Pat Romolo’s T206 Piedmont 150 Plate Scratch Project (Part 2/2)

On February 6th 2016, Pat posted a thread on net54 titled “I Believe This Could Be A Complete Horizontal Layout For This T206 Sheet”.  In it, he goes into great detail about how he re-created a Piedmont 150 sheet by connecting the Plate Scratches on the backs of the cards.

In Part One of this article, I posted a Cliffs Notes version of Pat’s net54 thread. You can read Part One by clicking the link below:

Pat Romolo’s T206 Piedmont 150 Plate Scratch Project (Part 1/2)

Piedmont 150 Bull Durham with dark plate scratch on the back

For Part Two, I wanted to dive in a little deeper.  Pat was kind enough to work with me by providing scans and answering all the questions I had.  Our conversation is below:

Q: How long have you been collecting T206?

A:  I purchased my first T206s at the 2003 National in Atlantic City.  I don’t remember exactly how many, but it was around ten raw Fair-to-VG commons that included a couple of Sovereigns and a Jennings (One Hand) in a PSA 5 holder.

Q:  Before beginning to collect the P150 Plate Scratches, how did you collect the set?
A:  I never really had a strategy, but early on I did have a phase when I was collecting non-Piedmonts and Sweet Caporals (like many T206 collectors, I wish I had stayed with that longer).
Q:  How did you first become interested in the plate scratches?
A:  When Steve Birmingham started the thread on Net54 about the plate scratches, he was looking for scans.  So I checked my collection and found that I had one.  I started tracking ebay and past sales looking for scans to send Steve.  Each one I found motivated me to search for more, hoping he would be able to come up with a sheet layout from them.
Q:  Do you remember the first card you owned that had a plate scratch?
A:  It was a Shipke scratch that I had in my collection and, coincidentally it matched up next to one of the Cobb scans that Steve had.
Q:  What gave you the idea to try and re-create an entire sheet of Piedmont 150s using the plate scratches?
A:  Once again, all the credit goes to Steve.  Steve and I were emailing back and forth.  I was sending him scans of the scratches I found and he was working on trying to piece a sheet together.  At the time it seemed like he was gaining the most traction around the Cobb, but in a couple of our emails he stated he didn’t have much free time to work on it.  I don’t think anyone was sure if there was more than one sheet involved, but I decided to try and see what I could come up with from a Seymour I had with a double scratch on it.
The circled pink mark offers more evidence that Seymour and Cicotte were neighbors on this Piedmont 150 sheet

Q:  Can you share any breakthroughs that you have had while working on it?

A:  There have been several, but I would say three of the main ones are:

  1. The first time I found an unconfirmed scratch using a template I made off the Seymour scratch.
  2. Finding a Seymour with a print mark on the front that connected to a mark on the front of a Cicotte (Seymour and Cicotte have several different scratches on the back that link them together).
  3. Filling the last missing slot on what I call the “A-B sheet”.

Q:  Have you had any missing pieces to the puzzle that have taken you a very long time to find?

A:  There are still a few that I think should exist and probably a lot more I don’t know about.  I think the A-B Sheet is complete minus a second subject that matches O’Leary, but I can’t say for sure.  It took me four years to find a Gibson that filled the Gibson/Bresnahan slot in the A-B Sheet.  A month or two later, I found the Bresnahan.  Also, Steve had sent me a scan of a Powell scratch that I could never find another scan of until one was listed on ebay about a month ago.  Coincidentally, another one popped up a couple weeks later.  So it took me almost five years to find one, and then two showed up within weeks of each other.

Q:  Do you try to own a copy of each scratch, or are you generally happy to just save scans?  
A:  In the very beginning I was just saving scans, but I purchased a couple of the cheaper ones when I saw them on ebay.  I found when I had them in hand I could glean more information from them.  I have a few that had a second scratch on them that I didn’t notice until I had them.  I have also picked up a few that only had front scans in the listing but I knew they were plate scratches because of a flaw on the front.  I have at least one copy of the majority of them, but I do lack most of the expensive ones.  There are four different Cobb (Bat on) scratches, two Cobb (Green Portrait), three Johnson (Portrait), three Mathewson (White Cap) and one Mathewson (Portrait).  I do have one of the Cobb (Bat On), but the rest are too expensive for me.
Q:  Is there anything I didn’t think to ask that you have learned from your work on this project?
A:  On a side note, the mystery surrounding the Plank continues over to the Plate Scratches.  There are only a few (all hand-cut) Piedmont 150 Planks, but two of them have the same Plate Scratch.  The Plate Scratch on the Plank goes almost straight across.   All of the other Plate Scratches are on a few different angles, so the Plank doesn’t match up with any of them.
I do have a theory about why this might be.  Awhile back someone mentioned that the scratches could have been caused by a nail or something on a shelf they were stored on.  I have seen pictures of the stones on shelves and also on pallets.
If a worker taking one of the stones off the shelf or pallet slid it back and turned it to grab one of the corners, it would create a straight scratch for a couple of inches and an angled scratch across the rest of the stones.  If Plank was on the end of a sheet, that would cause the straight scratch that’s seen on the two examples.