Net54baseball.com Forums - "New" Member Introduction

Hey all,

I'm not exactly a new member - I've been lurking and posting from time to time for the past few months, but figured I'd finally introduce myself. My name is Jeff Larson, I'm 41, and only recently started collecting again. My father started "collecting" in 56, purchasing just a few packs. He ramped it up in 57 and 58, and was apparently spending every cent he made by the time the 59's, 60's, and 61's hit. He's a Yankees fan, since in his words - "That's who was always on the radio". He'd listen to the games and arrange whatever cards he had on the floor and act them out. Unfortunately that means some of his more damaged cards were also Yankees. Once he graduated high school, he gave up hoarding cards, packed everything into cardboard boxes, and let them sit. They stayed at his mom's house until the early 80's until she told him to pick them up or she'd throw them out. He did, and let them sit in our garage for a couple of years. Some time in '84, one of my uncles bought him a price guide, and they immediately came indoors, and retriggered his collecting bug. At the same time, the sickness must have spread to me and my younger brother, as we started to get interested in it. Since my dad was a Yankees fan, and I didn't know any better, I was also a Yankees fan. I also played first base in little league, so Don Mattingly was my favorite player. In fact, the first pack purchase I ever made was an 84 Donruss rack pack from K Mart, and it happened to contain a Mattingly. That's all it took for me to be all in. Well, maybe that and the '59 Mantle my parents gave me for my birthday that same year.

After collecting again for a few years, visiting shows and shops around our area, my dad decided an easy way to grow his own collection would be to open a card shop and let people bring him cards, so he did just that around 1990. My younger brother and I worked it on evenings and weekends, and he'd work it in the afternoons (he owned a small building contracting business so his hours were flexible). My two older brothers would also occasionaly work there, but they weren't as interested in cards. He said later on that one of his motivations to open the store was to help teach my younger brother and me how to deal with people. Either way it was a heck of a great way to spend "working" my high school and college years.

By the time I graduated college in early '97, I had lost most of my desire to collect as my limited disposable income was spent largely on other things, and the card market in general hadn't been all that appealing for a few years. Because of that, I decided to cash out, and sold off nearly everything in my collection, including my 84 Donruss Mattingly. Fortunately, I held onto the 59 Mantle since it held the most sentimental value at the time. My dad kept the card shop open for a couple more years, before closing it for good. He kept at least a couple of his dealer accounts and continued to purchase unopened product for several years, selling some, hoarding some, and opening a bit until 2004/05 or so, at which point he stopped completely. All of his inventory sat in his house and workshop until earlier this year. He decided he wanted to start selling it, and wanted to know if I was willing to help. Not knowing any better, and really not having any idea what was in his collection anymore, I said sure. The first thing he showed me was the workshop. The amount of unopened products he had from the late 90's and early 2000's amazed me. I had no idea how much stuff he had been sitting on. Going in I really didn't know which of these was valuable and what was junk, and since my last real exposure to unopened was from the overproduction of the early to mid 90's, I assumed it was mostly worthless. Then I started checking prices, and couldn't believe how good or hard to find some of his stuff was. Boxes and cases of late 90's basketball, signature products, and other high end boxes. Just that was overwhelming. Then, I was reminded at just how much of a raw collection he had, much of which I hadn't really ever taken a good hard look at. When I collected, I was more interested in the newer products than his old stuff (with a few exceptions), and he didn't have a good portion of his older stuff out when he had the shop. He had a 5000 count box dedicated to 57's and 58's. Another dedicated to 59's and 60's. And another with almost entirely 61's, almost all of which were from when he was a kid. Many were in top loads, but it was still a huge amount of raw cards. He also had 62's on up in good quantity, just not as many as the 57's-61's. All in all, hundreds of thousands of cards to go through, although many of them were from the junk era.

So, since then, much of my free time has been spent going through singles to pull out grading worthy cards, and getting his boxes listed on eBay. I've learned a heck of a lot since getting back in, and my eye for grading has gotten pretty good. To keep my workload at least somewhat manageable, I've sent pretty much anything valued at over $50 off to Brent. It's not as if PWCC needs a plug, but I've had nothing but great experiences with him, and it's made my job much easier. Anyway, as you can imagine, the fun of going through this stuff has been insane. There was really no way I could go through these things without rekindling my collecting bug. Unfortunately, I haven't actually had much time to work on starting to rebuild my own collection, so I'm starting small by putting together a NM or better 56 Topps set and a few Mattingly items here and there. My wife mentioned a few weeks ago that if she collected, she'd collect Babe Ruth, so one of the things I got her for her birthday is a 32 Sanella Type 1 Ruth. It's just a great looking image and card for the price even in higher grades. I figured if I can get her hooked too, it would make talking her into going to Nationals a bit easier.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I wanted to finally give an introduction, and thank anyone who has answered questions. Also thanks to the couple of guys I've done deals with so far on here.

Jeff