What's your best tobacco-card find?

[ctownboy]

In the early 1990's, I was in college and had plenty of time to go around looking for baseball items. I put an ad in a small town paper and got a call from a guy. I went to his house and he had.... not much. Mostly cards from the 1970's. He did, however, tell me about a guy in another small town that had some older stuff.

I found that guy and got to hear a story and see some good things.

The story was, this guy's Grand Mother married a guy who was a junk collector (hoarder). When the Step - Grand Father died, his Grand Mother kept all of the stuff he had collected over the years. When she died, the children and grand children inherited it all.

Of course, some of the people didn't want anything (or wanted the money if it was going to be sold) and then there were some that wanted some of the stuff. After it was all divided, the guy I was talking to had the job of cleaning everything out of the house and the outbuilding, getting to keep anything he wanted as reward for doing the work.

The bad news:

Well, he said, the roof of the outbuilding had rotted and allowed water to get inside. In the middle of the small outbuilding was literally a three foot high pile of paper goods that were water logged. Nothing was salvageable and he had to take a shovel to be able to lift the stuff up and get it in the wheelbarrow to be thrown away.

The good news.

However, the things on the shelves were high and dry. Inside one of the wooden boxes on the shelves were tobacco cards. About 1100 in total.

Since he liked history, especially history about the West (he also found a number of tin type and daguerrotype photos, some of which supposedly were of Custer and his men in uniform. The guys were in uniform and each photo had the soldiers name underneath of it so, it could have been possible...). Anyway, he wanted to keep the cards of the Indians (about 100 cards) and was willing to sell the rest.

The "rest" were all cards from the 1880's. There were N28's of Clarkson, Keefe and Caruthers (the only baseball cards in the bunch). There were also N28's of wrestlers and pugilists (John L. Sullivan, Jake Kilrain), Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody, etc. I would guess there was at least half of the N28 set and there were some doubles (or more) of some of the cards.

The rest of the cards consisted of actors and actresses, World's Smokers, World's Dudes, Parasol Drill, Game Birds (and other animal cards) and very thin hold to light cards (when held in front of a light you could see different playing cards from a deck of cards), etc.

The guy wanted $3,500 for everything. Being in college, I didn't have that type of money to spend and my parents wouldn't loan it to me. So, I had to pass on the deal. I later told a guy who collected (and dealt in) cards about this find and he immediately went and bought them.

Later, I saw him set up at a show and I asked what he had gotten. Because he had only collected the N28 baseball players, he said he was able to almost finish the N28 set (and by selling these other cards, he would use that money to buy the cards he didn't have and finish the set). He said he was able to put together a couple of complete sets, each, of stuff like the Game Birds and Prize Chickens and then partial sets of the other cards.

To this day, I regret not having the money to buy those cards. Since eBay and third party grading wasn't around back then, if I could have just been able to buy the cards and hold on to them......

David