A handful of 1957 Topps cards takes me back to the time when the penny dropped and I got hooked on baseball. It was a great time to be young and a Giant fan. For one more year anyway. However, instead of traveling down that particular memory lane I will present this autographed 1934 Goudey Lou Gehrig as an artifact that evokes history. At some moment between 1934 and the time he lost his motor skills Lou Gehrig, living and breathing, held this very baseball card in his hand and affixed his signature in all its cursive glory.
I have a yearning nostalgia for the era between the two world wars. It's when my father was in his youth. The world he lived in was colorful and exciting - terrific music, fancy women, great athletes. Never mind that he grew up in San Francisco, 1000 miles west of major league baseball. It still had that jazz age gestalt that Gehrig's autograph evokes for me.
Fancy Women
Terrific Music
This YouTube - Manhattan by the California Ramblers - is a sweet jazz melody with great visuals, even with the "jitters". It's part of the soundtrack of my fantasy voyage in time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2rDsY-zge4
Great Athletes
Baseball historians say nice things about the 1928 San Francisco Seals. They won the PCL by eight games and were 120-71. I possess the glass negative from which this photo was printed. [Come to think of it, the neg itself would be a separate cool artifact by the terms of this writing assignment. Wish I had a pik of it. That piece of glass was looking right at those guys, its architecture re-arranged by light rays bouncing off them. Spooky stuff. Too much marijuana in my youth]. Frankie Crosetti is 18 years old here. Thirty years later we see him again via home movie camera waving Norm Siebern home on an inside-the-parker.
My Dad was born at home in a house one short block away from this Mission District street in 1920. He was an altar boy at St Peter's church whose corner and steps are at left. He delivered the San Francisco Chronicle to pitch in with expenses. Some of his customers were Civil war veterans. Imagine that. He saw Henry Oana play.
He attended St Ignatius HS which is by the athletic field to the left of SI Cathedral. In the background the Golden Gate Bridge is under construction. He saw the bridge go from nothing to magnificence.
Thusly this card held by the Iron Horse has a shred of his
mana and brings illumination to an era that matters to me. So there. Not sure if I met the requirements set out by the OP but I'm kinda scatterbrained at the best of times and I had fun throwing it together.