Posted By:
warshawlawI went to an antique store near my office (a real hole in the wall type place). The owner is ancient and he has so much stuff buried in there that you never quite know what will come bubbling up.
On a lark I asked about baseball cards. He brought out an ancient, dirty binder (good sign) and handed it to me. There were dozens of pages of all types of 19th century cards...or there were. Not one card was left in the binder, out of hundreds! The dust on the binder was so thick that it must have sat there for years.
Just a little too late.
My all time favorite story is this one:
When I was a kid in the early 1970's and just starting with vintage materials, my parents got friendly with a couple who owned an antique store in NYC and who were always going down the eastern seaboard (we lived in NYC) on buying excursions. When they found out I collected cards they offered to bring back a group of tobacco cards that a dealer acquaintance of theirs had shown them on their most recent trip to Virginia. They went down to VA again a week later, but the cards were already gone. The dealer told them that unknown to him, one of the cards was really valuable (several hundred dollars) because this old time shortstop did not want his image on a tobacco card and it had been pulled. A collector bought the whole lot from him the week before my parents' friends got there.
And that, my friends, is how I came within a hair of owning a T206 Wagner. For free.