A 1916 Sporting News Babe Ruth card from a newly graded complete set topped Memory Lane’s “The Find” Auction early Sunday morning. The card, part of a complete set consigned by a Midwestern family that had passed it through generations, sold for $89,250 including the buyer’s premium. Graded PSA 5, the card features Ruth as a 
pitcher with the Boston Red Sox. This variation was blank-backed.
Another card from the same set, featuring legendary athlete Jim Thorpe as a big league player and graded PSA 6, sold for $36,024.
Three other cards were sold separately and the remaining group of 195 cards brought $28,798.
Several Ruth items were offered in the auction, including a PSA 8 (NM/MT) graded single-signed baseball. Signed just 11 days after Lou Gehrig’s famous “Luckiest Man’ speech at Yankee stadium in 1939, the ball brought $28,798.
Another Ruth signed ball, this one with the extraordinary video provenance of the Babe signing it for the son of an Eastman Kodak employee who was testing an early home movie camera, sold for $14,378.
T206 collectors had a rare opportunity to bid on a T206 Eddie Plank graded PSA 5. One of the hobby’s rarest cards, it sold for $107,110.
A highly sought after post-War card, the 1949 Leaf Satchel Paige, was represented in the auction by a PSA 7 that sold for $25,462.
Among the other ‘finds’ consigned to the auction was a group of 1888 Scrapps die-cut cards, some of them in uncut panels of two and in virtually pristine condition. Consigned to the auction by a family in central California, they were broken into lots and sold for more than $13,000 combined.
Several of the hobby’s highest graded sets were offered including the seventh rated 1934 Goudey set. It brought $23,141. The eighth best 1951 Bowman football set, with an average grade of just over 8 (NM/MT), sold for $19,130 while a high grade 1955 Topps All American football set sold for $17,392.
A 1971 Roberto Clemente game bat, given to a friend during that year’s World Series, sold for $19,130.
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