Originally Posted by Hankphenom
This thread strikes me as almost confessional in tone, so I'll tell get mine off my chest. About 25 years ago, I needed some quick cash, so I took my WaJo card binder to the Fort Washington Philly Show to shop it around. I've always been more of a memorabilia guy anyway, and many of my cards had been given to me by a friend of my Mom's who got into cards very early and would pick up WaJo's for me when he found them cheap, so selling them didn't seem like any great sacrifice when I really needed money. I had all the basic cards, most in G-VG condition, but there were also some extreme rarities, like a Texas Tommy type I, BB Bats, Vassar Sweaters, others, along with some great early postcards. I decided on a price of 4K for the binder, and started with Bill Huggins, who turned the pages quickly and without a word pushed the binder back across his display case to me. The next stop was to Dean Zindler, set up near by, who told me the price was too high. "What the Hell?" I thought, I KNOW these cards are worth that much, and started breaking the binder up to sell individual cards at that and several succeeding shows. After quickly pocketing about 8K for maybe half the contents, I was feeling pretty proud of myself. The next show after Fort Washington was a tiny show promoted by Phil Wood outside of Baltimore that had some great dealers but for which few collectors showed up, and my friend Val Kehl happened to be the lucky WaJo fanatic who got the pick of the binder largely still intact. I remember gouging him out of $300 for the Texas Tommy and sticking him for a few hundred more for what I now know are some of the rarest WaJos around. If he sees this, he can offer more details of his bounty, and my consolation is that if there is one collector whom I would never begrudge this good luck, it is Val, one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. Among the many other consolations in telling this sad tale--including how great the hobby has been to me in general all these years--is the fact that I, like most of us, would like to have back everything we've ever sold, but this is the one I do still think about from time to time, although I try not to think about it too often--how much would I be able to extract from that binder today?
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