Interesting old article

[Archive]

Posted By: Chris Bland

Not sure if anyone has seen this before...

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915313,00.html

[Archive]

Posted By: warshawlaw

"It's like the stock market. Sometimes it pays off big, and sometimes it crashes," says William Mastro, 24, a Chicago respiratory therapist, who once spent four fruitless days combing a New Jersey dump after hearing that someone had thrown out an old box of cards.

[Archive]

Posted By: Hal Lewis

Bill should have stuck with respitory therapy.

There is no future in baseball card auction houses.

Who's going to ever buy a baseball card off of a computer?




He's come a long way from dumpster diving!!

[Archive]

Posted By: Joann

What a great link. Interesting read. And the timing (1977) is also interesting. Articles like this - and other rumors/stories about people hitting it big with older baseball cards - coincide with the time every parent started stashing his kid's baseball cards. I'll bet there are literally thousands or ten's of thousands of people in their 40's now that think they'll retire someday on the boxes and boxes and boxes of 1970's and 1980's commons. Didn't I hear that those buy and sell by the pound now?

For some reason I find this topic and issue fascinating. Cards aged naturally, and eventually a harmless (and maybe slightly oddball) pasttime had dollars attached. Before then no one ever thought to save them for money - the only surviving cards were from collections. Now there are closets full of worthless cardboard, the onset of which coincided approximately with this particular time. And for that exact reason - precisely because everyone caught on to the potential value of scarce and/or old cards - those cards will forever be plentiful and worthless.

Suppose that realization had happened 20 years earlier - in the 40's or 50's? How many duffel bags of 52 Topps would be sitting in closets waiting to appreciate? Or if it had happened 20 years later - or right about now? How differently would cards from the 70's fit into vintage collections? Why that particular time? And with what impact?

Thanks for the link Chris. Good read, and timely for an age that is (in my opinion) probably the most critical transition in the hobby - introduction of the concept of current cards becoming more valuable over time, and even as an investment in general.

Joann