any recent "finds"

uniship

For those of you who don't read the other CU board, I though I would throw this out to hear your stories:

I occasionally take out an ad in the local paper "seeking baseball cards". This has produced a couple of nice finds over the years. I have not done so in about a year. I was wondering if any of you have had any recent acquisitions that would be worth sharing (ie - garage sale, antique shop, flea market, classified, etc.) - please share if you do, perhaps it will inspire me to get off my butt and get back out there!

dude

Uniship.

Great topic! Unfortunately, I haven't found anything worth mentioning in the past three years.

Here is something related which will occur at the National:

Attic Finds

LuxuryWines

Uniship Neat idea especially with local newspaper advertising so cheap may have to try that one....

Dude- I love the concept of the Antique Roadshow for the NAtional SHould be interesting wish I could go... Are there any plans to air it anywhere?

Jeff

FB

Actually...

A couple months back, my wife asked me to drive her around to garage sales on a Saturday. Not what I would consider my first choice for a weekend, but it keeps the peace and she doesn't like to drive the van.

Went to three or four sales and then stopped at one about 4 blocks from the house. It looked promising when we noticed baseball bats in tubes.
As we started walking through the sale, we found boxes of baseball player biographies - brand new, autogaphed photos, hall of fame plaque cards, magazines with player covers, Topps Supers, Kelloggs complete sets from 72 to 84 and much, much more.

When I can pay $2 - $3 apiece for 70 and 71 Topps Supers (Rose, Clemente, Aaron, Mays) I was in heaven! We got some SPORT magazines from the 40's with Dimaggio with Williams covers for $15.

The guy was an advanced autograph collector whose wife said "ENOUGH!" - get rid of at least some of this stuff!!!

Needless to say - made my garage sale experience very nice that day. Of course, now my wife keeps asking - saying - remember, we might find another sale like than one. (And I might hit the lottery too...)

toppsgun

Here's an unusual story. A friend of mine is in the landscape business. He also does odd jobs like hauling off trash from work sites. (BTW, he is Roger Clemens' yard man.) Anyway, several years ago, he called another card collecting buddy of mine and said he was hired to clean up an old house that had some fire and water damage in an old part of town. He said it had some old sports stuff. He said we could go over and look through the place before he got there and take anything we found.

Well, this was at the height of our card collecting madness, pre-PSA. We figured we'd find no-telling-what.

The house was a mess. The fire department had soaked the place with water. It appeared to be much overkill for a small fire, but the walls and ceilings had pretty much collapsed.

There were no cards, but out back in the poolhouse, we ran across stacks and stacks of old Sports Illustrated magazines. Ali-Frazier, Ali-Foreman, Knicks NBA championship of the early 70's, Mark Spitz 7 gold medals. Even a Billy Jean King-Bobby Riggs I recall. Tons and tons of this stuff. Not wet or burned, but not mint either. We were really, really hoping for cards. So we only took a few magazines and left the rest. What a dump.

It's not the find that counts. It's the hunt that forever beckons.

riccaboni

Toppsgun,

Atleast they weren't a stack of old Becketts .


Ian

Fabfrank

This story is more about a gift rather than a find. My main collecting years as a kid were between 1972-76 (ages of 10-14). I collected not only baseball cards but comic books too. One day my friend Nicky Macchia, who lived around the block from me, told me his dad got transferred and was moving to North Carolina. Nicky was one of my best friends, so I was totally bummed.
As the moving day approached, I would go to Nicks house and help him pack up some of his stuff. One day as his dad was cleaning out his garage he came across a few shoeboxes of baseball and football cards that he had as a kid. Mr Macchia was the nicest man in the neighborhood, so he gave one box to me and one to his son Nick. Nicky didn't care so much for the cards. "They're old!" he told is dad. So he gave me both boxes. I didn't realize than, but the boxes were full of baseball and football cards from 52-57. The ironic thing was that there were no rubber bands. Mr. Macchia kept the cards neatly stacked and tightly packed in the boxes. I don't remember any particular card, but I do remember he was a BIG Yankee fan and there were quite a few Mantles in the box.
I know you're all wondering. What happened to the cards? Well remember I said I was also a comic book collector. A year or two later, another friend who knew I had the cards offered me a refrigerator size cardboard box of comics for the 2 boxes. I was not as excited about these "old cards" and wanted to expand my comic collection. So I made the trade. At that time it was a no brainer for me. It took 4 kids to push/drag that box of comics to my house.
I kept up my comic collecting since than and have virtually every Marvel and DC comic from 1964 and up. I renewed my card collecting in 1984 and have been working back ever since. But I wish I kept those cards.