Great Finds Thread

[trdcrdkid]

I don't know if this really counts as a "find", but the two Lenox T206s in my collection were among the first five T206s I got back around 1979-81. I think I got one of them from a neighborhood kid in a trade for something or other, and the other might have been among my brother's collection (including lots of other cards from the 1950s to 70s) that I bought from him in 1981 for $80 so he could buy an Atari video game system. He might have gotten his Lenox from the same neighborhood kid. We had no idea that Lenox backs were rare; to us, they were just T206s, which we considered exotic enough by themselves. Only when I got back into collecting more than a decade later did I realize what I had, and put them into plastic sleeves.

Probably the best finds where I knew what I was getting came in the late 90s at the National Trade Card Convention in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. There were a lot of ephemera dealers, mostly selling trade cards, some with non-sport tobacco cards and similar stuff, including a few with a handful of baseball tobacco cards. One year there was a guy going around with a couple of Old Judges in pretty good condition that he was trying to sell, but none of the dealers were interested. I asked him what he wanted for them, and he said $50 for the pair. That was a fantastic deal even then, so I pulled out my wallet and gave him $50 on the spot. Another time, maybe the same year, there was a table that had some T206s in a box for $15 apiece, in about VG condition. They were mostly commons, but among them were a Griffith portrait and an Evers with Cubs on shirt, which I snapped up. I think they were my first T206 Hall of Famers.