T206 Wagner Sales History
 

Does anyone have any confirmed sales of T206 Wagner cards from around the 1960s? I can only find sales from 1980s and earlier, and the fact that it was listed at $50 in a 1933 card catalog. I'd be interested in knowing what it sold for in between those time periods. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!

Cole-

Never say never...but, what you are looking for will be very, very, if not impossible to find.

Before the card explosion in the 1980s, there was not a lot of 'outside' interest in the hobby, much less what appeared at the time to be just another old card.

Noticeable records did not really begin until the 1980s.

Now, I respect my elders, so if my analysis of this is incorrect, and you qualify as an elder, please share your knowledge.

IMO, I would think such a data search should only be tied to abject curiosity because if anything is found, it will not be germane to current evaluations.

...and finally, there is something attractive in newly discovered, long stashed-away and not thought of cards 'jumping' directly from whatever abyss to become that days' Black Swamp find, etc.

.

Yes, there are quite a few Wagner sales reported before the 1980s, relatively speaking. As someone who collects very old hobby publications I have seen several references to private sales. I'd be surprised if someone doesn't have a few they could mention, off hand.

I seem to recall in year 2000 when Mastro Auctions was offering "THE Wagner", Rob Lifson was with the company then, and prepared an extremely impressive presentation of the card, including a list of sales. This occasion marked the time when the card sold for over $1,000,000. So, now to track down a nearly 17-year old auction catalog. Good luck.

I believe it was back in 1962 when Frank Nagy bought his Wagner, and it cost him a whopping $250, at the time a fortune for just one card. What I remember is that Nagy said the card was shipped with TWENTY POUNDS OF PROTECTIVE WRAPPING---POW!!!!!

---Brian Powell

there have been a few stories on this board regarding wagner sales from the 70's and beyond I believe...you just have to find them!!!!

Not sure if this has been shared yet or not, but I read this a few days back....while no dollar amounts are shown, the chain of ownership for this particular copy is discussed


http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com...-scp-auctions/

Story from the late 1970's...... all names withheld to protect the guilty AND innocent! Collector/dealer arranged to buy a T206 Wagner for $2000 and had a sale for the same card arranged for $2500. The seller showed up at the flea market where the dealer was set up (this was in Nashville, Tennessee) and the dealer was busy with another customer......so hold on.......the prospective buyer showed up and the two guys started talking...... the deal was done for $2250 and the dealer got ZIPP a DEE DO DAH! Like I always said, the cards and the money arent the best part of this hobby....ITS THE STORIES!! ps none of these people were me, I heard the story from the dealer later.......

trdcrdkid's posts should have information, as well as the dubious Hauls of Shame website has a ton of features on the various histories of the Wagners.

This page from the Lemke-Wagner files mentions a sale in the early 60's for $100.

Attachment 268523

Interesting that the theoretical count back then in 1977 was between 12 and 60. We've found 50 or so by now, 40 years later. And I loved the line about it not finding a bidder at $100 for four consecutive months. Thanks for the article, Rich.

In 1974 or early 75 there was a NY times ad offering a Wagner for $1500.00 my Dad called and was told that someone had already looked at it said it was in vg condition and passed on the card. Owner said others had said they were coming to look at card. My dad said he would buy the card but owner said first $1500 got the card. Owner called back 15 minutes later and said card was sold.
Jonathan

My father bought and sold three different T206 Wagner cards between the years of 1972 and 1974, then again in 1984. I still have a hand written receipt for his second Wagner and a letter of provenance related to the third.

Great story! :)

I was the buyer for one of the Wagner's Andrew mentions that his Dad Mike Aronstein sold.

I have written about it elsewhere here on Net54.

Fred

Do you still have it?

No, sold it to Halper years ago. It was his first Wagner.

Lost track of it never knew what Halper did with it, then it turned up in a Goodwin auction and sold for $1.2 MILLION!!! I knew it was mine because of a unique crease.

See:

https://goodwinandco.com/LotDetail.a...entoryid=19548

Fred

Here is a want ad from the 1946 ACC looking for a Wagner
I have also included the listed price for the Wagner from 46 ACC. It seems to be an accepted fact that Wagner was listed at 50 from the earliest guides (even REA descriptions state it). But as you can see it simply isn't true. I don't think that the figure was 50 until the guides in the mid 50's. I know this is a small point but I have always found it odd how often it is misstated

Wow!!!:eek:

If Frank Nagy bought his Wagner from Preston Orem in the early 1960s, it might have been from one of the ads in Card Collectors' Bulletin through which Orem sold most of his collection. When I get home on Sunday (I'm on the road right now), I'll look through my CCBs from that period and see if I can find anything, though I don't have a complete run.

It was late 1978 or early 1979, I was working for a fur dying & dressing company called Meisel & Peskin Fur Dressers, located in Brooklyn, NY, Union Local 122. It was my first adult job and I was the youngest guy working with a group of old-timers. This group of guys were straight out of a movie. They drank, gambled and talked sports all day. When things were slow we played poker all day. One day during poker we were talking about baseball cards and my Dispatcher, his name was Emil (Red) Weiss, an old-timer, said do I know about the Wagner card. I said sure do, that I have purchased many t206 cards from my local coin store for 25 cents each in the early 70's. Red then stood up, pulled out his wallet and slowly pulled out a Wagner. He told me his father owned a saloon back in the day and he would clean up at night and go through all the empty cigarette packs on the floor. This is how he came up with the Wagner. The first words out of my mouth were (do you want to sell it). He replied sure, for $500 it's yours. The Wagner had its share of creases even though it was protected in a thin plastic. I thought $500 was a bit too much, so the negotiation started. I was earning $200 a week take home and this was good money at that time but not enough to afford the Wagner. Red would not budge on his price, so I had to come up with the money. I wound up getting the $500 from a loan shark that worked with a different division of Meisel Peskin on the 2nd floor. Now I owned a Wagner. My girlfriend called me an idiot, but still married me in the summer of 79. Now it was late 1979 or early 1980 and I read in the daily news about an upcoming baseball card show in a Manhattan Hotel. The day of the show, I grabbed the Wagner and a buddy and headed to the show. I was thinking about selling it but had nothing to go by regarding price. When I arrived, I showed the card to the first dealer as we entered. It didn't take long, I had a crowd around me. The gentleman running the show ask if I would like to put it up for auction. I said sure as I needed the money with a child on the way. The final price was $2,200 or $2,250. I remember getting home and slapping the money down on the table and saying to my wife, (who's the idiot now). I talk about it all the time, she is tired of hearing it. A few members here know the story already. Oh well. It's Wagner #17 on t206Resourse.

What a cool story Chuck. The last reported sale of that Wagner was a Lelands
Auction in December of 2003.
Attachment 268635

+1

If you have had your cards long enough, who of us has NOT been on the receiving end of "You're an Idiot!!!" ????

Just saying...

thanks for sharing
 

outstanding story on that wagner for $500!!!

thats a whale of a story Chuck!!!! congrats!!!!!

Great story, Chuck!

Holy Mother of God..... :eek:

Chuck!
Awesome story and a bit depressing :)

Very cool!

Any idea what the card sold for in 2003?


I'm sure it's a painful number.

Great story...I like the fact that the gentleman carried the Wagner around in his wallet. That has to account for a lot of the creases.

Brian

Research takes time....
 

There are probably earlier valuations but Burdick said value was 2 bucks a piece for Plank or Wagner, in 1943. Set #521 Baseball Series, white border, approximately 3/4 of the page down...

http://luckeycards.com/acc1943b.jpg

Let's give this one nudge to the top to see if anyone else has seen some early valuations or sales of Wags or Plank?

Both the 1953 and 1960 editions of the American Card Catalog gave valuations of $50 for T206 Wagner and $10 for Plank, but Lionel Carter wrote in the November-December 1955 Sport Fan that "$10. offers for Ed Plank and $50. for Hans Wagner go begging" (see here: http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=227125). In the July 1956 Sport Card Journal, Carter similarly wrote that "A good copy of Plank will net the seller $10, while offers of $50 for cards of Hans Wagner go begging." (See here: http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=225029) That suggests that Burdick's prices for Plank and Wagner were already out of whack with the market by the mid-1950s.

In the February 28, 1962 issue of The Card Collector, Mike Adams mentions the "official" valuations of $10 for Plank and $50 for Wagner, but says that a Wagner had supposedly sold for $250. I suspect that this was the copy that Frank Nagy bought from Preston Orem, even though the article posted earlier in this thread says that the selling price in that deal was $100. Later in 1962, Buck Barker wrote an article for The Sport Hobbyist about the prices of T206s. He says that he remembers a listing in about 1940 of $2.50 for Wagner and $1 for Plank, which had risen to $25 and $10 by 1946, though Barker's memory may have been faulty. He mentions the rumored $250 sale of a Wagner, which he must have read about in Adams's article. I posted both of these articles in this thread: http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217680.

When the hobby became more organized in the 1970s, and conventions proliferated, sales of Wagners became more public and better documented. The September-October 1972 Sport Fan has a headline "Mastro Pays $1500 For Card", and the details are given inside in Irv Lerner's writeup of Dan Dischley's convention that summer in Hauppauge, Long Island. A guy walked into the show off the street with a Wagner that he wanted to sell for $2000. Bill Mastro really wanted it but didn't have the cash. Between that show and the Detroit show later in the summer, Mastro worked out a deal with the guy to buy the Wagner for $1500. Lerner states that the previous record price for a Wagner had been a little over two years earlier (thus in 1970), when Bill Haber paid Wirt Gammon $500 for one. I think that sale might have been written about in The Ballcard Collector, but I don't have time to look it up right now. In any case, I've posted below the cover of that issue of Sport Fan plus Lerner's article (the whole thing, since I figured people might find it interesting).

Fred McKie (whiteymet) mentioned earlier in this thread that he bought a Wagner from Mike Aronstein. That happened at the 1973 Midwest Sports Collectors Convention (the Detroit show) in July 1973, and it was extensively written up in the September-October 1973 Sport Fan. It was the first time a Wagner had ever sold at a live auction, with Fred paying $1100 for it, even though the card was not actually present in the room. Below the other article, I've posted the cover of that issue of Sport Fan (with Fred in picture #4 at the top, alongside Elwood Scharf and his wife), plus two articles by Bob Jaspersen that describe the auction for the Wagner, along with other stuff that people might find interesting.

http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70418_0001.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70418_0002.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70418_0003.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70418_0004.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70419_0001.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70419_0002.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70419_0003.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70419_0004.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70419_0005.jpg
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/g...70419_0006.jpg

Great stories!!

Some great information and awesome stories, thanks everyone! Was trying to show my dad how good of an investment it would have been if he bought one as a kid in the 60s. Loved the story about the guy carrying around a Wagner in his wallet. I would think by 1979 he'd at least have it in a toploader and stored away somewhere?

There were no toploaders as we know them in 79. Plenty of cut up pages, which of course were all PVC.

Steve B