Posted By:
warshawlawI found a bunch of 1950-56 Callahon HOFers in a $1 box at a show. I bought them all for $20. They were so pretty that I sent 13 of them to SGC for grading. Got (5) 8's (including Grove, Speaker, Young), (4) 8.5's and (4) 9's (Terry, Sisler, Waner, Frisch).
Around 1992 I bought a collection of 1970 boxing football and hockey from the original owner. He opened the packs as a kid, put them away, and forgot about them for 20 years. I could tell he opened one box of basketball 2nd series, 4 boxes of football and 3 boxes of hockey, because he came over to my house with the cards in some of the original boxes. He was so thrilled with the $1500 I offered him that he threw in the original boxes (those unfortunately bit it in the Northridge earthquake in '94 when my entertainment center collapsed on them).
One of my best lucky finds was a misdescribed auction lot from a major house. They offered a huge collection of boxing cards as group of assorted cards. The counts of the assorted lots from each of the sets led me to suspect that they were in fact complete sets, so I bought the lot. They were full sets, allright, and many of the T cards graded very high too (several 6, 7, 7.5 from SGC). Best of all, the 1948 Leaf Sharkey was actually a 1932 US Caramel worth like ten times as much.
Recently, I bought a big collection of exhibit boxing cards including many 1930's rarities for $5 a card. Worth at least five times as much.
Not quite a card but still a great deal: I found an auction with an unintelligible description of the item and no photo but it sounded like it was a vintage Benny Leonard autographed PC. I contacted the seller and found out what it was, lodged a bid at the last minute with a sniper service and walked off with a $300 autographed RPPC for $50.