Mine wasn’t at a card show, I hope that’s ok. I’m from the middle of nowhere Kansas. We didn’t have many shows to go to but somehow at about 12 years old I got on the Fritsch catalog mailing list. I can still picture what I think that black and white newspaper print cover looked like, because it’s the only reason I knew T206s were special. There was a Doyle, a Magie, a Plank and a Wagner. Inside, the prices for a couple of those cards were in ranges I knew my piggy bank couldn’t hold.
There must have been an advertisement for an auction house because within a year I was on the phone during visits to my grandparents house bidding on cards. I never won a T206.
Fast forward a couple years and we’re about to take a roadtrip to Philadelphia to visit family. I was 14 and checked out a Pennsylvania yellowpages from the library and wrote down every card shop that had big advertisements around philly. This was 1987 so there were a few. I mowed and collected cans for 3 weeks trying to make money for the trip. On the way we stopped at one shop in Lancaster, I’ll never forget it because every once in a while I’ll have a dream about thumbing through raw T206s there.
I bought these 3 cards and even though they’re Piedmont and Sweet Cap 350s, they’re a permanent part of the (mostly) off-back monster binder I just started building last year...my first major purchases since 1987.
