Oh my star vintage archive#
Oh my star vintage series#

After a bit of bouncing around, the Strib’s VP for marketing, Steve Yaeger, got back to concede, “Oh, it’s a story and a half. Calls to PiPress Editor Mike Burbach, (the preferred go-to guy for staffers reluctant to say anything on record), were not returned. Locally, those in the know aren’t much more forthcoming. Reporting about Rogers by any of the papers known to have bought into his now-foundered scheme is rare to nonexistent. The thought that big-city newspapers like the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press here in Minnesota - and others in Chicago, Detroit and Denver - were willing to hand over (for a nice price) one of their (and their community’s) most valuable historical archives to a character like Rogers is startling in itself, and may explain why so little has been said about the deal. Finally, the FBI raided his place, and he was tossed out of the business, a receiver appointed to make sense of the mess.

Oh my star vintage series#

First, sports collectors who bought what they thought were original items from Rogers began crying “fake.” Then a series of people Rogers did business with started suing him over unpaid bills. Today, Rogers faces more than a dozen lawsuits, which together seek something north of $90 million.

This would allow the papers to have far more convenient access to their archives - and gave Rogers the photographs and shared rights to the images. There his staff would painstakingly scan and organize the material.

Oh my star vintage archive#

The basic deal being that after negotiating a price, his Rogers Photo Archive would send a truck or two up, package the not-so-orderly files of old photos and negatives and haul them back to Arkansas. Whatever else you might say about him, John Rogers was clearly one hell of a salesman.Īfter first buying up several high-profile collections of sports memorabilia, the Little Rock entrepreneur hit on the idea of talking big-city newspapers out of their predigital photo archives.