Howe McCormick T206 Back Stamp Collector

 As some of you may know I have an online project documenting T206 back stamps.

I've posted about this before, but for those of you who are newer to my blog, I have a project documenting all of the different T206 back stamps that I can.  It is called The Great T206 Back Stamp Project.  Catchy right?  

Well, one of the stamps that I have documented on the site is from a collector named Howe McCormick.  I don't have that many of his stamps pictured on my website, but there is a collector out there that has hundreds of them.  His name is Ed McCollum.  And I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to Ed recently.

Here is what I learned.

Ed got his first baseball cards back in 1972 when his grandfather bought him a pack at the local grocery store and he was hooked from that moment.  He didn't see his first tobacco card until 1989 when he stumbled on a T206 Ty Cobb Red Portrait at an antique store while shopping with his wife.  He started collecting prewar cards after that.  

First he decided to get a few T206s which then led to more and then more.  He focused on getting one of each of the back advertisements (minus the Ty Cobb back) which he accomplished.  Then he got all the six horizontal cards.  Then some of the rarer cards in the set.  But, after 19 years of collecting, he felt stuck at 220 cards and felt he wasn't going to complete the set so he decided to refocus how he collected.  This led to an idea.

"One of the first cards I got when trying to collect all the backs was a Hindu backed card that, when it arrived, had this rubber stamping on the back from Howe McCormick, 500 W. Main St., Gainesville, Fla. (Back in 1991, you bought cards from listings in trade magazines and didn't have a way of checking what you were really getting until it arrived.) Fast forward almost 15 years, and one night while browsing through eBay to try and find a card I could afford to bid on, there was another card with the same rubber stamp on it. I thought it might be kind of cool to have two, purchased 15 years apart, with several thousand miles between the two places I purchased them from. A couple years later was when I decided I had to focus my collection, and I thought "Why not see how many cards this guy stamped and how many I can find?" So it just took off from there."

Ed sold off all his other cards after refocusing on Howe's collection and the quest began.  As of today, he has reassembled and incredible 383 cards of Howe's original collection.  When asked where he gets all of them, Ed explains,

"In the beginning, most came from eBay. As time has gone on, the cards may still come from eBay, but there are so many people who have seen my posts on net54 that look for the cards for me also. A card will show up in an auction, I’ll get five or ten emails about it. Someone is visiting a local card show, sees a card with Howe’s stamp on it, and I get a text message. More than a handful have come from collectors who may not have ever paid that much attention to the back of their cards, but when going through them will notice one or two have the stamp, will contact me and reunite them with the others."

Ed can also shed some light on Howe himself.

"Ulric Howe McCormick was born on July 31, 1895 in Alachua county Florida.  His father and uncle owned a market (groceries/tobacco) at 500 West Main Street in Gainesville, and both families lived above the market. He lived there until after his service in WWI, when census data shows he married in 1926 and had a child two years later.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been in contact with two individuals who knew Howe, one is his second cousin who until recently still lived in the Gainesville area, and the other a gentleman who met his daughter during her career on Broadway and stayed friends with her until her death. Both have been able to fill in a lot of the information about Howe that I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

The cards were collected from smokers who bought the cigarettes at the market, but didn’t want the cards. No one has been able to provide any information about why he stamped the cards, but there are two different stamps. The main one has his name and address in two lines, and appears in black or brown, or some faded version of that. The other version has his information on three lines, and uses his first name, middle initial and lists him as an agent for the Saturday Evening Post. The six of that version I have found are all in a very faded green color.

Howe was quite proud of his collection, and like to show it to the friend of his daughter’s every time he went to visit Howe and his wife in Florida. He tells me Howe had three boxes of cards, larger than shoe boxes, filled with the cards. But sometime between 1968 and 1974, when they moved from the house they had lived in most of their adult lives into a smaller place, Howe sold all but 12 of the cards that he wanted to keep. The friend remembers the name of one of those 12 cards quite well, but it disappeared soon after his death in July 1976 and hasn’t shown up since.

The second cousin was able to give me several scans of Howe as a child (guessing between the ages of six and nine?) and I was also able to find online two photos of him from the 1913 yearbook from his sophomore year in high school, where he was a trombone player in the school orchestra."

He has about 200 different cards with the stamp and several doubles, triples and as many as five examples of the Joss pitching pose with the stamp.  Ed also keeps track of cards he knows of but doesn't own and he knows of 36 examples that are out there in other collections.  He even has scans of several of the cards he knows of but doesn't own just in case he picks it up later he can take it off his known examples list.

When asked what the best part of collecting this way has been, Ed says,

"The friendships made with other collectors, all but one of which I’ve never met face to face. Since 2007, when I started truly rebuilding Howe’s collection, there have been more than 200 collectors who have contacted me about what I’m doing, or offered to help. Of those, there are at least 50 who I hear from three or four times a year, even if it isn’t about cards, but just checking to see how we are all doing. People who started out as an eBay handle or a user name on a card chat site have now become people I know their names, about their families, their collections, sometimes what the weather is like that day where they live. Quite often, we have nothing in common other than the love of old pieces of cardboard. But that is all it takes to be friends. And I really appreciate that."

Ed's focus is still to acquire as many of these stamps as he can and continue to reassemble Howe's original collection.  If you have one of these or know of one, please reach out to him at:

Ed@edmccollum.com

I'd like to thank Ed for answering my questions.  Below is an example of one of Howe's stamped T206s.

Enjoy the hobby all...it's a great one.