the air in 2005... especially since it was changed into a corporate friendly adult hits station called Charlie FM (burn in hell Charlie!).

After a couple of years of being heard on the internet only , KISN came back to terrestrial radio on 95.1 FM in 2015 -- conveniently just a couple of months after I moved away -- where to the best of my knowledge, is where it can still be found today.


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McAdone

It's hard to believe that it's almost the middle of January, and I'm just now starting in on all of the cards that had been accumulating in my COMC account throughout last year.

With 200+ cards to choose from, I think I'll start off with the card that I consider to be the most important (to my collection) of the bunch:

You are looking at a 1973-74 Topps Bob McAdoo rookie, and now with this card in hand, my 1973-74 Topps basketball set is COMPLETE! It's kind of exciting for a few different reasons, the biggest of which, is that for the moment, it's the oldest set that I have actually completed.

As a quick aside, even though it's somewhat plain in design, I absolutely love the look of the old Buffalo's Braves home jersey's.

This has been the only card that I've needed to complete the set for over a year now. I have bid on, and subsequently lost out on this card so many times on eBay it's not even funny. While Bob is a former MVP, and an owner of multiple championship rings, as well as a HOF'er, his rookie still doesn't go for much -- one could even say that it's been undervalued -- knowing this, and knowing how frequently they come up on eBay, I never bid too much, figuring that if I didn't get it... there would always be more.

At least that's how it had been up until a couple of months ago. It seemed like almost overnight that they stopped coming as frequently, and when they did, the condition of them was going down, but the prices were starting to go up a little more. After losing out on a few more, I decided to start looking elsewhere, which is where COMC comes in.

Normally there aren't a lot of copies to choose from on the site, but in between the Autumn Sale and the Black Friday sale, a couple were added to the site. Since I really wanted this set to be done, I didn't waste any time and made an offer on the nicest looking example -- which was accepted -- so, for a little over $6, I was finally able to put this set to bed. One set down, and way too many to go!


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A PSA, courtesy of Dr. J and Rick Barry

                       
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