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Posted By: sfmasher

Here's a funny story I wrote about collecting and the one that got away. The story is in my latest book, Left-Handed Stories. Thought I'd share it with the group. Hope you like it.

Best,

Travis

thesfmasher@yahoo.com
~~~~~~

Treasure Chest
By Travis Jensen

In the summer of ‘87, my mom packed me and my sister up into her old ’77 Buick Century station wagon and moved us from Chicago, Illinois to Denver, Colorado. She decided to move us there after being accepted into Denver University’s graduate program. She rented a small two bedroom duplex on South Gilpin Street, a half-mile or so away from campus.

I befriended Joey Tranella the first day we moved in. He lived in the house next door with his father and two sisters.

Joey’s father worked at the Flying Pie Pizzeria on University Ave., across the street from campus. I don’t know if Flying Pie is still in business or not, but to this day, I still consider it to be one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had. They served it just the way I like it, deep-dish, Chicago style. It reminded me of home. Not to mention, Joey’s dad always gave us free pizza whenever we came in, so that made it even all the better. There’s no pizza like free pizza.

One afternoon that summer, I believe it was mid July, Joey and I decided to go up to Flying Pie to pay his father a visit. My mom had given me a couple bucks to eat with, but since Joey’s dad always gave us the pizza for free, I decided that I was going to spend that money on a couple packs of baseball cards instead. It was “dump day” in our area, so everybody had their junk out on the edge of the street awaiting pick up.

Dump day was the one day a year in Denver that you could throw out all your old junk that the Goodwill didn’t want and the regular garbage men wouldn’t pick up. Each section of town had a different dump day and when it was your day, an enormous garbage truck nearly twice the size of a standard one would come huffing-n-puffing down the street with a cloud of black smoke billowing out of the exhaust and a team of three or four men dressed in blue jumpsuits hanging off the side. The truck would stop at each house and the men would jump off the side of the truck, load your junk into the compactor, and then proceed on to the next house.

Joey and I rummaged through some of the junk piles along the way to the pizzeria. Most of the stuff had already been picked through. The only good things we found were a couple of old Playboy Magazine’s from the late 60s. Since we couldn’t risk carrying the magazines with us, we tore some of the better pictures out of them, folded them up, and shoved them in our back pockets to look at later.

Joey’s dad was working the register at Flying Pie when we showed up. I ordered sausage and pepperoni; Joey had Canadian bacon and Pineapple.

Afterwards, we stopped off at the 7-11 a few doors down. Joey played a game of Space Invaders and I bought two packs of baseball cards. I popped the two free slabs of gum into my mouth and started scanning through the cards: Kevin Mitchell-got ‘em, Eric Davis-need ‘em, Carlton Fisk-need ‘em, Paul Molitor-got ‘em, Allan Trammel-need ‘em, Jose Conseco-Cool!

After I finished going through the two packs, I shoved the cards into my back pocket with the nudie pictures and watched Joey finish his game.

On the way home, Joey and I decided to walk down a different street than we had come up to see if we could find anything good in the junk piles. Again, most of the stuff had already been picked through, but Joey had some luck and ended up finding an old electric train set with tracks and other accessories in a pile about four blocks from our house. This particular house appeared to be vacant and had more junk waiting to be picked up than normal. There was a “For Sale” sign in the yard and it looked like the previous tenants had planned their move around dump day.

While Joey sat on lawn of the empty house examining the train set, I rummaged through a skyscraping pile of old garments that reeked heavily of mothballs. There, buried deep beneath the massive heap of clothing I discovered an old chest. It looked like an old pirates treasure chest you’d see in the movies or imagined while reading Treasure Island. Oh, this should be good, I thought, as I continued digging my way through the mound of musty clothing to get to the chest. Once I got it out, I flipped open the lid to see what was inside. To my surprise, the damn thing was practically overflowing with vintage baseball cards. There must have been four or five thousand of ‘em in there. I knew they were old because they were much smaller than the normal cards I was used to seeing and their uniforms and haircuts looked funny compared to those of today.

I picked up a small handful of the cards and started to thumb through them. The cardboard smelled like stale tobacco and I didn’t recognize any of the player’s names: Collins, Lajoie, Kelley, Duffy, Anson, Evers, Young, Fletcher, and Cobb.

Examining the cards further, I flipped them over to look at the backs. There were no stats, just a bunch of old cigarette advertisements of tobacco manufacturers that I had never heard of: Sweet Caporal, Piedmont, Old Mill, Drum, and a couple others.

“Hey, whatcha lookin at?” Joey asked, glancing up from the train set.

“Nothin,” I replied. “Just a bunch of crappy old baseball cards.”

“Anything good?”

“Naw, just a bunch of old timers I ain’t ever heard of before,” I said, then tossed the cards back into the trunk, shut the lid, threw some clothes back over it, and then walked over to where Joey was to check out the train set he had found.

Joey and I didn’t speak much on the walk home on account of the fact that I was jealous he found the train set and I didn’t find anything.

Here I am now almost 18 years later, an avid vintage baseball card collector, and I’m kicking myself in the ass for leaving that trunk of cards behind. As it turns out, the cards were from the 1909 T206 White Border Set and 1911 T205 Gold Border set. Judging by the quantity, I’m guessing they’d be worth somewhere in the area of two to three million dollars on todays market. Who knows what kind of gems were in there, because some of the cards I specifically remember seeing in that small handful I thumbed through alone book for a couple thousand dollars a piece. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was even an elusive Honus Wagner card in there, which in decent condition can bring in well over one million dollars alone at auction. This treasure chest of cards would have definitely gone down in history as one of the hobby’s most significant finds of all-time, a true piece of Americana. Too bad I didn’t realize this until many years after the fact.

I would give anything in the world right now to turn back the clock and replay that situation over again. I’d be sitting on a freaking gold mine right now…coulda-woulda-shoulda. Sometimes I wonder if someone came along after me and scooped the cards up, or if they’re just sitting in a dump somewhere in Colorado decomposing underneath a mountain of trash. That’s the part that bothers me the most, I’ll never know. I wonder if the original owner ever realized the true value of the cards after discarding them.

Ha! And to think I was jealous that Joey found that train set and I didn’t. What’s even funnier is that the train didn’t even work when we took it back to Joey’s. We spent close to two hours assembling it and cleaning the gunk of the tracks and all it did was give us both a good shock when we plugged the old transformer into the wall and turned on the power. On top of that, I forgot to pull those nudie pictures from out of the back pocket of my pants and my mom ended up finding them along with the two packs of cards I bought while doing the laundry a few days later. She tossed the cards in the trash, grounded me for two weeks, and decided it that it was time she gave me the dreaded sex talk about the birds and the bees. Ain’t that the breaks?