[G1911]

My favorite pre-war baseball card and my favorite card(s). Livingston here was my first T card of any kind, bought my Dad for my 10th Christmas after a three years of collecting post-war vintage together. At the time a $10 card was a huge pickup for us. I couldn't put it down, I remember keeping it in its top-loader in my pocket for like an entire week. Almost a century old! Total common, but he and the other ones I first got with my dad will always be my favorites. I should build a back run of this card.

When I was 12, my Dad bought for another Christmas a lot of non-sports T cards that were like .20 a pop or something and he gambled I might like it. In them was 7 T220 Silver Border boxers. Dangerous, that quickly became my favorite set once I realized that unlike the gold border baseballs we could possibly afford to collect them on my tiny kid budget. What I didn't know at the time was that the checklists were wrong, and there were 2 cards that are still all but impossible to find. James J. Corbett has only 4-5 known copies today. Mike Donovan has 5 known copies in total today; but when I was 12 he was not even confirmed. I eventually marked him as the probable 25th card instead of Jack Goodman, which still has never provably surfaced, based on the artwork design that strongly suggests he belongs in the half of the set that comes in silver border flavor. Shockingly, it did appear in a random eBay listing. Unfortunately I was like 15 then and my budget was still basically nonexistent. I scrounged and bid every penny I could come up with at that time, but failed. It sold for somewhere between $100 and $200 off memory (an absolute steal, even then) but I had a $50 budget or so as a broke ass kid.

Years later, a WTB post shot in the dark here secured that same exact copy, the original discovery I had been sad about losing as a kid. That's the left Donovan in the photo. Then I discovered a proof panel of 8 (there are more proofs than there are production cards with this sheet discover) and bought that too, putting me in boxing card heaven and giving me my favorite piece. Then I was lucky enough to secure the Corbett sheet through the generosity of another collector who snagged it first, but then chose to let it go into my rebuild of the sheet when they didn't need to do that. And then I bought the PSA 1 Donovan, which I had tried to buy over a decade before when it was listed for a silly low BIN on eBay but someone else must have clicked it seconds first because I couldn't check out. It came with the 2.5 Donovan, 2 in a day! Also got the PSA 5 Corbett. Then the PSA 6 Corbett appeared and I won that too, in the same week I happened to land the first Corbett.

Anyways, I love these old cards and Donovan will always be my favorite, with Corbett in the #2 slot, just because they are the tough cards kid me salivated over in the set I latched onto as my favorite for some reason. Probably the shiny border. Nothing can beat a proof sheet of the Boxing T card version of Wagners and Planks for me, though there are many more valuable items out there.