This is perhaps the rarest of the Ty Cobb rookie postcards, the H.M. Taylor LaFond Detroit Tigers Floral Horseshoe postcard commemorating “Wild Bill” Donovan.
It depicts Donovan receiving a floral horseshoe during the September 30, 1907 Tigers game at Philadelphia when his Philadelphia fans presented him with this token of their appreciation. A youthfully exuberant Cobb is at the far right. The regular version does not contain “By permission of M.A. Lafond & Co….” overprint. So how did this Lafond version come to be and how was it distributed?
Lafond was a cigar store in Detroit. They advertised on the Bennett Park wall as shown below.
The Lafonds were related by marriage to Wild Bill Donovan and as the October 23 edition of The Tobacco Leaf (a tobacco trade magazine) shows they displayed the Donovan Floral Horseshoe in their shop window in Detroit.
The floral horseshoe game was September 30th and by October 5th the Horseshoe was on display at LaFonds as shown in the Detroit Free Press of October 6th.
This October 11 LaFond ad in the Detroit Free Press shows the exhibition from the window was already gone.
The earliest postmark I can find on any H.M. Taylor Tiger postcard is about October 10, 1907 when the World Series against the Cubs was being played. A shot of Chance in the Tigers dugout before the World Series commenced is a part of the set. Thus it stands to reason that the H.M. Taylor set was issued during the 1907 World Series and that the Lafond version of the Floral Horseshoe postcard was overprinted especially for the LaFond store and only distributed by them at their store the week of the display or for a short time afterward. This would explain extreme scarcity of this variation.
For the story of the rare 1907 Dietsche Cobb “Fielding” postcard and how this LaFond postcard research help solve the mystery of its scarcity see this item in the collection:
