New in the collection: Randolph Scott cigarette card

Card with black and white image of Randolph Scott smoking a cigarette.

Randolph Scott left Charlotte in 1917 to serve in World War I. Returning home, he went to Georgia Tech with dreams of being an All-America football player until he suffered a back injury. He then transferred to the University of North Carolina, where he studied textile engineering and manufacturing for two semesters before returning to Charlotte to work for  his father’s accountancy firm.

“In 1927 Scott traveled to Hollywood with a letter of introduction from his father to Howard Hughes. He was able to meet Hughes and score a screen test with Cecil B. DeMille….”

— From “Classics in the Carolinas: Randolph Scott.”

This German card, one of hundreds in a movie star series inserted in packs of Lloyd cigarettes,  is circa 1936.

“If to collect cigarette cards is a sign of eccentricity,”  Edward Wharton-Tigar commented after bequeathing his collection to the British Museum, “how then will posterity judge one who amassed the biggest collection in the world? Frankly, I care not.”