Buying Golden Age keys on the newsstand 2 2

[TheSurgeon]

Does anyone know of any firsthand accounts of purchasing from the newsstand at the time of publication and reading golden age keys like action 1, detective 27, marvel comics 1, etc? Are these accounts written anywhere, or recorded? I am reading “All in Color for a Dime” where one author recounts his friend buying Whiz #2 (1) off a newsstand and reading about Captain Marvel. 

[Robot Man]

Paging Marty...

[sfcityduck]

There is a guy still alive in the SF Bay Area who bought an Action 1 off the newstand, entered the contest, and won.

[fifties]

Well, not Golden Age, but I bought a copy of Showcase #4 at the news stand in the late summer of '56 and read it.  Wasn't too impressed frankly, and gave it along with many other comics to my little brother, who of course managed to lose them all...

[Gotham Kid]

7 hours ago, sfcityduck said:

There is a guy still alive in the SF Bay Area who bought an Action 1 off the newstand, entered the contest, and won.

Does he still own it ?

[Marty Mann]

11 hours ago, TheSurgeon said:

Does anyone know of any firsthand accounts of purchasing from the newsstand at the time of publication and reading golden age keys like action 1, detective 27, marvel comics 1, etc? Are these accounts written anywhere, or recorded? I am reading “All in Color for a Dime” where one author recounts his friend buying Whiz #2 (1) off a newsstand and reading about Captain Marvel. 

Thank you for asking...started buying off the newsstand in 1942 and continued until 1954...still have most of the books

I bought...700+.  You can check them out at "TOP TWO IN MY COLLECTION" on this thread.  Any questions please

feel free to ask.

Marty

[circumstances]

I somehow missed Giant Size X-Men 1, but I did buy X-Men 94 off the newsstand.

That's as close as I come!

Born about 35 years too late.

Edited April 14, 2019 by circumstances

[Yellow Kid]

 I had a good friend in Southern California, Ray Funk, who bought most of the big keys off the newsstand.  He collected trains, pulps, and comics as his primary interests, but was also an expert on farm toys and always did a chapter on them for Richard O'Brien's book on toys.  His primary passion was Buck Rogers, and he put together a run of Famous Funnies from #3, which contained the first Buck Rogers in the series through the last issue.  He even made a 15 volume set of Buck Rogers books that contained Buck that that represented a true labor of love.  He used to tell me how he and his friends would make string networks outside to fly their Buck Rogers rocket ships for long distances.  He grew up on a farm, and whenever the family would go into town, his mother would give him a dollar for comic books.  To buy the keys, a person would have to be at least about 90 today, and Ray would have been in his early 90's today. 

[telerites]

1 hour ago, Yellow Kid said:

his mother would give him a dollar for comic books

Dang, a dollar back then was a fortune.  I had to dig through trash cans in the early 1970s a kid to find pop bottles I could return to have money to buy comics. I never even got an allowance 

[batman_fan]

1 hour ago, telerites said:

Dang, a dollar back then was a fortune.  I had to dig through trash cans in the early 1970s a kid to find pop bottles I could return to have money to buy comics. I never even got an allowance 

Crud, I still do that today !

[telerites]

1 hour ago, batman_fan said:

Crud, I still do that today !

I picked up aluminum cans too.  I actually took an old broom handle and drove a nail into the flat end, sharpened the nail end and stabbed the cans from my bike.  I carried a trash bag to load them up but begeezers, it took a lot of cans to mean anything.  The bottles were big pay-offs.  

[50YrsCollctngCmcs]

A co-worker of mine had a party to celebrate his 40th birthday back in the early to mid-nineties. He held it at his father's house in a nice area of Pasadena. His father was a retired Pharmacist and had a variety of nice collectibles in the house. I was talking to him about his collections and our conversation turned to comics. He told me that he remembered as a boy working in his father's drug store when Action #1 came out. He said it was a big deal and everyone realized that is was something new and different. Clearly, it had made an impression on him.   I don't think that he bought one though and he certainly didn't have one. He did take his son to some of the Hollywood Book Stores in the seventies and picked up some mid-forties Superman books. I gave my co-worker some mylars to help preserve them.

[Robot Man]

I scrounged bottles as a kid as well. There was no aluminium can recycling. Small bottles were 3 cents and the big ones were a nickle. Rode our bikes down alleys with a little red wagon digging in trash cans. Or walking the beach at the end of the day picking them up out of the sand. On a good day you could make maybe $2 bucks. Big money when I was 8 or 9. We would take them to the liquor store. The guy knew us pretty well. He would add them up and let us know the total but not pay us. He knew we would blow it all on comics, cards and candy. If we came up a little short he would "float us". Cool guy!

[woowoo]

12 hours ago, Marty Mann said:

Thank you for asking...started buying off the newsstand in 1942 and continued until 1954...still have most of the books

I bought...700+.  You can check them out at "TOP TWO IN MY COLLECTION" on this thread.  Any questions please

feel free to ask.

Marty

Link would be nice since I cant find it under search.

I bought hulk 181 off the stands so I could get my next Marvel Value Stamp that I still have

[D84]

28 minutes ago, woowoo said:

Link would be nice since I cant find it under search.

I bought hulk 181 off the stands so I could get my next Marvel Value Stamp that I still have

Found it for you.

 

[woowoo]

7 minutes ago, D84 said:

Found it for you.

 

[Marty Mann]

Thank you D84 for providing a link...you'll have to go half way down on page 12 for my

first scan...TERRY-TOONS" #38...way back on February 20, 2013.

Marty

[sacentaur]

On 4/14/2019 at 8:15 AM, Yellow Kid said:

 I had a good friend in Southern California, Ray Funk, who bought most of the big keys off the newsstand. 

IIRC, Ray had a complete Fiction House collection the one time I met him back in the 80’s.

[BB-Gun]

19 hours ago, Robot Man said:

I scrounged bottles as a kid as well. There was no aluminium can recycling. Small bottles were 3 cents and the big ones were a nickle. Rode our bikes down alleys with a little red wagon digging in trash cans. Or walking the beach at the end of the day picking them up out of the sand. On a good day you could make maybe $2 bucks. Big money when I was 8 or 9. We would take them to the liquor store. The guy knew us pretty well. He would add them up and let us know the total but not pay us. He knew we would blow it all on comics, cards and candy. If we came up a little short he would "float us". Cool guy!

My brother and I worked paper routes for extra cash and picked up pop bottles to cash in at 2 cents per each.  Comics were a dime at the drug store but 5 cents at the local Mom and Pop grocery.  After 1961, I was on an allowance which increased to 2 dollars a week by the time I finished high school. 

[Marty Mann]

One of the great things about newsstands was the fact that as you moved from city to city you would always

find titles you had never noticed before.  I found these when we moved to Augusta, GA.