It was the kind of walk-in collection that turns an ordinary Thursday into one you don’t soon forget. The kind that card shop owners go to sleep dreaming about and wake up hoping it might actually happen.
Sometimes it does.
A fresh find of about 600 sports and non-sports “strip” cards from a century ago won’t make anyone a millionaire but it’s more proof that there are still unknown stashes of very old cards still waiting to make their way into the modern hobby. Apparently collected by a candy loving youngster and passed down through the generations, the cards are a visit to what and who were making news and entertaining the public 100 or so years ago.
Joe Davis, owner J&J Sports Cards/Got Baseball Cards in Loganville, GA, wasn’t in his store last week when he learned from an employee that a woman had walked in with a cigar box full of the cards. Clearly there was no cherry picking in this collection.
Among the pile of mostly 1920s issues sitting inside were 20 Babe Ruth cards (five different), 15 of Ty Cobb (three different), ten of Walter Johnson, nine of Rogers Hornsby, a dozen with Grover Cleveland Alexander’s hand drawn mug, 24 of Tris Speaker, eight of Casey Stengel and a pair featuring Christy Mathewson.
“They originated from a collector in Coney Island and were then were passed on to a caregiver and have been stored for decades,” Davis relayed to SC Daily.
Strip cards were just that—cards produced in long strips that were typically cut or ripped apart by the youngsters who got them by buying candy in a store. They’re made of paper stock. That, plus the often less than ideal methods of separation created by young hands 100+ years ago mean they tend to be rough grade but it’s not every day such a large group enters the hobby.
The demand for Ruth–especially those from early in his Yankees career– knows no bounds. The other Hall of Famers will easily find buyers and the legion of lesser names make for a low-cost way for just about anyone to grab a pre-War card on the cheap.
The cards in the box weren’t all baseball. There were ten of boxing legend Jack Dempsey and other sports stars like Walter Hagen and a W551 of early tennis star Bill Tilden.
There were also non-sports card in the find, including US presidents, a whopping 34 featuring early film star Charlie Chaplin, six of Charles Lindberg and various actors and actresses.
The local woman who owned them spent hours in the shop last Thursday, learning about the cards and working Davis’ team to determine what to do with them.
“They were offered to us because the owner said she wanted to maximize her return rather than sell outright, which is of course what we specialize in doing through our grade to consign program,” Davis explained.
The Hall of Famers and other more valuable cards are now at SGC, where they’ll be graded. Once back from Florida—likely some time early next month– many will be listed for sale on the Got Baseball Cards eBay store with others listed on the shop’s website.
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