My dad worked in a mfg setting in the 70's also. Was tough work but he make good money for working hard. As a baby boomer raised in rural PA he was somewhat tight with money. A couple bucks here and there for some packs was cool but I was informed that there was no way I was gonna be allowed to "waste 50$ on a Pete Rose card" even if it was his rookie card. Besides, I had several Rose cards with him in a Phillies uniform and they looked better than the floating heads anyway.
So, 40 years later my son and I are at this Gettysburg estate auction of a old time, hard core card collector. It was literally a ranch home full of cards in the middle of an apple orchard. There were hay wagons loaded with unopened modern, baseball reference books, postcards, a house full of boxes of random cards, early 20th century cards, and 3 large fiber drums of random cards- plus, lots of dealers & collectors.
The "mystery drums" seemed interesting as we noticed some '67's, a nice morgan rookie, and a few other decent cards mixed in the top layer with early '80s commons. And they did not seem to be drawing much attention.
My son was excited about the idea of buying over 120,000 cards at auction so I let him pretend to bid when they came up. The auctioneer would look at him and then check w me for the bid when it came around. We wound up buying the cards for under .01 each. Some guys were cool and congratulated him on they buy, and a few "know it all's" dropped comment's like "man I got some junk cards for ya at that price" and "ya ain't gonna find a Mantle in that barrel kid". We still laugh about that comment because he was correct... there were over 2 dozen of them. Along with near sets from every year 1960 thru '83 that turned out to be straight from the wax packs.
We were like card archeologists finding cards from all different years as we carefully excavated the drums that summer. I recall Tom Petty played in the background and Joey shouting "dad, we got one, it's Pete! " we sold most of the cards and put the money in the kids college funds.He got to keep the Rose card as payment for being my helper with the deal... so, I couldn't sell it even if I wanted too
