A dealer of vintage books and ephemera was inside a Vermont attic in early August, hoping to make a purchase. Alongside the bound volumes and other items stored inside was an unexpected treasure: a Keds shoebox of mostly non-sports cards dating to the 1930s. One card, though, stood out.
The owners of DeWolfe and Wood Rare Books in Alfred, ME didn’t know exactly what it was when they posted it for sale on eBay, but knowledgeable collectors of vintage baseball cards did.
Mixed in with the Indian Gum and other non-sports cards was a rare 1933 Uncle Jack’s Candy Babe Ruth worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The Ruth card and another featuring Wes Ferrell were the only sports cards found inside the box.
DeWolfe and Wood, which has been in business since the 1990s, offered the ungraded Ruth card in a separate listing on eBay. By early Wednesday evening, bidding had passed $30,000 and it soared past $48,000 by the time the auction closed Thursday morning.
The card is in reasonably good shape but has a small crease in the lower left and a small bit of paper loss on the back.
The 1933 Uncle Jack’s Candy cards were produced in New England, so the find inside the Vermont attic certainly makes sense. The cards were packaged inside small glassine type wrappers with the player visible through it. Uncle Jack’s offered prizes to “New England boys” who collected the most wrappers including a trip to the 1933 World Series.
To date, barely over 200 cards are listed on the combined population reports of the three major grading companies. PSA has graded ten Ruths while SGC has examined six. Most are mid to lower grades.
The checklist consisted of 30 players, but the cards were printed in four different colors, making for a 120-card master set that’s impossible to put together. The majority of the players in the set are Hall of Famers. The cards measure 1-15/16″ x 3.”
In May, a PSA 2 example of the Ruth card sold for $58,849 at Memory Lane. In 2021, a PSA 3.5 brought $68,400 at Goldin. An unopened pack with Ruth on top graded PSA 7 sold for $66,000 through Heritage Auction three years ago.
As part of eBay’s new Authenticity Guarantee program, DeWolfe and Wood will have to ship the card to CSG and if authentic, it will be forwarded to the winning bidder.
The auction listing is here.
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