Quote:
Originally Posted by coolshemp
It is true about the fact that kids picked them up as discards by the adults. My late neighbor was 11 when the T206 came out, and he told me that he and his buddies would linger a little bit longer on the subway in Boston and pick up hundreds a week from the floor as the smokers threw them down, along with the empty pack. He was sure that he had shoe boxes full of them, but when he came from France in 1918, they were gone - his mother cleaned out his room while he was in the army. When I showed him mine, he had a story about every player as he was an avid baseball fan. He once met Honus Wagner, and remembers that he was a huge man with gigantic hands that was really nice to the kids. I miss talking with him!
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That's an awesome story, Derek. I love these stories about how those cards were originally seen and collected when they first came out. There was that 1929 New Yorker article by a guy who had collected Old Judges and other tobacco cards 40 years before (
http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=202129), and the 1982 interview with longtime collector John Wagner in which he described collecting T206s as a 10-year-old when they were first issued (
http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=207915). And it's interesting (but not really surprising!) to know that mothers were already throwing out baseball card collections a hundred years ago!