". . . buying T206s at antique stores for 35 cents apiece." What's YOUR cool story?

[sb1]

Bought a 180 card T206 lot out of a Broadway Rick auction, probably 20 years ago. Very little details in the SCD ad for the auction, mentioned a few HOFers and others. I called for details, and all they wanted to tell me how great a deal it was.....I kept inquiring as to condition, etc, but again they were more interested in hard selling the lot. I already knew I was going to bid on it, it wasn't really necessary. I opened and won the lot for the $1,800 opener. $10 a card, which was a pretty standard price back then. Binders of T206's with HOFer and usually a few E card mixed in were just sold by the card count x's X, which was often $10-12 a card.

When I received it I was pleasantly surprised with a Cobb BL 460, Brown Lenox Chase and several more backs of note. Of course all were sold well before the current boom.

[pete zouras]

$5 is actual price paid. Had authenticity confirmed by net54er of old Kevin Saucier. Contacted by dealer in antique mall responding to my craigslist paying top dollar for vintage baseball cards ad.

[Tere1071]

The store location I worked between 1982-84 had many walk-ins and I was able to get two Ruth autographed baseballs and a Clemente game-used U1 bat, with the permission of the shop owner. But the coolest thing was a man brought in a home St. Louis Browns jersey circa 1950-1951, it wasn't tagged with a name or date, but it did have the manufacturer and size tags.

He stated that he had a paper route in Cincinnati as a teenager and one of his customers gave it to him as a present. He wanted a Dodger Starter jacket in trade. I purchased the jacket from the shop at the full retail price and traded it for the jersey, again with the knowledge of the shop owner. No, I no longer have any of these items, having sold them over 35 years ago to help my mother out with some expenses at the time.

Phil aka Tere1071

[bbcard1]

I have played the game a long time with relatively few home runs to speak of...more of a slow and steady, which is very much like the rest of my life. One of my big "home run" buys was getting 150 T206s fro $100 which included Chance and a few other minors.

[dbrown]

At a usually dismal flea market in the northeast, I bought a very neat 1930s scrapbook from an old lady vendor for $15. I usually don't do scrapbooks but this one was pretty nice and then I saw a Cab Calloway autograph in there, on Cotton Club stationery. SOLD!

It was only when I got it home that I discovered the Babe Ruth-signed 1936 World Series ticket. Sold that page at Heritage a few years ago, to a disappointing result. So it goes.

[chriskim]

Originally Posted by sb1

Bought a 180 card T206 lot out of a Broadway Rick auction, probably 20 years ago. Very little details in the SCD ad for the auction, mentioned a few HOFers and others. I called for details, and all they wanted to tell me how great a deal it was.....I kept inquiring as to condition, etc, but again they were more interested in hard selling the lot. I already knew I was going to bid on it, it wasn't really necessary. I opened and won the lot for the $1,800 opener. $10 a card, which was a pretty standard price back then. Binders of T206's with HOFer and usually a few E card mixed in were just sold by the card count x's X, which was often $10-12 a card.

When I received it I was pleasantly surprised with a Cobb BL 460, Brown Lenox Chase and several more backs of note. Of course all were sold well before the current boom.

Wow.. great story! so you were the one who discovered the first Cobb BL460!

[sb1]

yes, it was the one that Heritage just sold with the two corners missing.

[fkm_bky]

Early in the previous Net54 board days I was looking to complete the E95 run and was able to pick up 10 of them from a kind board member for $225 and it included Wagner, Plank, Chance and one other HOFer. Wish I still had them. Sold them a while back (2007/08). It was a good deal back then, but by today’s standards it would be incredibly good!

Bill

[brianp-beme]

I had a similar Broadway Rick surprise haul about 15 years ago with a lot of 80 to 90 1929 Zeenut cards that I won on Ebay from him for about $7 or $8 a card or so, which was a reasonable amount for cards in low/mid Zeenut condition. Not quite the incredible score that Mr. sb1 came across, but like his lot there was minimal description/photos and in my case no mention of any cards of extra value. I was shocked when I found that it contained two Oana cards, a Lombardi, a Reese and an autographed Lefty Gomez (his pre-rookie) card. If it was a consignment and I was the consigner, I would have been very upset how carelessly the lot had been listed.

Brian

[IndyDave]

I've mentioned this a couple of times in posts since I joined, but probably my best story like this is the first card show I ever attended.

I was a regular reader of The Sporting News (the local drug store held me a copy at $0.35 per week) and was 12-13 years old in the early 1970's. Answering some sort of ad that was in TSN led me to getting a few of the early hobby newsletters. And from one of those newsletters I received a letter from a collector in Grove City, Pennsylvania, about an hour from my house in a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio.

Bill MacTaggart invited me to a show he was hosting at his house. My parents drove my brother and I over and we found Bill's house on Grant Street. There were a handful of collectors set up on card tables and other tables on the front porch and in the living room. It was amazing to see all the older cards everyone had that I had only seen on one of the early checklist books that we had.

I can't remember any of the cards we bought or how many cards we bought. I do know that we had a wonderful time and my parents hit it off with Bill and his wife Jean. Bill eventually rented a hall for his show (I think he had two different locations) and my brother and I each took a table at his show for several years. The show circuit around Youngstown was Bill's show in Grove City in June and Jim Borgen's show at the McKinley Memorial in Niles in July.

I've traded Christmas cards and letters with Bill for nearly 50 years now. In those early years in the 70's, he would often buy my brother and I boxes of cards that were in Grove City and not Youngstown (including hockey cards) and ship them to us. We've traded cards over the years and I've thoroughly enjoyed our hobby friendship.

I haven't seen Bill for way too long. A couple of times since I moved to Indiana in 1997 we've been back in Youngstown and gone to the outlet mall in Grove City - I've often kicked myself for not having set up a lunch or dinner with Bill.

I see the occasional picture of early hobby "shows". I wish we would have had pictures of the set-ups on Bill's porch.

[Kingcobb]

I purchased the majority of my T206's from a man in Virginia with the last name of Maxwell thru a mail in auction that was advertised thru Sports Collectors Digest in the 1980's. I would mail him my bids from a list of hundreds of cards and usually won. I probably won close to 200 cards from him including all 4 cobbs. His grading was pretty accurate. I believe the Cobb cards were under $100.00's each. I was a big Cleveland collector I remember getting a Lajoie Portrait for $25 and the Young Portrait for $60 I had them graded later the Lajoie was a 5 and the Young a 4. Does anyone else remember buying from him?