Garage/Estate Sale Success?

[slidekellyslide]

I got a Nolan Ryan rookie at a tag sale a few years back...on the SECOND day of the sale. I skipped the first day and attended the second day where everything was half off. They had about 40 small stacks of cards rubber banded together for a couple bucks each, I hit about 5 or 6 of them and found the Ryan rookie. I didn't even look through the rest, I just picked up the shoe box and took all of them. The Ryan rookie was the best card in the lot, but there were a lot of stars too, like Frank Robinson, Roger Maris, Tony Perez, et cetera.

Just last year I hit it big at a garage sale with a ton of 1950s cards including about 200 near mint to mint 1957 Topps cards. I paid about 10 cents each for them. Sold them to a card shop in Omaha for a lot of dough, I'm sure he made a ton on them, but I don't submit to PSA and he does.

If we're talking about local auctions I've made a lot of great scores. Just last year I picked up a photo/scrapbook album of former major leaguer Bill Davidson which included a bunch of photos of himself with other major leaguers, some real photo postcards of Brooklyn players including Zach Wheat which was signed on the back "Buck Wheat". There was also a World Series ticket stub in there from 1913, the game between Mathewson and Plank which went 9 scoreless innings. Matty drove in a run in the 10th and then went out and shut the A's down for the 10 inning shutout.

My best find ever was a Tris Speaker game used bat picked up at a local auction about 6 or 7 years ago. I didn't know it was a gamer until I posted pictures of it to Net54 though.

I've made way too many finds at flea markets to mention all of them, but my best finds include, A Dog's Head cigarette pack, 2 Cameo Pepsin pins that were dead mint, and an early Portland PCL team cabinet photo that was HUGE..the largest cabinet photo I've ever seen.

I don't think it's pure luck to find this stuff though, it's perseverance. I hit garage sales, tag sales, auctions, antique shows and flea markets weekly.