It's time to redirect this blog and give the "One a day" approach another try. Inspired by other collectors and sites, where people have shared their passion for a certain subject, like a favorite player, card maker or team, I have decided to give my "Garvey a day" project a shot. Having collected Steve Garvey memorabilia for over 40 years now, I have had the opportunity to come up with some pretty neat and obscure pieces. Collecting the cards has been fun, but it is finding the oddball stuff that makes this player collection much more enjoyable for me. It is amazing how many different items for a celebrity, issued across so many different subjects you can find and I can only imagine what more I might have had in my collection that I'll probably never even see, had I been living in LA in the time period.
I am going to take a completely random approach for this one a day presentation. I am just going to dig into the vault and pick something, trying to keep it fresh and interesting each day. Sometimes the entry will be short and sweet with the basics, other times I may be able to put some real effort into building a story behind the item(s). It all depends on what information is available, what I can find and what I know about the piece(s).
Starting us out on day 1 is a simple cable TV guide from June 1982. It features Steve Garvey in his final year with the Dodgers and crosstown California Angels & AL rival slugger Reggie Jackson. The guide is roughly 5 1/4" by 8 1/4" in size and opens up to reveal a show schedule for the month of June 1982. On TV was a paid cable subscription channel that showed local sports, movies and late night adult content for only $22/month. I am going to guess it was a Gemco exclusive offering, but I do not know that for sure. I remember getting similar small cable guides when we first started subscribing to cable TV in the 80s as well. My younger brother and I beat those guides up, as we were flipping through them so often, marveling at all the new and exciting content we never had before with plain old network TV!
Garvey and Jackson had some history facing each other's teams in key games, including the 1974 World Series between the Dodgers and the A's as well as 3 epic World Series battles between LA and the NY Yankees in 1977, 1978 & 1981. Jackson had just joined the Angels for the 1982 season from his successful stint with the Yankees. However, Garvey would depart LA at the end of the 1982 season and head to San Diego. Eventually Jackson moved back to the A's in 1987 and although they stayed in California, both would be out of baseball by the end of that year, but their rivalry would still outlast Gemco's existence by a year!
As stated above, my guide advertises the paid cable network service called On TV, and it was available through a membership club store called Gemco. Gemco was a mostly southern California chain of department stores that required a paid membership to shop. They performed well, but ultimately their parent company decided to liquidate the brand in late 1986 apparently due to several hostile takeover attempts. This liquidation actually paved the way for Target to quickly enter the California market, as many of the Gemco locations leases were assumed by Target and remodeled/rebranded. Gemco was owned by Lucky Stores, a larger grocery chain also out of southern California that would eventually be taken over by Albertsons.
Certainly this guide was probably printed in a fair quantity, as Gemco was doing quite well around that time. I am guessing these were probably available for free to anyone who wanted one inside the store, but possibly even mailed out to all On TV subscribers as well. As with anything like this, some were saved but many were tossed out after June ended and a new guide showed up for July. A great piece of history and a trip down memory lane for those who were living in southern California at the time and remember the store, cable network and/or especially the players!
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