The perilous times of an OTR mail trader?

I have blogged before about how much space an OTR collection used to take "back in the day" when the shows were kept on reel-to-reel or cassette tape.  Note that I have never had a reel to reel (for OTR purposes) and have never traded OTR with anyone.  My perspective is simply thinking about how the situations probably played out.

After going through some old collector's trade magazines it seems to me that there were some problems in trying to have a collection.

Belonging to a club would be the most ideal situation.  You would probably meet once a week - trading tapes with people you knew and trusted.  You knew people - they knew people.  You probably knew traders they didn't know and vice versa.  Therefore, there would be shows to obtain because Harry had a lot of the Superman stuff you need and his friend Albert had 3 Ozzie and Harriets you didn't have.  You on the other hand, you had 6 episodes of Adventures of Research that Albert's friend Ned wanted...

So this is how a club worked.  It was the best way to 'do business.'

Once a year, you might drive 100 miles away (if you were lucky!) and go to an OTR convention. 

At the convention, you'd bring whatever you could bring - but mainly a list of what you had, a list of what you wanted and you made as many contacts as you could.  In between, you'd meet celebrities and whatnot but it seems to me that in - let's say - 1985, most people who went to a convention were most interested in finding people to trade with.

At the low end of finding a trade partner would be through a magazine.  All one has to do is look through the old trade magazines to see that many people traded for stuff they never got.  You send out your tape full of Jack Benny for another tape of Jack Benny that you didn't have.  Your tape went out and the one you were to get never came.

You'd ask politely.  You'd threaten.  You'd write again.  But you'd give up after a while.

Having never gone through this myself, I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been.  However, knowing many people through the Internet and having to rely on people for this and that for the blogs has taught me a lesson: people's "words" and their "promises" mean very little.  Therefore, if you made some good trades with some good people - and all were satisfied, this would be the kind of people you'd want to trade with. 

The magazine was a way to "hide."  I'm not saying these people who didn't return tapes were crooks, I'm just saying most people are unreliable.   I'm going to say that at least 90% of all people are unreliable!

OTHER PROBLEMS

Aside from all the above problems you had these other worries:

Postage.  It was a lot cheaper then than it is now but you can imagine how much it would cost to trade 100 tapes in a year?  What if you traded 500 tapes a year?

Waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting.

It seems the Internet solved a lot of these problems.  There is one thing though: people are still unreliable.  I'd say at least (now) 90.1%... (and growing.)

©Jimbo 2010/2011