When I started Graphlife in January of 2008, my desire was to simply begin with that year’s successes, thinking that it would be pretty tough to go back and chronicle some of the autographs that had come my way in prior years. As I have moved forward with my collecting I have often wanted to go back and share a few of the pre-Graphlife autographs I was lucky enough to come across.
That having been said, this is the first of a few new posts I will be doing in the coming weeks entitled Graphlife Retro, in which I look back and detail how I came across some of the autographs in my collection.
The first in this series is Andruw Jones. Back in April of 2007 we had decided to head down to Atlanta for the weekend to make the most of one of John Smoltz’s Food Bank autograph sessions. That Thursday I had luckily come across a web advertisement for a grand opening for a small business center in a strip mall. To promote the event they were having Andruw Jones come out and sign autographs. So, we headed down to the ATL on Saturday morning and got in line a couple hours before the event was scheduled to start. As it turned out, it wasn’t entirely necessary to get there so soon because they had done a poor job advertising the event and there were only about 50 or so people there. They were charging $5 an autograph while also selling bats, balls and 8×10’s at cost. It was completely awesome. I think I spent about $40 dollars and walked away with a signed magazine, (2) jersey numbers, a ball, and (2) 8×10’s. Ah….the good ole’ days, when the economy wasn’t in the tank and players would sign at grand openings! Anyway, here’s the stash, and a link about the event.
