Topic: Tell us a powerful collecting story!
 

Thread for a powerful collecting story. A moment, or series of moments, an exchange, a period of time that had a great impact on your as a collector and as a person. Pictures, visual aids, whatever else welcome!

If you feel comfortable to share, I'm sure we could build an awesome thread together!

Cheers! :D

^^ I've attached here a image documenting the closure of AJ's Sports Stop - the card shop i went to regularly as a kid with my umpiring and lawn mowing money. it was a little shack off the side of the road by a restaurant; their vintage stock was gorgeous. flipping through binders and binders in their piles stacked and glass cases. that's where i first developed my love of vintage... going there with my dad to get my first 1960 topps warren spahn.

For me it was how I started collecting. I was a teenager who couldn't have cared less about sports cards. My younger brother stopped at my house and was showing me all his cards he had started collecting and had a Beckett showing me prices.

I had around a couple hundred mostly NrMint 60s cards I was given as a little kid in the mid 70s that I put in a drawer and never touched. So I pulled them out and was amazed at how much all the Mantles and other cards cost. Over the last 40 years I have done a ton of buying, selling, and trading. In that time I have owned countless high end vintage cards and insanely rare junk era cards. My collection at this point takes up most of one room and has 40+ Wade Boggs Louisville Slugger bats that range from a little kids Tee-Ball model to one of his 1/1 AllStar bats.

In that entire 40+ years I have not spent a single penny out of pocket for any of it. It has all come from selling/trading the original cards I had given to me as a very little kid. I also like to "rent" high end and silly rare cards. Meaning I will get a cool expensive card and later sell/trade it/them for another card(s) I decide I want more at that time.

After the giving up cards, growing up, moving out, and then having mom give the cards to Goodwill story, which everyone has heard a million times, here's another good one:

Not long after I bought a Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig signed OAL ball, and 1933 Goudey Ruth and Gehrig cards, for $1000 out of a reenlistment bonus (1988), I was stationed in Charleston, SC. I met up with a retired Navy radioman who was selling cards at a converted grocery store that had become an antique mall, called Vendors Mall, on Spruill Ave. outside the Navy Base. I bought cards from him, but more importantly, we sat around talking baseball and cards for hours. Basically every Saturday I had off without the duty.

After a couple of years of this, he started saying he was going to truly retire, and was going to sell his vast, many thousand vintage card collection at a local auction house there in Charleston called Rammouilat Auctions.

One Saturday after I had been away on leave for a few weeks, I came in, and sure enough, his space was vacant. There was a fellow directly across who I also knew who sold old books. He saw me and said, aren't you Ingram? I said yes, and he said hold on, and went to the back of his space and came back with a grocery sack that was full and stapled closed, that said "for Ingram" on it.

I went back to my barracks room and opened the sack. I couldn't believe my eyes. The sack was absolutely full of every kind of vintage cards you can imagine...OJs, t206, t205, Goudey, Play Ball, Bowmans, Topps!

If you ever wonder how I have so many great cards, as Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story!