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CyRarely do I get a chance to show off in the world of vintage cards. But I happened upon a "find" this past March. A good friend who owns a card shop called me and told me that another friend of his was in his shop and had a beautiful T206 Cy Young that I might like. I asked him the price and it was basically full book. I was shocked because my friend is a pretty fair man with his prices. No, I take that back. He is a generous man with his prices. So I asked him if this man had any others and he told me he had a bunch of stars. So I took a ride up to view these cards.
I don't get the opportunity to have a large number of stellar cards in my hand. But when I got there, the guy let me look at them and I started looking and I saw, Brown, Chance, Cobb, Elberfeld, Evers, Joss, Johnson, Lajoie, Marquard, Matty, McGraw, Tinker, Waddell, Wheat, Willis, Young and a few T205 cards, to boot. Plus, he didn't have just one of these. He had multiples of these guys, 72 cards in all and basically all stars. So I casually asked him how much would he want for all of them. He gave me a price. I got light-headed, laughed, then I said something crazy. I said, "Do you need the money right now?" He looked to my friend. My friend assured him that I was a very honest man. The guy said, "OK, if you sign a piece of paper", to alleviate any discrepancy later on. I agreed.
Now, 72 cards is a nice find. But these were only the first batch. He didn't have enough money to buy all of the cards that were found in a desk or something from an antique mall somewhere in Pennsylvania. After I sold the vast majority of the cards, with the help of my good friend Scott Forrest, I paid him his money. He came back to my friend about a month later and sold him the rest of the "find", 400 more. So this "find" of 2002 totaled about 470 cards. I know the Florida "find" received all of the ink. But I am confident that this batch was just as good, probably better, than those cards, all in all.
To give you a better understanding of the cards that I received, check this link.
http://www.cyscards.com/t206/t206.html
You might have some fun looking at the cards. I know I do. I use the directory of the jpegs to generate my screen saver. So even, though I still don't have all of the cards from this find, I have the scans to remind me of the most exciting buy of my life.
Cy