Posted By:
David SmithNot pre-war but just thinking about this topic upsets me.
Back in the late 1980's, when I was still in college, I used to go out looking for cards and I even put some want ads in newspapers. One time, a person called me up saying they had a couple hundred thousand cards for sale. This person used to be a dealer and his shop went out of business and he just wanted to get rid of everything he had.
I went to his house, saw the cards and bought them. It took me two trips, with my car loaded and almost dragging the ground, to get the cards back to the house I was living in at the time. Most of teh cards were from the 1970's up to 1985. There were some back to the 1950's but not very many.
Included in this group of cards were unopened factory baseball sets from 1984 and 1985 and unopened 500 (600?) count boxes of baseball cards from 1982 to 1985. Since I got a REALLY good deal on all these cards, I set up at shows and sold the factory sets for less than book value. Same for some of the unopened 500 count boxes.
The heartbreaker, at least to me, were the football, basketball and hockey cards that were included.
In the collection were unopened packs from 1977 to 1982. WHen I got the cards back to my house, I found these packs and me and two of my friends spent a couple of hours one night just opening all of these packs and seeing what cards were inside. It was like we were 8 years old again.
I don't know how many Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson Rookies were in those cards but there were a number of them. I also don't know how many early Wayne Gretzky cards were in there but there were also some of them too.
I took some of these cards to the shows but not a lot of people were interested in them and thus they didn't sell too well. So, because of this and because I wanted to get my money back as quickly as possible, I sold ALL of these cards to a local card shop for $20 dollars and a couple of 1968 Topps baseball star cards I wanted for my set.
Unfortunately for me, Beckett started putting out their monthly football, basketball and hockey price guides about two years later and those cards that I owned and nobody wanted at the time shot up in price. I KNOW the cards that I sold for $20 dollars in 1989 were worth at least $2,000 dollars shortly after the price guides came out.
To this day, I kick myself for not keeping these cards (since I didn't have much money in them and because they were in such great condition) and then sold them after the price guides came out. The profits from those cards would have helped pay for my college costs AND allowed me to buy some pre-war baseball cards that I found but didn't have the money for (a group of about 20 Curtis Ireland Candy cards).
David