". . . buying T206s at antique stores for 35 cents apiece." What's YOUR cool story?
 

I was reading Keith Olbermann's recounting of when he was 11 he would go to antique stores with his mom and, boom, there they were. Before anyone cared about backs or factories.

Not to sound like Nell walking out of the woods for the first time, but who's got a cool story like his to share? Getting them for low, low prices is certainly part of it, but it wasn't just because it was a long time ago, but also because very few folks seemed to *really* pursue the set like now. And differentiating twixt backs and locations, would be very cool to know about those collectors or investors on the leading edge of, "Wait . . . why do I have 83 Piedmonts and five Carolina Brights?" and decided to investigate.

I've read plenty on other sites, but most of that is from an investigative pov. Wondering about any personal experiences!
Chuck

Purchased 3 Cobb’s from SCD in the 1980’s, Green, Bat off, bat on for $265.00. All grade SGC 50 to 70. Sold 2 years ago. Joe

But you didn't kill yourself about it. Well done.

Bought an Official Harridge Reach American League baseball signed by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb (authenticated by Harvey Brandwein) for $500 in 1988 at Chanute AFB, Illinois. According to Mr. Brandwein, the ball was probably signed in 1934. Yes, you could buy cards and memorabilia very, very cheap. But at the time, $500 clams seemed like a crazy amount of money to shell out for a baseball signed by anyone.

I'm a 90's baby, so I missed out on a lot of the bargains that are only bargains in retrospect. I've had some luck in 'real time bargains', where I got a card for much less than it's value.

Got a 52 Bowman Mays, missing a small piece of a corner but nice looking, for around $50 a few years ago. That was a steal even then. Found a T206 Young (hand showing) in an antique shop on the east coast on a work trip, paid $50 and traded it quickly. Would love the other Young pitching, not a big fan of the image on the no glove card.

And then I got this, my biggest bargain by a long shot, a couple weeks ago for $100 after Uncle Sam got his cut. This is the boxing T card equivalent of finding 8 pre-production T206 Wagner's on a sheet. Which mean's its worth way less than 1% of those Wagners, but it's a heck of a bargain.

There used to be a really cool card shop in the Chicago Loop in the 90's, just off Michigan Avenue. They had a weekly auction where they put all the cards up on the wall and you would write down your bid on a sheet attached to the card.

Once in a while I would bring my 9 year old son into the shop with me. He was in awe there, he would talk to me in a whisper like he was in church.

The bidding always started at $1 and he would bid on a few cards. The cards were mostly vintage baseball but they also had modern cards and other sports in the auctions. My son won a Shaquille O'Neal card one time for I think $10. The card is now worth about $1000 so he did good on that one.



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What in the ever-loving F(&@^)#&^@!!! You just bought sheets of T220 silvers for $100??? Everyone else loses. Forever.

EDIT: Please share any story and tons of pics. My jaw is on the floor.

Somewhere around 18 yrs ago I had a find I called The Trucker Boy Find....nothing too crazy except, well.,.. Here it is in a thread with some other stories, from only 15 yrs ago.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...ht=trucker+boy
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Not the greatest story ever but I remember in 1988 answering an ad in SCD selling commons for $4. I requested and got a Chick Gandil which I was super excited about as the movie Eight Men Out had just come out.

In the 1960's, I was working part-time on weekends at a bank in downtown L.A. One lunch, I walked by an old book store that had a huge picture window and 4 rubber-banded stacks of '51/'52 Bowmans in the window as decoration. They were marked at 25 cents each. I told the owner I wanted to buy the cards and he said he wasn't climbing into the window for 25 cents. I told him I wanted all four stacks and gave him $1.

There must have been about 50 cards in each stack so I walked out with probably 200 of them for $1.

It'll never happen again.

Made a separate thread over on the boxing sub with the details for discussion, etc. I'm pretty excited still

I missed out on the 'buying green Cobbs for 25 cents' boat, but about two years ago, a seller on eBay listed four signed 1953 Topps Detroit Tigers, including Fred Hutchinson. The photo was terrible; I could barely see the cards, let alone the signatures, but at $80 for the lot, I figured it was worth taking a flyer. When I got them in hand, they were four beautiful vintage signatures, all authentic. In addition to the Hutch, two of the others ended up being upgrades for ones I already had. Since I bought them, a Hutchinson in worse shape than mine sold for over $1,200.

[IMG]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...0f08dd1830.jpg [/IMG]

Bought a 180 card T206 lot out of a Broadway Rick auction, probably 20 years ago. Very little details in the SCD ad for the auction, mentioned a few HOFers and others. I called for details, and all they wanted to tell me how great a deal it was.....I kept inquiring as to condition, etc, but again they were more interested in hard selling the lot. I already knew I was going to bid on it, it wasn't really necessary. I opened and won the lot for the $1,800 opener. $10 a card, which was a pretty standard price back then. Binders of T206's with HOFer and usually a few E card mixed in were just sold by the card count x's X, which was often $10-12 a card.

When I received it I was pleasantly surprised with a Cobb BL 460, Brown Lenox Chase and several more backs of note. Of course all were sold well before the current boom.

t206 elberfeld
 

$5 is actual price paid. Had authenticity confirmed by net54er of old Kevin Saucier. Contacted by dealer in antique mall responding to my craigslist paying top dollar for vintage baseball cards ad.

The store location I worked between 1982-84 had many walk-ins and I was able to get two Ruth autographed baseballs and a Clemente game-used U1 bat, with the permission of the shop owner. But the coolest thing was a man brought in a home St. Louis Browns jersey circa 1950-1951, it wasn't tagged with a name or date, but it did have the manufacturer and size tags.

He stated that he had a paper route in Cincinnati as a teenager and one of his customers gave it to him as a present. He wanted a Dodger Starter jacket in trade. I purchased the jacket from the shop at the full retail price and traded it for the jersey, again with the knowledge of the shop owner. No, I no longer have any of these items, having sold them over 35 years ago to help my mother out with some expenses at the time.

Phil aka Tere1071

I have played the game a long time with relatively few home runs to speak of...more of a slow and steady, which is very much like the rest of my life. One of my big "home run" buys was getting 150 T206s fro $100 which included Chance and a few other minors.

At a usually dismal flea market in the northeast, I bought a very neat 1930s scrapbook from an old lady vendor for $15. I usually don't do scrapbooks but this one was pretty nice and then I saw a Cab Calloway autograph in there, on Cotton Club stationery. SOLD!

It was only when I got it home that I discovered the Babe Ruth-signed 1936 World Series ticket. Sold that page at Heritage a few years ago, to a disappointing result. So it goes.

https://dyn1.heritagestatic.com/lf?s...oduct.chain%5D

Wow.. great story! so you were the one who discovered the first Cobb BL460!

yes, it was the one that Heritage just sold with the two corners missing.

Early in the previous Net54 board days I was looking to complete the E95 run and was able to pick up 10 of them from a kind board member for $225 and it included Wagner, Plank, Chance and one other HOFer. Wish I still had them. Sold them a while back (2007/08). It was a good deal back then, but by today’s standards it would be incredibly good!

Bill

I had a similar Broadway Rick surprise haul about 15 years ago with a lot of 80 to 90 1929 Zeenut cards that I won on Ebay from him for about $7 or $8 a card or so, which was a reasonable amount for cards in low/mid Zeenut condition. Not quite the incredible score that Mr. sb1 came across, but like his lot there was minimal description/photos and in my case no mention of any cards of extra value. I was shocked when I found that it contained two Oana cards, a Lombardi, a Reese and an autographed Lefty Gomez (his pre-rookie) card. If it was a consignment and I was the consigner, I would have been very upset how carelessly the lot had been listed.

Brian

I've mentioned this a couple of times in posts since I joined, but probably my best story like this is the first card show I ever attended.

I was a regular reader of The Sporting News (the local drug store held me a copy at $0.35 per week) and was 12-13 years old in the early 1970's. Answering some sort of ad that was in TSN led me to getting a few of the early hobby newsletters. And from one of those newsletters I received a letter from a collector in Grove City, Pennsylvania, about an hour from my house in a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio.

Bill MacTaggart invited me to a show he was hosting at his house. My parents drove my brother and I over and we found Bill's house on Grant Street. There were a handful of collectors set up on card tables and other tables on the front porch and in the living room. It was amazing to see all the older cards everyone had that I had only seen on one of the early checklist books that we had.

I can't remember any of the cards we bought or how many cards we bought. I do know that we had a wonderful time and my parents hit it off with Bill and his wife Jean. Bill eventually rented a hall for his show (I think he had two different locations) and my brother and I each took a table at his show for several years. The show circuit around Youngstown was Bill's show in Grove City in June and Jim Borgen's show at the McKinley Memorial in Niles in July.

I've traded Christmas cards and letters with Bill for nearly 50 years now. In those early years in the 70's, he would often buy my brother and I boxes of cards that were in Grove City and not Youngstown (including hockey cards) and ship them to us. We've traded cards over the years and I've thoroughly enjoyed our hobby friendship.

I haven't seen Bill for way too long. A couple of times since I moved to Indiana in 1997 we've been back in Youngstown and gone to the outlet mall in Grove City - I've often kicked myself for not having set up a lunch or dinner with Bill.

I see the occasional picture of early hobby "shows". I wish we would have had pictures of the set-ups on Bill's porch.

T206's
 

I purchased the majority of my T206's from a man in Virginia with the last name of Maxwell thru a mail in auction that was advertised thru Sports Collectors Digest in the 1980's. I would mail him my bids from a list of hundreds of cards and usually won. I probably won close to 200 cards from him including all 4 cobbs. His grading was pretty accurate. I believe the Cobb cards were under $100.00's each. I was a big Cleveland collector I remember getting a Lajoie Portrait for $25 and the Young Portrait for $60 I had them graded later the Lajoie was a 5 and the Young a 4. Does anyone else remember buying from him?

James Maxwell and Virginia Caputo. bought quite a bit from them myself.

About 20 years ago a retired teacher opened a card store in our small town just about when I started collecting T206's. Most of his oldest stuff was from his own collection from the 50's and 60's I think he might have had a few early 1900's cards at the time. One day I stopped in and he greeted me with wait till you see what I bought today and he reaches in the case and pulls out 9 T206's and hands them to me. I started looking through them and they were all brown Hindu's in really nice shape. I had just started collecting T206's and knew very little about them and he knew even less. He said an older lady brought them in and wanted to sell them. We went back and forth on whether he wanted to sell them and he finally said he would. As I said it was when I just started collecting them and I had never even seen a Hindu and didn't know that they were worth more than the Piedmonts and Sweet Caporals and neither did he. I ended up buying 8 of the 9 for $480 I paid between $40 and $85 each. I passed on one because it was miscut I think he wanted $30 for it.

After I bought them I came home and got out my copy of Bill Heitman's T206 The Monster that I recently bought to do a little research on the Hindu's as I honestly didn't know if they were real or not but from what I found in the book I was pretty confident they were so I went back in to buy the last one and he had already sold it.

I had them all graded just about 10 years ago two of them graded PSA 5.5, five graded PSA 5 and one graded PSA 3 at the time all but one was the highest graded. Six of the eight are still the highest graded today.

A couple of years later when I had learned a lot more about them I asked him about the woman that had brought them in and he said that was the first time he had ever seen her and he never saw her again.
I sold all of them a few years ago but now I wish I had kept at least one of them.

I no longer own this baseball but it's my best find to date. I was trolling eBay years ago, maybe close to a decade now, and found a listing for an antique signed baseball. The listing had a terrible out of focus photo and the description said the seller didn't know who signed the baseball but there were three autographs on it.

I bought the ball for the $80 buy it now because it kinda looked like Grover Alexander on the sweet spot. Not only was I right about Grover, but the ball was also signed by Babe Didrickson.

https://live.staticflickr.com/818/39...1a892b18_z.jpg