Several of my friends here have been officers of the HDA or other leagues, and can surely appreciate Randy’s letter in the 1st Houston Open program.
That was a huge effort by a lot of people, at a time when darts was taking off around the USA and HDA membership was growing rapidly. There were around 700 active HDA members in early 1980, and the organization continued to grow to over 1,200 members in years just after that.
This is just part of the H.O. program, most of the rest is advertising. I’ll try to scan the rest as time permits.
As with most of the darts documents I post from “the old days”, I designed and did the lay-outs for most of this program and a large part of the advertising.
Selling advertising in the program was the main method of financing our tournaments in the ’80s. Alcohol & cigarette companies were not allowed to directly sponsor sporting events, but they -could- buy advertising in a program for the event.
So, we printed darts tournament programs to get the support of Coors and other large corporate sponsors.
