Most undervalued HOFers

[Balticfox]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

I had sort of the opposite experience. My brothers and I first started buying 1965 Topps, but we ended up having a ton of earlier cards all the way back to 1952, whether from the kid across the street whose older brother had left him a massive collection, or my parents' friends who knew we collected and gave us their (older) kids' old collections, or trading with friends who had acquired them in probably similar ways.

No one gave a thought to value of course. I remember my girlfriend in high school had a little sister who loved baseball, so I gave her maybe 5 each of Mantle and Mays, we had dozens.

Should I therefore understand that these cards you had then went by the wayside somehow and you no longer have them?

I turned my half of the card hoard we'd accumulated over to my buddy Anthony a few months after I'd been packed off to a boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine for ninth grade in 1965. Once Anthony finished grade school himself in the spring of 1966, he turned over the cards which he'd lovingly filed in order in a large cardboard box to young Billy across the street thinking that Billy would continue carrying the torch and further build the collection. Not so. Billy just scrambled the contents of the box for the other kids in the neighbourhood right in front of Anthony's horrified eyes!

Given the sad though self-inflicted denouement to our/his collection, Anthony can't stomach the thought of spending even a dime on cards these days. He does still collect Shirriff Hockey coins since he still has the ones he got as a kid. And of course he enjoys looking through my card binders.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Sadly, my Mom tossed vast numbers of cards when I was in college, because she wanted to make room for something else on the basement shelves where all the boxes were. Oh, what might have been. I mean the Mantles and Mayses and so on were probably well handled but still tragic. Speaking of which imagine getting a Mantle out of a pack and being pissed because you were trying to get a Sonny Siebert or whoever to complete the series checklist.