Well, definitely a first for me posting twice in short order to the memorabilia side, a new thread no less...
Anyway, nothing major worth squillions or heading to auction to revolutionize the collector worlds minds so if you just want to scroll and see the pics and move on I won't be offended.
After selling a 19th century college ticket on ebay just a week or so ago I got to talking back and forth with the buyer. Top fella, wanted me to keep him in mind if anything else TOC or earlier that was Ivy League College Football turned up. As he mentioned, it's hard coming across anything 'first' these days with a chance to add to a personal collection as niche as 19th Century Ivy League College Football.
Well, it kind of spurred me to think if I had stuff lying around I wasn't displaying or using in some functional way, something that maybe got packed away some time ago and forgotten.
To mind came the memory of a TOC baseball cap I'd bought at auction at least 10-15 years previous but hadn't seen in the longest time.
So I went looking.
Every container/tub in the basement got opened and along the way 'found' a Kobe auto'd basketball I'd bought for display and just never did, a heavily auto'd vintage football I can just barely remember as being KC Chiefs related - perhaps to Superbowl IV, and that turn of the century baseball cap with an associated 'medallion'.... alongside some other smaller non-descript items.
That decidedly less than extraordinary searching effort turned my night into one of the more fun I'd had for ages, you see I'm 52 and things I bought 10-15 years ago don't have a lot of associated neural pathway associations.
The basketball was easy, it's got a holo and it's just a really nicely auto'd ball.
The football I'm going to need to do work on, it doesn't seem to have a date or game related inscription to it so I'll slow burn that.
And the baseball cap, which was the real 'find' of the night.
You see, when I bought it at auction in 2006 the auction house didn't have any useful information about it, and I purchased it much as an aesthetic item for contemporaneous display with other stuff.
I emailed my newly minted friend who bought the ticket, and who has an absolutely gorgeous memorabilia collection himself, and showed him some pics of the cap.
He told me to go away and do some thinking and see if I could hunt down the answers to the cap's history and attribution myself.
Well, for the first time since I bought the cap (and it got packed away soon after purchase) I studied the lettering and came to a quick conclusion that it showed a large S and J, interwoven on a background BBT.
The colors black and dark blood red, stunning to be honest.
I pulled the associated medallion that was sold in the same lot as the cap and took an iPhone snap to help my aged eyes try and determine the inscriptions...
Some of it I couldn't find immediate online useful reference to, such as - 'IN HONOR OF THE RE BUILDERS', but more immediately useful was the bar holding the material holding the disc stating '4 YEARS SERVICE', then a date of when it was made/gifted - '1902/3', and lastly 'MANLIUS NY'.
There is a building cast on the medallion too but that seemed too hard to decipher to be useful so I moved on..
Well, the size of the cap is on the smaller end which had me wondering about a private prep or High School, but the more tantalizing idea that jumped out was that SJ stood for Saint John, and BBT meant baseball team. The colors worked after all....
You must know that during the couple of hours I was pondering all this I was sharing with my wife the cap itself and details I was gleaning and she was glued on to the story.
She thought this cap was the best thing I'd ever owned or shown her, notwithstanding any N172 Harry Wright, 52 Mantle, Pele game worn jersey, or other cool things I've collected and owned.
This cap was the shizzle, and the story to determine it's roots and the hunt to understand them was as exciting as she could imagine for a sports related item. As she described, she was picturing some young man of the era donning it and proudly walking the school terraces, the pictures she painted were glorious.
I got back to my friend with our thinking and he just matter of factly said 'of course' that's what it is, St Johns University, a freshman's beanie/cap to be worn proudly denoting his position with the baseball team, and he had a Yale example he could share pictures of in return.
Boy oh boy, I'm glad he didn't tell me before I entered on to the discovery train. One of the best nights I've had forever, my own 'find' story with an item sitting within my very walls, that I knew I had all the time but had just never explored.
Anyway, wrote the story for any who've had less than exciting nights to read, every word is true and the pics to follow will prove it so.
Also, when penning this missive I pulled up the image I'd taken of the medal and blew up the size really large....
Says Saint Johns under the building dead square but in lighter stamping than my aging eyes could initially discern.
LOL, so glad I didn't see that immediately on opening everything up.
