Wallpaper, Jimmy Claxton and the HOF

Every once in a while in this great hobby of ours somebody comes along with a product that just grabs you. And you say to yourself, "Why didn’t I think of that?" That’s exactly what’s happened to me. My hat’s off to Chuck and Anne Catalfamo of Hudson Falls, N.Y. for their novel idea.

Most all of us, unless you live in a teepee, go home from work every night and look at four walls. Why not put something on those walls besides ordinary wallpaper or some boring shade of off-white paint? The Catalfamos to the rescue with their new baseball wallpaper.

A former minor league ballplayer and roommate of some guy named Nolan Ryan, Chuck Catalfamo, now a building contractor, never outgrew his love for the game, and collecting. A couple of years ago while going through some Exhibit cards he’d bought as a youngster, he duplicated some of them on a copy machine in strips of five or six and pasteed them along the top of his office wall. His wife saw what he’d done, like the idea and, voila, the A.J. Exhibit Corp.

Ads for the wallpaper border have already appeared in SCD, but fruiting from the copy machine to a finished product was not without a lot of red tape. They had to acquire the rights from the Exhibit Supply Co., and they had to get permission from each of the ballplayers to use their likeness.

They currently have 28 players licensed and they’re workig on more. Among those under contrat are Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey For, Bob Feller and Sandy Koufax.

Available at present are five different series of wall covering, and each of the five rolls has photographs of six different ball players. There are two series from the 1930’s and three from the 1960’s. Each roll costs $21.95 or you can get a four-roll set for $74.95

To order, call 1-800-727-8894
-Rick Hines, Sports Collector Digest, September 24, 1993