I buy autograph collections all of the time and sometimes I never know what I am going to find. In the 1980's the local newspaper in Ocala Florida where I was then living ran a story about a baseball autograph collector who as it turned out lived just a few miles away from me. We became friends, he was then in his 70's was still very attached to his collection but promised me that whenever he was going to sell it he would give me an opportunity to buy it.
He had collected in two phases, as a youngster growing up in New Jersey in the 1930's he had written to many old time Hall of Famers as well as active players requesting their autographs, In this way he secured autographs through the mail of Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Cy Young etc. and hundreds of others all neatly signed on 2x3 linen cards that he sent to them through the mail. He stopped collecting sometime in the 1940's and in the 1950's took a job in Southern California. In the early 1960's he rekindled his collecting and since most of the old timers he already had he focused his collecting on writing to family members of long deceased mostly 19th century players. He recieved responses back from Cap Anson's family who supplied a couple Anson signed letters for his collection and from Christy Mathewson's family who gave him several "Matty" signed items including an early signed document and personal check signed by Mathewson.
He eventually retired in central Florida. Around the mid 1990's he elected to "test the waters" and put his Anson and Matty signed items in auction. He was none too pleased with the results and told me he had wanted to sell the entire collection outright. We talked about it and he concluded that he would offer it to four seperate dealers and go from there. Of the four two never responded to his letter and the 3rd made an offer so low it was laughable at best and insulting at worst so I ended up buying the entire collection.
Along with all the autographs he had which I had seen multiple times he had a large filing cabinet in which he kept all of the hundreds of responses he had recieved from family members of all of the long deceased ball players he had written to in the 1960's. He was a prolific letter writer. There were no autographs in the filing cabinet and he gave threw it in the deal if I would haul it off along with the collection I had just bought.
SO ......now onto the subject of Wee Willie Keeler. It was a few months before I was able to go through the filing cabinet and there was some very interesting letters written from son's, daughters, cousins, nieces, nephews of famous ball players all basically stating they had no autographs on hand. Among them I found a letter written by a relative of Willie Keeler around 1965 in which he mentioned he had several letters written by Keeler that had been in his family for years but was not interested in selling any of them but included in his letter was a photo copy of one of them ....I was astonished , It was evident to me that since the letter had been written 30 years before its discovery that the Keeler family member who wrote it was probably deceased and there was no return address.
I was never able to locate a lead that might produce more information about the Willie Keeler handwritten letters and eventually gave up and figured that someday, somewhere they would surface. To my knowledge they never have and that is the mystery.
Several years ago I ran a series of classified ads , in newspapers , periodicals and SCD trying to find them and to date not a single lead has surfaced. The letters obviously would be worth a considerable amount of money today. If they were still around and I would suspect they are out there SOMEWHERE.
Has anyone ever heard of ANY Willie Keeler letter ever being offered for sale anywhere ? Or any of the above mentioned letters surfacing in either public or private sale ? To this day it still baffles me.
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Buying and Selling Vintage autographs
jim@stinsonsports.com