Posted By:
William Heitman Until late this afternoon, I had kind of thought, because of the direction this hobby has taken of late, that nobody really cared about this stuff anymore. Oh sure, I knew people cared about the grading of cards and the translation of that into instant wealth, but I didn't know there were people still digging.
Before The Monster was published, there were just a handful of people in the country who cared about the various T206 Series and such. It is gratifying to think that there are those of you out there who now care about that. I have to say that most thought I was crazy to even try to collect T206 that way, but what's a guy supposed to do who started doing it that way when he was 9 or 10 years old. After going through so so so many T206s, I just started to see a pattern so I wrote it down in checklist form. My actual checklist has proven very accurate. Of course, in 1979, I didn't know what 1980 to 2005 would bring by way of discovery, but, as far as I know, there has not been any T206s found that do not fall nicely into my theory.
My grandfather actually collected Old Judges as a small boy. He said that as the adults would leave their tobacconist, they would open the packs up and throw the cards on the ground. He told me that he, and numerous other young friends, would spend hours at those spots picking up the cards. My oldest uncle related a similar story of picking up what later became cataloged as T205s, 6s and 7s. The quanitity of cards that have survived from those eras is testimony to the passion this country felt for baseball and baseball players.
Imagine, you're 12 years old and your father tells you that there is a package waiting for you. It was sent to him by an oldtime dealer/collector friend who you have now begun corresponding with. There's a note to your father that says "Let the boy go through them." You open this very large box and there before you are about 7 or 8 15 inch rows of T206. Well, guys, it happened to me. The package was from Wirt Gammon (who I corresponded with until his death many years ago). I never counted those cards, but we can do the math. I know I had packages arrive with at least 2000 T206s in them at least 25 times over the years. And I once did some advertising that netted me 6 finds of over 1000 each. In fact, 1 Wagner in that group.
It was a lot of digging, digging and more digging. And researching the players and matching things up. You're all right. We had no internet, no price guides--but to those of us who were looking, that was our advantage. To those of us who wanted to learn, we just dug and dug and dug and corresponded with older collectors (who almost always were generous to me in so many ways). Keep digging. I'll have more later.
Bill Heitman