LARGE SCRAPBOOK
For those of you who have gotten into internet auctions, especially eBay, you know it's easy to get auction fever. Well, fortunately for us, the bidder who got it when this 80 page Peter Brown scrapbook went up for auction is a friend of this website. Jo Anne is a friend, like the ones you've never met but feel you know from emails and their tasteful choice in television westerns and actors.
When we spotted the scrapbook on eBay, three of us decided we'd make a group bid so we could use the pictures for this website. Before we could put together a plan of attack, Jo Anne got in there with a maximum bid with which we weren't about to compete. As it turned out, this auction was not for the faint of heart. The seller puts up many of these type of scrapbooks. We concluded he must have ads posted somewhere that appeal to cold-hearted parents who sell their children's comic books and baseball cards if the kids leave their childhood belongings stored in the family home too long.
The auction ended on a work day and imagine our shock upon logging into eBay after work, the max bid had gone up to $485!!!! And Jo Anne was still top bidder. (Now there's a woman with an understanding husband.) We were expecting one of those last-second sniper bids, so Jo Anne put in a max bid that floored the rest of us. But luckily, she got it for $485.
The person we feel bad for is the girl who, in the late 1950s and 1960s, must have lovingly put this book together only to have someone sell it. Maybe she ended up married to someone who was threatened by her girlhood crush. We'd love to hear from that person if she ever sees this.
A SCAN OF THE ENTIRE 80 PAGE SCRAPBOOK
Jo Anne's generosity knows no bounds. She lent us her newly acquired Peter Brown scrapbook to scan for this website. The only thing she asked in return was to have Peter sign it. No problem there, he loved looking through it. At this point the stories of youthful marital follies and arranged photo dates are amusing. He even called Bob Fuller and Edd Byrnes (who were attending the same celebrity event when we caught up with Peter) over to check out the pictures where they appeared. Of course, this assignment would have been a lot less nerve racking with the $100 scrapbook we were hoping to win. A borrowed $485 scrapbook needed a real Lawman to guard it. Again, thank you Jo Anne!
The pages are posted here the same way they're arranged in the book, even when that puts the pictures chronologically out of order and when there are duplicates. Some of the captions and pictures were cropped by the original owner in such a way that it was clear she didn't care about saving parts of pictures or information that wasn't about Peter. We've typed the captions that aren't readable after scanning. Our comments are shown in orange.
The second highest bidder's auction history showed that he collected a lot of celebrity memorabilia but there was nothing to show he was specifically a Peter Brown or westerns fan. Later we found out that Malcolm from Australia was actually bidding for his aunt, who had been a Peter Brown fan for 40 years. He remembered as a kid that she was always talking about Peter. When she asked him to bid for her, he doubled her bid as a gift. After the auction was over, Jo Anne graciously made laser copies of the whole book at cost for Malcolm to give to his aunt. Thanks Jo Anne!
A Michael Landon book had gone for $301, but we chalked that up to that big contingent of Bonanza fanatics. A Robert Fuller book had gone for around $275. He and Peter have a lot of the same fans, so surely (we hoped) the Peter Brown scrapbook wouldn't go higher than that. Most of the celebrity scrapbooks go for under $100, many for under $30. A few more bidders tested the waters and by the final afternoon the bid was edging close to $80.
Contact us at outrider@peterbrown.tv
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