Mid Summer Classic Auction 2016

Presented here is an extraordinary opportunity to travel back to the rough-and-tumble days of the early National Basketball Association, a time when the brand-new league boasted franchises in outposts like Sheboygan, Wis., Waterloo, Iowa, Syracuse and Rochester, N.Y., and even tiny Anderson, Indiana, home of the Anderson Packers and a central Indiana city better known – eventually – as the birthplace of the nicest man to ever play in the major leagues, Carl Erskine. Here then are nearly five dozen remarkable artifacts from a league in its formative years, a giddy mixture of small town and big city, when clubs from tiny Midwestern towns might tangle with the New York Knicks, or amazing doubleheaders at the greatest shrine to both the professional and college game, Madison Square Garden in New York City, where the hometown Knickerbockers could share a card – and a glistening souvenir program – the likes of Power Memorial High School. It wasn’t at all atypical to have doubleheaders with college and pros, but it takes on another dimension when the opening act for a New York Knicks and Indianapolis Olympians (not literal Olympians but a mascot name) might be Power Memorial High School vs. Rice High School, a pair of legendary Harlem prep enclaves that captured the attention and reverence of legions of New York City basketball fans even before a certain Lew Alcindor arrived at Power in the mid-1960’s. This is the kind of window into a fledgling NBA that is provided by this spectacular grouping of programs.