[Hankphenom]

Fred's story is the mic-drop, I don't think anybody could top that. But somebody described the hobby in those days as the Wild West, and that's exactly what it was. And for Fred's sake, everybody should know that an entire generation of collectors in the 70s and 80s had a few shots at a Wagner and didn't pull the trigger. My first memory of one that I could have bought was in a Trader Speaks in the mid-70s for $1,500. That was a chunk of money in those days, but I probably had as much in my stereo system, so not out of the question. But, as I tell people when they ask me why uber-rich guys ever stop bidding on something they really want, I answer "well, nobody wants to feel like they're being stupid." Nobody knew where the hobby was going, and nobody knew how many Wagners would surface as it grew. Now we know, and it can make our decisions look foolish in hindsight. Dan McKee told me that he let not one, but two, Baltimore News Ruths go, one for $1,000 and the second for $8,000, and that his dad, Dan Sr., saw one in a shop for $1,000 and passed on it, going back the next day only to find it had been sold. So there you are. Things were different back then.
This is to preface my story, which fits in well here. Sometime around 1998 or so, I needed money and, being a memorabilia guy, decided to sell my WaJo card collection. I only had these cards because an avid collector named Bill Rubin, who worked with my mother at the Labor Dept,, would pick up cards of her father at shows when he saw them cheap. She put them in a cigar box for years, and at some point she gave them to me. I had pretty much every standard WaJo card there was, not in great condition, but not beaters, either. They were "presentable." Then at some point around the mid-90s, I met a dealer named Dave Speidel, who would somehow come up with the rarer WaJos and trade them to me for Johnson cancelled checks, which the family had started letting out into the hobby some years before. I don't know what his sources were, but Dave, a real hustler and wheeler-dealer, came up with a Texas Tommy, a Baseball Bats, a Willards Chocolates, a Holland Creamery, an Oxford Confectionery, a Vassar Sweater, a BF2, some other very rare cards, and a few strip cards, some of which were uncatalogued. One day he brought me a Texas Tommy Type 2, which I turned down because his guy wanted $1,500 cash for it. In addition, I had a nice collection of WaJo postcards, some supplied by Dave, some from the family scrapbooks, and some I had bought. There was a PC 757, a PC 796, a Johnson Birthplace, an Oakland Tribune, a Weiser Wonder, a Lawrence Semons, and a few other goodies in that group. I had all the cards and postcards in one binder, and at a Fort Washington show, I started shopping them around. As I said, I needed money, so I priced the entire binder to sell--at $4,000. At the House of Cards table, where they were still in the process of blowing out a collection of thousands of baseball books they had bought, Bill Huggins (R.I.P) spent maybe a minute turning the pages, then said, "Hank, it's not there," and pushed the binder back across the table. Dean Zindler was next, and he spent a little more time going through it before handing it back to me with a shake of his head. "What the hell," I thought, I believed I had really priced these things to sell. Now I was pissed, and I had also by then starting signing up for some shows to start selling off the bottom of my memorabilia collection along with my book, so I decided to start putting my cards out at those rather than come down from my price, which I thought was more than fair. There were a bunch of shows around Baltimore at that time, and the first one I did was a little vintage-only one at a motel in Laurel, MD, I think, promoted by collector and media guy Phil Wood. The first person to show much interest in my binder was Val Kehl, who picked up the Texas Tommy for $300 along with a few other gems. Over the next few shows, I did pretty well, it seemed--I remember Bob McCann giving me $1,000 for one of my postcards, and pretty soon I had pocketed about $8,000, which took care of my money problem, so I stashed most of what was left back in the binder and parceled them out over the years. I remember the Oakland Tribune went for five grand in an auction, and the Weiser Wonder did about the same. I have no idea how much I ended up pulling in from the collection, some healthy multiple of my original asking price--but I was pretty darn proud of myself for not giving in to the discouraging beginning of my venture. To this day, I can't understand what Bill and Dean were thinking--maybe times were tough in the hobby right at that pre-grading and pop report time. Of course, I shudder to think what that binder would be worth today, and I'm extremely pleased that my friend Val got to put some of the extreme rarities in his wonderful collection. We would all like to have back today just about everything we've ever sold, and God bless the collectors who had enough faith in the future of the hobby to have held on to the things they bought. Being quite comfortable now and delighted with what I still have, I can look back with some sanguinity, but it makes for a hell of a story, no?