i received a note back from the seller with a little more info on the card, i'm posting the email with his permission. a little long-winded but good read:
Hi,
Thanks for the link, I enjoyed the comments and speculations. To clarify, when my grandfather moved out of his PA home in the late 1980's we discovered a few dozens of these in his attic. They were all in very nice condition besides this Plank. He told me he was very meticulous and kept them inside his tin box, whereas his friends would pin them to walls or cut the borders paste them onto notebook. He collected by teams and had most of the Athletics, Giants, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. In the late 90's we sold all off the cards to invest in the tech boom and Enron stocks.
The only card the dealer didn't want was the Plank because it's not as nice as the rest. My grandfather said that was because one night he left the Plank out and a mouse got to it and was chewing on the card, and he literally had to wrestle the card away from that god-awful mouse. The missing chunk is not from a pinhole, but from a mouse! The 'EM" is his initial to show the mouse who the card belongs to. Looking back who could've guessed the varmint actually did us a favor.
Incredible and funny anecdote on the plank.
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