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Rob D.It's 1988, and my future wife's father is doing some renovation work for an elderly lady who's getting ready to move from her house. She comes across a box of cards her two sons collected back in the 1950s. She has no use for them, she says, and her sons, who live out of state, have told her to maybe try to sell them and just keep the money.
My future father-in-law mentions that his daughter's boyfriend knows quite a bit about cards and could be of help and might possibly want to buy them. Now, as I hear this scenario for the first time, I'm dubious, because I've been down these dead ends before. But I go over to the house the next day, and in the middle of a dusty kitchen that's having new cabinets put in and is in a state of complete disarray, I'm dumbfounded as a shoebox full of absolutely beautiful Red Man cards in placed in front of me. No rubberbands. All with tabs. Sharp corners, great gloss. Stars. Superstars. Just beautiful. A conservative guess is there were probably 300 of them.
In my mind I'm already trying to figure out how to raise the money to make a fair offer (I was playing minor-league baseball at the time, so the bank account wasn't exactly overflowing). I start to explain that these cards came packaged with packs of Red Man chewing tobacco and point to the back of one of the cards where this is printed. I no sooner get the word "tobacco" out of my mouth when the woman says, "No, there's no possible way these came with tobacco. My boys did not smoke."
I explain that Red Man was a chewing tobacco and that people didn't smoke it ... "I don't care what kind of tobacco it was, young man, my boys wouldn't think of even touching tobacco. Not then, now now."
So now I realize that this woman is truly pissed. It's like I'm Joe Camel dangling cigarettes in front of her kids' mouths. I say that probably her boys were given these cards by other people who bought the tobacco. No dice. "These never should even have been brought into the house."
And with that she puts the small stack of cards I had set on the table back into the box, takes the box and starts to leave the kitchen.
I'm speechless. How the heck did this woman not know these cards came with tobacco? Can she not read? Had she even looked at them? What have I done? There are a hundred things racing through my mind.
I recover in time to explain that the cards are probably pretty valuable. Doesn't matter. She leaves the room, returns empty-handed and says, "I will get answers to how those cards ever were brought into this house." I have no doubt.
I know I'm screwed. I ask if I can just look at them to give her an idea what exactly she has. The look I receive could have killed. "I don't care what they're worth. They will not be sold."
I look pleadingly at my father-in-law, who just shrugs. I'm in a tough spot, because this lady is a customer of his, so I don't want to risk making her even madder. A couple weeks later, when he was about to finish the job, my father-in-law brought up the cards again -- making one last effort for me after I literally begged him -- but the lady said she didn't even want to talk about them.
To this day I truly believe she burned them. After reading her sons the riot act.
No wonder they moved out of state.