Feb 10 2008 11:20 AM
This article is in the Times today. I have no recollection at all of these pieces decorating the Kiner's Korner studio. I remember a sort of a 3-Dish frieze made up of 'METS' in different type styles in a sort of beige color.
Anyone remember these drawings...?
Also - if you go to the article at the Times site [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/sports/baseball/10cheer.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin]here[/url], you can listen to Kiner interviewing Stengel on the very first Kiner's Korner
February 10, 2008
Cheering Section
Mets Lore Lands in New Jersey Basement
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
Charlie Sobel received a rather unusual bar mitzvah gift in 1971.
“I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and I get this box in the mail from my Uncle Robert and I’m all excited,” he recalled. “I open it up and I see all these baseball drawings and I’m like, ‘What’s this junk?’ I mean, here I was, this 13-year-old kid, just looking at what seemed like a really cheap gift. I just threw it in a box and forgot about it.”
Twelve years later, Sobel married and was moving to New Jersey. His father reminded him about the box, which had been collecting dust in the basement. Inside were the 14 drawings that his Uncle Robert, a sports memorabilia collector in the 1960s and 1970s, had bought at an auction.
“I had forgotten all about it,” said Sobel, a 48-year-old Mets fan. “But this time around I was a little older, and I appreciated the gift a lot more.”
Most of the cartoonlike drawings feature caricatures accompanied by the kind of punchy lines that might be written on fans’ signs at the ballpark: “How About a Bat Transplant,” “Don’t Put This One on Instant Replay,” “A Mets Summer Night’s Dream,” “Did You See That, I Can’t Look” and “Whaddya Mean Out?”
Sobel, who retired as the owner of a garment manufacturing company in Manhattan, eventually framed and hung the drawings in his basement, where he often sits with friends, watches sports and talks about baseball, his favorite sport.
His friend Todd Kupfer was visiting one day when he realized that he had seen the artwork before, in another room where people used to talk baseball. As it turned out, the drawings had once decorated the set of “Kiner’s Korner,” a long-running postgame interview show. Ralph Kiner, a Mets broadcaster and Hall of Fame player, was its host.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Kupfer, 48, whose favorite drawing is one that says, “Get Him on Kiner’s Korner.”
“I told Charlie that what he owned was a rare and incredible piece of Mets history,” Kupfer added. “Everything else in this basement — autographed baseballs and basketballs and jerseys and hockey pucks — everyone else has. But no one has this.”
Sobel, whose basement is filled with autographed photos of players like Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, as well as baseballs signed by the 1969 and 1986 Mets World Series champions, considers the unsigned original “Kiner’s Korner” art the crown jewel of his collection.
“When I give people a tour of this basement, I always save the drawings for last,” said Sobel, who lives with his wife, Linda, and their three daughters in Colts Neck, N.J. “I look at this artwork as the most unique part of my collection. Everyone who has seen it has been impressed.”
So is one person who has not seen it.
“I can’t believe someone still has that stuff,” Kiner, 85, said recently by telephone from his home in Palm Beach, Fla. “I thought it was all gone. As a collector’s item, I would have to rank it up there with just about anything else that has been a part of the 43-year history of the Mets at Shea Stadium.”
He added that the artwork has “extra-special meaning now that Shea is in its last year of existence.”
Kiner said that his show began at the Polo Grounds in 1962, the Mets’ first season.
“We didn’t start calling it ‘Kiner’s Korner’ until the Mets moved to Shea in 1964,” he said. “It’s kind of sad because I don’t think there are more than a dozen of the shows from those early days that were saved on film.”
Kiner said that Seaver was his favorite guest.
On Sobel’s version of “Kiner’s Korner,” it is Kupfer.
“When Charlie is talking baseball with me in this room, he kind of reminds me of Kramer interviewing people on the old Merv Griffin set,” said Kupfer, referring to an episode of “Seinfeld” in which Cosmo Kramer finds furniture from Griffin’s talk show in the trash and reassembles it in his apartment.
Kiner said he was flattered that after all these years, some Mets fans would still be imitating him.
“I always run into people who are in their 50s who say they grew up with ‘Kiner’s Korner,’ ” he said. “But this is the first time I’m hearing about someone who actually owns a piece of it.”
E-mail: cheers@nytimes.com