Quote:
Originally Posted by GasHouseGang
Bored! Not at all. I love hearing these stories. I can tell that the old-time collectors felt the money emphasis was ruining the hobby they loved. Imagine what Lionel would think now! The times were certainly different. I remember reading how one old-time collector had two T206 Honus Wagner cards and he sent one to a fellow collector that needed it for his collection. So the fellow that received the card sent a check for $100 which was returned. And he sent it again, and it was returned again. I might be making this story up, but I think I remember reading this in SCD back in the day. I don't know which collectors were involved in this exchange, but it wouldn't surprise me if one of the collectors was Lionel Carter.
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You're probably thinking of Willie Ratner's sale of his T206 Wagner to longtime hobby writer Wirt Gammon in 1972, which has been a part of hobby lore ever since. Peter Nash wrote about that card's history in Hauls of Shame a couple of years ago:
http://haulsofshame.com/blog/?p=25287
"Ratner held onto his collection through the Great Depression and also through his tenure with the newspaper which spanned from 1912 to 1972. During this long stretch of time Ratner repeatedly turned down offers for his Honus Wagner from aspiring hobbyists like Wirt Gammon from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Gammon was a fellow newspaper writer who also published and wrote for the early hobby newsletter The Ballcard Collector and after making several offers to Ratner for the hard-to-get card decided to take a chance and send him a blank check in the mail. To his surprise, Ratner fulfilled his request for the card. According to The Complete Book of Baseball Cards, “Ratner wrote in only the original sum offered by the Tennessean—a mere pittance compared to later offers. Ratner had not been holding back, he told the buyer– he had simply wanted to keep the card. In effect he gave the card away.”
Wirt Gammon had wanted a Wagner ever since he was a little kid. In his “Gammon’s Corner” column in 1970 he fondly recalled how he collected T206 cards soon after they were released in cigarette packs sold by the American Tobacco Company. Gammon wrote, “When T205 and T206 began around 1910, I was five years old and I can remember back when I was about seven that these cards began to appear everywhere. Many smokers collected them. If not, their children collected the bright colored pictures, often begging parents to buy a pack.” Gammon recalled how he only had one relative who was a smoker and that, much to his dismay, his uncle smoked a brand that didn’t include baseball cards. Gammon also recalled that many smokers simply discarded the cards after opening their pack and he wrote, “It was nothing to walk along the street and see a baseball cigarette card on the sidewalk or the edge of the road or edge of a yard.” So that’s how he collected them. He added, “The best I could hope for was to find a card or two along the sidewalk, where some smoke-stained-fingered guy had discarded it as he opened his pack.” Gammon, however, never found a Wagner in the gutter and had to wait several decades until Willie Ratner was willing to part with his prized possession.
Gammon had been searching for years for his own Wagner via want ads he placed in The Sporting News and other publications with no luck until he finally acquired his “Holy Grail” from Ratner. Little did Gammon realize that like his fellow scribe he was merely a temporary caretaker of the T206 treasure and he ended up parting with the rarity when a young Brooklynite named Bill Haber offered him $500 for the card on June 1, 1970. Haber was working as the baseball director for the Topps Chewing Gum Company and was responsible for the player bios and facts found on the backs of baseball card issues. He was also one of the sixteen founding members of the Society For American Baseball Research in 1971 and according to the current SABR website he was, “considered one of the greatest biographical researchers” in baseball research history.
But Haber’s other passion was baseball cards and he was a dedicated collector who by 1970 had assembled near-complete sets of the T205, T206 and T207 issues. According to Haber it took him 19 months to assemble the sets and in his “Haber Hi-Lites” column in The Ballcard Collector, he said his “greatest stroke of luck occurred when (he) found a non-collector who had a (Eddie) Plank, and (he) bought it from him for $6.” That left Haber with only the Honus Wagner on his wish list and he then proceeded to “make a cash offer to all (he) knew had the card.” Haber recalled, “The going price when I was looking was $250. I decided it was worth $500 to me.” Wirt Gammon accepted Haber’s cash offer and after the collector “borrowed $350 from (his) wife” Gammon shipped the Wagner card up north to Brooklyn where it remained in Haber’s collection for several decades until the mid-1990’s."
Gammon's 1970 column that Nash quoted was posted by me here:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=217635
Gammon later had other Wagners, I believe. I have most of his columns from that period, in The Ballcard Collector and SCD, but there are a lot to go through. I also have the "Haber's Hi-Lites" column quoted by Nash.
04-29-2016, 12:36 PM
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