New Jersey Find -May (strip cards)

[pawpawdiv9]

I read this over at Beckett, and couldnt find it posted here anywhere. Thought it be interesting to read. Please delete, Leon, if this been posted before.

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2...ure_chest.html

Jersey City man finds century-old baseball card treasure inside wall of home PHOTOS in LINK

JERSEY CITY -- Trying to get rid of a family of raccoons living in a crawl space in his home, a city man says he came across what he hopes is the treasure find of a lifetime.

Drenched in sweat and sucking in dust, Rafael Torres was at wit's end one day last week attempting to locate the group of critters whose cries had antagonized him and his family for weeks.

Then bad went to worse. The 34-year-old's cell phone fell through a crevasse and lodged behind a drywall in his Greenville Avenue apartment. There was only one way to get to it -- cut a hole in the wall of his daughter's bedroom and pull it out.

But the story has a happy ending. Besides finding the dusty cell phone, Torres pulled out what experts say are thousands of dollars worth of nearly century-old baseball cards.

"When I cut the hole open immediately all this paper starts pouring out and I am like 'what is all this stuff?' so I grab a garbage can and I start shoveling all this stuff into the garbage," said Torres, who has lived in the apartment for 3 months. "But then something caught the corner of my eye. It was a piece of paper that said 'Babe.' "

"So we immediately start dumping everything out of the garbage," said Torres. "We start pulling out Babe Ruth cards and other baseball cards and celebrity cards. It was crazy!"

In all, Torres recovered 262 "strip" cards from the drywall in his daughter's bedroom, almost all of them printed from 1920 to 1923.

"I guess some kid just put them in the wall a long time ago and then forgot about them," said Torres.

Along with five Babe Ruth baseball cards, Torres found cards depicting other Hall of Famers like Casey Stengel, George Sisler, Ty Cobb, and many others.

There were also cards of famous boxers like Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard, presidents including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and Hollywood celebrities of the twenties like Diana Mayo, Pauline Curly, Harold Lloyd, and Hoot Gibson.

Most of the cards -- 1.5-by-2 inches -- were printed by the Decalco Litho Co. in Hoboken, and kids would cut out the cards from an uncut sheet, said Leighton Sheldon, owner of Justcollect.com, a company based in Somerset that buys and sells vintage card collections.

One of the Babe Ruth cards in Torres' newfound collection -- an unnumbered card from 1920 -- is worth $1,500, Sheldon said. The other Ruth cards could fetch a few hundred dollars each, considering their condition.

"The 1920 card has more value because its one of the first cards in which Ruth is pictured in a Yankees' uniform," said Sheldon, who lives in Hoboken. Ruth was traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees in December 1919 in the most infamous trade in baseball history.

Sheldon said the total collection could fetch "a few thousand dollars. ... The cards are not super rare, but they also are not easy to find." Sheldon also noted that the cards of players not in the Hall of Fame tend to sell for from $10 to $30 dollars apiece.

While Sheldon gave a conservative estimate of the value of the cards -- some are in rough shape -- people selling smilar cards on auction sites like eBay are asking for as much as $500 for Hall of Fame players like Sisler.

Torres is waiting contact with art auction house Sotheby's to see how much the cards might be worth. He says he has already received offers from local collectors, including one man who offered to purchase the five Babe Ruth cards for $5,000.

"When I found them it was like hitting the lottery," says Torres, who works at a trucking company in Bayonne.

Uncovering this small treasure couldn't have happened at a better time, Torres said. The married father of four says he grew up in Florida and moved to Jersey City for a "change of scenery," but now is ready for another change.

"With me, finding these cards it's like a blessing because it's like God put them there for me so I can get out of this place," said Torres, who hopes to make enough from the sale of the cards to move back to Florida and start a landscaping business with his father.

"This could be life-changing for me," says Torres. "I would love to get six figures for them. I'm just hopeful that a collector out there will give me what they are worth."