Home› Trading Cards & Memorabilia Forum
Options

My buddy said he had some OLD cards...didn't know what to expect...HOFers surprise! (with photos)

jersterjerster Posts: 828 ✭✭✭
in Trading Cards & Memorabilia Forum

So a month or so ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about what type of things we collected. I mentioned to him that I had collected many things over the years at one time or another. Cards, comics, coins, you name it.

"Oh really," he said. "Well I've got thousands of old baseball, football and basketball cards that have been in my garage for many years, and I think I want to start selling them. Do you think you could come over and take a look?" I said sure, how old are the cards, fully expecting that they were mostly from the 80's and 90's when everybody was stockpiling cards. To my surprise, he said, "well, they go back to the 50's when I bought them as a little kid. I've kept them all these years...do you think they are worth anything?"

OK...so know my interest is peaked. Thoughts of a horde of fresh, raw cards to look through that could include Mantle's, Mays', etc. popped into my head. So I asked him, "what kind of condition are they in, do you think you have any well known players, what years are they from, etc?" I was bombarding him with questions left and right to try and judge what he potentially had sitting around for all these years.

Well, he mentioned the older ones were mostly from the mid 50's, and he had some newer ones too that he collected when his own kids started to get interested in them. Those were from the late 80's, early 90's (yep...here we go, I thought).

I told him I would come take a look and would help him sell whatever he wanted to sell.

When I finally made it over to his house, he lives about 1.5hrs away from me, he took me into the garage to take a peek. First thing that hit me when I walked in is, "holy cow, you are quite a horder aren't ya Larry?" He chuckled. But I got focused.

He had stuff everywhere. Anything that could possibly be a collectible...I swear he had in there. Dolls, matchbox cars, license plates, coins, magazines, memorabilia, autographs...you name it. We scooted by all that and he showed me his shelving units filled with binders of cards.

Scanning the shelves of the labeled binders, I could tell he wasn't kidding. He literally had thousands of "old" baseball, football, and basketball cards -- only problem was -- all I kept seeing was the typical 80's and 90's cards. "Where's the old cards, Larry," I asked. And he took me over to where the binders were. And there they were. Labeled 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956. I grabbed those and we went inside to take a look.

Well...I was actually pleasantly surprised with what he had. Flipping through the pages, I saw many of the stars from the 50's you'd hope to find. When I told him he had some cards that were potentially worth hundreds of dollars, he got excited too.

Now...a snap back to reality. Looking closer at the cards, I could tell they were in kinda rough shape. The 52's thru 55's, for example, were littered with tape, tape stains and other problems. The grades are probably in the 1-3 range, unfortunately. The 56's were actually pretty nice, with most probably in mid grades +.

No blazing Gem Mint cards to be found...but it was one heck of a fun time flipping through them. As we did, my friend would explain that he would take his $0.25 weekly allowance down to the corner store to buy packs of cards with his buddies. He was very organized as a youngster, and would tape (ugg!) the cards to 8x11 sheets of paper and store them in binders. It wasn't until the 80's that he moved them from that storage method to plastic pages. He said in the 50's, he got tired of doing that after awhile, so the 56's were just stored in a box until they were released from their slumber 30 years later.

I've scanned a lot of the star cards and will add them to this thread so others can enjoy. Larry has told me they are all for sale, so if you see anything you might be interested in, or have a question on, shoot me a pm. I plan on getting some graded for him, while others keeping raw.

Enjoy!
Jerry

Comments

Sign In or Register to comment.