[Leon]

Thanks for sharing, Bill. Great story and legendary hobby stuff.

Originally Posted by zimp

HERE'S A WRITE UP I DID FOR A LOCAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 1N 2018..The Honus Wagner Baseball Card Story

Back in 1910 trading cards were issued in packages of cigarettes....These cards were placed in each pack to help the cigarettes from getting bent in your pocket.
Subjects on the cards ranged from flowers, fish, animals, soldiers, presidents, flags but the most popular were the current baseball players of the day...Kids would hang out in front of stores waiting for a smoker to buy a pack then hopefully get the baseball card from the smoker. The baseball set pictured over 500 different cards including all the greats of the time. Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, Frank Chance, Cy Young, Walter Johnson and many many more. At that time the players were sent samples of their cards to be used in the packages. Honus Wagner of the Pittsburg Pirates however did not want his picture being associated with tobacco so he asked that they refrain from putting his cards in the packs. The companies assuming every player wanted their pictures in the packs had already issued some of the Wagner cards in the packs but ceased the production of his cards shortly thereafter. As years went by and collectors were putting sets of these cards together they all found that the Wagner card was extremely rare. When I started collecting baseball cards in the 1950's as a youngster the legend of this card was well known. At that time the card has already been valued at $250. where most of the other cards in the set were still only fetching 50¢ to $5.00 apiece. In the 1970's I became a full time collector and dealer of baseball cards. We would set up at shows all over the country buying and selling baseball cards. One of the ways we would buy a lot of cards was to set up in a hotel room and advertise in the local paper that we were in town buying old baseball cards. We would do this in most of the major cities on the east coast. We bought hundreds of thousands of cards but never saw a Honus Wagner card from 1910. By the late 1970's the card value had risen to the $10,000. range. In 1978 we decided to do a buying weekend at two hotels in the Pittsburgh area. By this time I had three partners so two of us were at the Holiday Inn South Hills and Myself and partner were at the Wilkinsburg Holiday Inn. Whatever was bought was to be split up four ways.
Our ad stated we were there Friday, Saturday & Sunday paying top cash for your old baseball cards. Well Friday was pretty slow with very little walking in but I received a call from my friend John Stagerwald sportscaster on channel 2. He asked if he could come over and do and interview for the sports that night on TV.
I brought in my set of the 1910 baseball cards all mounted in a binder and John was going through them on TV....He came to an empty spot and he asked where was this card and I told him that's where the Honus Wagner card belongs. Then I proceeded to tell him the story of the Wagner card. Well that night the piece was run on the eleven o'clock news. Well the next morning we open up the room and very little happening. Then a well dressed man and woman walk into the room with a big shopping bag. Then the man comes over to my table and says to me I hear you are looking for this card. He pulls out a strip with five players on it and there at the second spot was the Honus Wagner card. Unfortunately the card had been folded right on Wagner's pose but still it was the Wagner, the Holy Grail of baseball card collecting. What I assumed it was , was a proof copy of the card since it was in a strip of five. I bought the piece then the man pulls out a Herme's Ice Cream pin from 1910 of Honus Wagner. I proceed to buy that. Then he pulls out two schedule cards from 1910 with Wagner's picture on them. I buy those then I ask him why does he have all these Wagner items. He tells me he owns Wagner's house and I tell him I had been to Wagner's house when his sisters still owned it and none of this stuff was there. He tells me that there was nothing in the house when he bought it but one day he was in the garage and pulled down a ladder to a second floor loft. There he found a lot of Wagner's baseball mementos. The next day I went to the house and spent a lot of money on everything from photos, books, coaching uniform, ect. We assume that that strip of cards was given to Wagner for his OK then he just folded it and put it in his back pocket never to be seen again. Later that week we had to split up all of our purchases. My partner Wayne ended up getting the Wagner card under the stipulation he could not sell it for three years. In 1982 he sold it to one of the owners of the Yankees for $15,000. In the late 1990's that card was placed in an auction and went for 125,000. Last year it was auctioned again and went for $300,000. And to think I was the original buyer. Oh well, you win some and you lose some