Random Ray - 1991 Score All-Star FanFest

The 1991 Major League All-Star game was in Toronto, Canada. It would be safe to assume that the 1991 Score All-Star FanFest Ray Lankford card was given out at that event. A Canadian Ray Lankford card that is not an O-Pee-Chee? No Tim Horton's logo? It's not written in both French and English?  

Let's learn more, eh?  

 

I bought my copy of the Lankford FanFest card from a local card shop roughly two decades ago while I was still living in St. Louis. The shop was in south St. Louis County. It was slightly disorganized. There were stacks of cards everywhere and you never quite knew what to expect. The store owner was his own person. Cool guy, but definitely lived by his own rules. The shop was a short drive from my school at the time, so it was a good afternoon stop from time to time. 

This Lankford card was in a $0.50 bin, or something of the sort. Seemed like a cool card, not very expensive, and one that I did not own. I bought it. I was a little surprised that a young Ray Lankford made an All-Star FanFest set. Usually those types of products are filled with big names.  

Here is the front of the card. 

Score actually made the All-Star FanFest set focused on young players. After all, we were at the beginning of the prospect boom. The checklist had Ray Lankford, Hensley Meulens, and Chuck Knoblauch just to name a few. There are only 11 cards in the set, which I do not own. I was happy with just the Ray Lankford card. I like the picture that Score used with the Wrigley Field ivy in the background. I also love the double-ear-flapped helmet. The design around the borders looks very 1990s. It's dated, but I am sure that it had some strong appeal back in 1991. 

Let's talk about the back of the card. 

This is the painful part of this story.

I want to kick myself. 

Notice the bottom of the card has a banner that identifies this as a card from the 1991 All-Star FanFest. Well, apparently Score used this set of cards as a promotional item at two other events. One of the events was The National Sports Card Collectors Convention, or "The National", which took place in Anaheim that year. 

The third one?

Back to the store owner. 

Every good baseball card store owner good stories about cards, or different items in their store. Beyond cards, this store was always filled with promotional items of all kinds. Many of them were oddball giveaway items from Cardinals games. Yes, he sold the bobbleheads, but we're talking about stuff like "Bud Light Bucket Hat Night" or "Tino Martinez Kids Shirt Day". At one point he had a pair of Jockey underwear autographed by Jim Palmer. I usually ignored all of that stuff.  

The day I buy this card, he sees me pick out the FanFest card, and he goes on some long-winded story. It was about a guy he knows who worked at the Convention Center in St. Louis as a contracted janitorial service. I am all ears to hear where this is going about a janitorial service and baseball cards. Anyway, this guy he knew used to end up with items at the end of conventions and would just put them in his basement. All sorts of odds and ends. He was in the process of downgrading to a smaller home and had dropped off a box of Score baseball card sets from a candy convention. 

The story ended with the sales pitch of....."Only $10 for the whole set"

There was a long pause. In my mind I was thinking.......

He points to a cardboard box with a piece of paper taped to the front labeled "Candy Convention Cards $10". They were right next to all the late 1980s and early 1990s traded box sets, which were all $5 each.

Candy Convention Cards?    

I did not budge and did not deviate from whatever pile of cards I was sifting through to look at the promotional items from some guys basement that he got cleaning up the Convention Center. The story about the convention center stuck though. It was definitely one of that owner's better stories and he was not even drinking beer in the store that day. 

Two or three years later, I got on a big kick about tracking my Ray Lankford cards. I found a checklist and started crossing off cards and trying to find the ones I did not own. Most of the junk wax cards were checked off right away, but there were a few I was missing. One of them is a 1991 Score National Candy Wholesalers Convention card.

The National Candy Wholesalers Convention in 1991?  

It was in St. Louis. 

It was in St. Louis at the Convention Center.

They also had hockey cards with the same design as the baseball cards. This is not my Brett Hull card, but you can see the label on the bottom. It's slightly obscured by the COMC watermark. 

I have not seen the Candy Convention Ray Lankford card in the wild. I have also promised myself to never pass up another set of cards that were leftover at the St. Louis Convention Center and picked up by someone who runs a janitorial service.