Estate sale finds #1

In the last couple of months, I have gone to quite a few estate/moving sales, so many in fact, that I have decided to start a new series here on the blog to cover some of the better outings.

Fairfield Glade, which is the name of this area that we temporarily moved to in May while the house is being renovated, is a hotbed for such sales, mostly due to it being populated by older residents. Where we normally live (we will be moving back in less than two months) about 45 minutes away, there are never any such sales, so this has turned out to be one of the few nice things about living here.

Until about a month ago, I had only been getting one or two things per sale, which wasn't really enough to warrant a post. The last three however, have been absolutely amazing, so why not try and make series out of them?

I'm sure a lot of the stuff that will be featured in these posts won't be of much interest to anyone else, but they will give me the occasional break from writing about cards, which is something I really need right now, so hopefully at least a few of you will find this worth viewing.

So let's get to the goods, shall we?

First up we have one of GE's earliest entries in to the burgeoning personal cassette player market, AKA  their attempt to get in on the Walkman craze.

I believe the Walkman was introduced in '79 or '80 (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), and although I can't find a date for this particular model (#3-5430B), I'm assuming based on the sheer size of the player, combined with style, that it's got to be pre '82-83 at the latest. And speaking of size, for those that are curious (I was), this beautiful behemoth weighed in, with four AA's and a cassette, at 1.1 lbs... definitely not for the modern saggy pants wearing crowd.

At $5, I'm sure I overpaid for this one. But what can I say, other then it was love at first sight, so in all likelihood, I probably would have paid twice as much to ensure that it was going to be leaving with me.

Next up, we have not one...

... but two Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone's. Well, technically speaking, the flesh toned one is an AT&T phone, but it's the same style -- and that's all that really matters to me.

I have had a minor obsession with these phones since around 1991 or so, when a young me bought one at a garage sale for a quarter. Now keep in mind, that at the time, I was under the impression that all one had to do to get their phone line/number, was to merely purchase a telephone and plug it in. So the moment I saw this particular phone at the very affordable price of just 25 cents, I immediately envisioned being the envy of all my friends, and more importantly... being an objet de désir to all the girls, as I would be the only boy with his own phone.

Obviously, I ended up learning that you need more than just a telephone in order to get your own telephone number. Not surprisingly, my mom was to keen on paying for me to have my own line, so things didn't end up working out quite like I had imagined, but at least I was still the only kid around to have a phone in their room.

Because of the memories associated with that first one, I have bought more than a few of these over the years, which basically means, if I come across one that's cheap, I buy it!

With their potential for containing early photos of notable people before they were famous, old yearbook's are always fun. This 1951 version of The Fultonian made it's way to Tennessee from Fulton, NY.

Generally I prefer older yearbooks, but this one was intriguing because most of these student photo pages are signed by the respective students, so if there is anyone of note in here, there might potentially be an early signature of theirs as well.

It will probably be a few months before I start going it, but if I find anyone interesting, I will certainly mention it in a future post.

Old tools are not something I had ever planned on collecting, at some point I just started picking up a few here and there, and now I have a small collection. Often, I find myself drawn towards obsolete items, or like this hatchet, items that I find aesthetically pleasing. The initials of A.O. carved near the only add to the overall charm. Now, if I could just come up with a way to display this unintentional collection!

Saving the best for last, I finally got me a stereoscope, which is something I have wanted for quite some time now. For those unfamiliar, these were the precursor to the View-Master.

I have come across these a few times over the years, but there usually missing the view slide (the bit on the left), so to find one complete and at a very reasonable price, was kind of exciting.

You can't see it, but the underside contains the makers mark, which is the very well known American Stereoscopic Co. out of New York.

Hey look! My left hand is making it's first blog appearance.

It does have a bit of wear, but at well over 100 years old, that shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

Also included, was this tray of around 30 stereoviews. Try as I might, I wasn't able to get the views in action through the viewer, so I have included a few (minus the 3D effect) to give you an idea as to what was in the lot.

About half the views come from this series of shots from the Savoy region, for those interested in history, I would recommend reading up on the history of Savoy. This particular image is of Interlaken in Bern, below the Jungfrau summit.

And the back.

Here's a neat one of the Giessbach Falls.

There are a few from this series as well. It's much easier for me to use my various foreign language books to translate things, versus using the computer, but since all my books are currently packed up, this one will have to wait to be translated.

I got a whole bunch of stuff at another sale last week that I still need to take pictures of, so for anyone that enjoyed this post, you can expect another one within in the next week or so.


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TTM Triumph: Nick Libett

I wanted to take a break today from all the recent basketball successes, and instead, show off a nice hockey return:

A twelve year veteran in the NHL, Mr. Libett is considered by most to be one of the best two way left wingers in Red Wings' history. Always a durable player, he led the league in games played four times. The former Detroit captain was also revered for his toughness, always being ready to throw down when necessary. An All-Star in 1977, he would play ten years in Detroit and two more with Pittsburgh before retiring in 1981. Nick finished is playing days with 237 goals and 268 assists, scoring 505 total points.

As always, I would like to send a big thank you out to Mr. Libett for taking the time to sign my card.


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Al, Norm, Roger, and The Mick

Another day, another post that's starting off with Mr. Tiger (and company). For those of you at home keeping count, that's 3 out of the last 9 now.

Until recently, while finally making a real effort to clean out all of my old picture files chock full of never gotten to items for the blog, I had no idea how many of Al's cards that I was fortunate enough to get last year on COMC. I have been trying to sort everything into similar groups (usually by set), which means, in theory I could start off at least two more featuring Mr. Kaline, as there are still cards of his from '68 and '69 patiently waiting for a public showing.



This was a last second addition to the post, hence the terrible picture.

In the early days of this blog (back when no one was reading it yet), I mentioned that it was my coming across cheap 1972-73 basketball singles on Wensy (god, how I miss that site) in or around 2010, that brought me back to card collecting, which at that time, was only going to be vintage basketball.

But I have never mentioned, that it was the finding of a large amount (at least 100) of '67 & '72 Topps baseball in a dime box, at my first show at the Mall 205 (Portland) in over a decade, that led to me starting to collect baseball again as well. I really thought I would be further along with both of those sets by now, possibly even have them finished, but of course that was also before things got out of control, i.e. before I decided to start working on the insane amount of sets that I currently am.

Now we're getting to, what I consider to be one of my top five vintage baseball gets from last year. It seems like Topps must have started production on the '67 set, or at least the fist series, before Roger's trade to St. Louis, thankfully he didn't end up getting one of their hastily done airbrush treatments.

Considering the overall condition of the card itself, and knowing that it was his second to last, $10 in earned credit seemed like it was almost a steal of a price for this one.

As an aside, I saw a recent article in which Giancarlo Stanton mentioned that he considers Roger Maris' 61 home run's to still be the single season record, despite the fact that the records show three drugged up cheaters ahead of him. It was very refreshing to see a current big leaguer espouse such an opinion, as even if they believe it to be so, most guys usually wouldn't offer up that kind of "hot take" for public consumption. Kudos to him for being willing to do so.

Even if it's just a card featuring his disembodied head, it's always nice to check a Mantle off the list. I may look to replace this one for a non-partially checked/erased version at some point, as of now though, I'm just glad to have this one.


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TTM Triumph: Bobby Hansen

After taking a break for a couple of months, I have started sending out requests again, which thankfully, usually results in some successful returns -- hence the recent return (pun?) of these TTM posts, including today's:

In 1979, Bobby was a member of the U.S. team that won the gold at the inaugural FIBA Men's Junior World Championship in Brazil.

He played four years at Iowa, which included going to the Final Four in 1980.

Drafted in 1983, he would go on to play for ten seasons in the NBA, seeing action with Utah, Sacramento, and Chicago. The highlight of Bobby's career came during the 1992 NBA Finals as a member of the Chicago Bulls, where the three pointer he hit (followed by a steal) to start the fourth quarter of game 6, is often credited for sparking the rally that saw Chicago erase a 15-point deficit to beat the Portland Trailblazers (and break a young Jon's heart) for the NBA Championship.

Retiring in 1992, Bobby has spent the last 25 years doing color work as member of the Hawkeyes radio broadcasting team.

As always, I would like to send a big thank you out to Mr. Hansen for taking the time to sign my card.


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Archiving a birthday

In my previous post I spoke of not acquiring many cards through purchases as of late, and why that is. However, I failed (intentionally) to mention my not too long ago acquisition of many cards through an overly generous gift.

I'm always a bit hesitant to bring up my birthday, primarily because I don't want it to sound like I'm fishing for well wishes or any other sort of salutations (trust me, I'm not!). But since it's pertinent to how I came into all of these packs, it will be necessary to make mention of it.

Before I get to these particular packs, I will set up this short and, probably uninteresting story, by saying that after receiving the lot of packs from Oscar's Lucky 13 game, I knew I had to get my hands on more 2017 Archives. The problem was, like it has been for a lot of folks, they just haven't been in stock anywhere around here. Well, I guess technically that's not true, as I did see one whole blaster box for sale at the Walmart, but I had my heart set on getting more hangar packs, so I ended up passing on it (it was gone the next time I went).

So fast forward to a little over a month ago, when it came time for my least favorite day of the year to make it's annual appearance... my birthday! This year's "big" day happened to coincide with a ten day trip that my mom was taking back home to Portland. Since I had heard about most of her plans before the trip, I knew generally where she would and wouldn't be, which brings us to the packs.

Since I hadn't been having any luck finding the Archives here, I decided to ask her if she could look for any back there, especially since I knew that at some point she would be right near a particular Target in Vancouver (Washington) that could always be counted on to have a well stocked card aisle.

I'm sure much has changed in the couple of years since I moved away, but apparently that Target has changed a bit, as even during the height of Judge-mania, they still had a plentiful bounty of all the hottest current products. Now when I asked her to look for any, I was really hoping to just get a couple of packs, so you can imagine my surprise when upon my mom's return, she gifted me with a huge stack of 17 packs (I opened three before realizing I should get a picture of them). Even though I'm not a big fan of getting birthday presents, I have to admit that I was thankful to have received these.

This post ended up being a touch lengthy, so I decided to limit the base cards to just eight examples from each of the three different designs. If you've ever read my blog before, you shouldn't be too terribly surprised to see that I ended up featuring mostly older players.

The 1960 design is my favorite of the three designs used for the set. And the Gehrig is probably tied for first as far as my favorite card from the set goes.

The only real problem I encountered with all these packs was that collation for the 1960 portion of the checklist seemed to be much worse than the other two, I mean I must of opened up four packs that Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, and Noah Syndergaard all back to back. The '82 and '92 sections didn't have that kind of repeated mixture, so I don't if that's normal for the 60's, or if was just that way for me.

I don't have any sort of affinity for the '82 Topps set, so this would probably be my least favorite of the three designs.

More than a few people have already commented on how great the Monte Irvin card is, so I will just say that I am in complete agreement with everyone else's sentiments. I really like the color job they did on Jimmie Foxx as well.

I didn't think I would like the '92 design as much as I do. Whether it's looking back to the old timers, or showcasing today's young talent, it just seems to work for me. I had to show Lou, what with us sharing the same birthday and all (different years of course). It doesn't seem like you see Reggie as an Oriole very often. And how great is this Bob Feller? It's tied with the Gehrig for my favorite of the base set.

Randy doesn't look quite as ornery as he usually does. The coloring of the Ruth card is really well done too.

A quick note before I get to the non-base stuff. I think normally your supposed to get one of the Rookie Stars and one insert in each pack, but for whatever reason, about 2/3 of my packs had a Rookie Stars and two inserts in them. I just thought I should mention that, just in case anyone wonders why their are more inserts than there were packs.

You get one of these Rookie Stars in every pack. A ten card set, of which I only now need one to complete. I left out Yoan Moncada, only because his card has already made a recent appearance in the Oscar post.

I got a bunch of these Bazooka's, including a few duplicates. I love the background on the Bregman. And the Koufax is pretty neat as well, although I think the little kids in background that were trying (and succeeding) to get in to the shot, is what makes that card so great.

I haven't really figured out if I like these Retro Original's yet. I guess which ever way I end up leaning, I at least got some decent names.

My least favorite part of this year's Archives release... the Derek Jeter Retrospective insert set. I can't even begin to tell you how uninteresting these are to me. After I pulled my first one, I kept saying "Please don't let me get another one" multiple times before opening each of the remaining packs. As you can clearly see, that mantra didn't work out so well.

I managed to get four of the peach parallels, which are numbered to /199. The Jim Bunning is my favorite, but the Galarraga is pretty neat to. I'm not familiar with T.J. Rivera, but going by his stats, he seems to be having a decent rookie season.

The blues are numbered to /75. Young Mr. Alfaro seems to be a prospect of some note, who thus far, has only seen limited action.

Hey look, another Andres Galarraga parallel. This time in red, which are limited to just /25. I can certainly think of worse players to get two different parallels of. I don't remember him too much from his time with the Expos, but I do recall those couple of really productive seasons he had in Colorado very well. I can't really remember why at this point, but I do remember following the ups and downs of the Rockies during their first couple of years. I suspect that it might have been just because they were new and sort of close to Portland, certainly closer than that other fishy expansion team. Whatever the reason was for that interest I had in the team, it obviously didn't last. If it had, you might be reading another Rockies related blog right now.

It's a little hard to tell, but this is a Jacob DeGrom Gold Winner parallel. For obvious reasons, these parallels were only used for the 1992 portion of the checklist. The red parallel above was more difficult to get odds wise (I forgot to check one of the wrappers for the exact numbers), but for some reason, this one falling at 1:110 packs, (I think) felt like the bigger get. Another really cool image on this one as well.

Another rookie that I wasn't familiar with, who also seems to be having a solid season. Batting .284 with 113 hits so far, he is leading N.L. shortstops in multiple categories (never mind that one of those is errors committed). I might hang on to this one for a bit, just in case he turns into something special. I have to say though that his signature leaves a little to be desired, but I guess that's to be expected from the youngsters these days.

Now that is a cool card! A great image combined with an attractive signature. I was very happy to pull this as I believe it's now my first autograph from a member of the '95 Braves championship team.

So in an attempt wrap this one up, I will say that I really enjoyed opening up all of these packs, and I was satisfied with what I ended up getting. I don't know if it is or not, but I kind of felt like this was the equivalent of getting a hobby box. I will be adding set needs to my want list sometime in the next couple of days, so if anyone has any duplicates, I would love to try and complete this set. Also, if anyone isn't working on the set but is interested in any particular player(s)/team(s), just let me know what you're looking for as I have plenty of extras that are yours for the taking.


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Luck of the Irish

My card purchasing has dropped pretty dramatically over the last couple of months, so much so, that since the last show I attended at the end of May, I have bought maybe five cards total. I attribute this recent decline simply due to being burned out on cards, plain and simple.

Card burnouts are not uncommon for me, but this kind of decline in buying, has been a little more pronounced than usual. Thankfully for me though, I have many other collecting interests, so I don't have to do anything too crazy/responsible, you know... like save my money. That would be just sheer lunacy!

This drop-off in newer acquisitions is also why all of my more recent posts have featured cards from last year, and even as far back as late 2015, that have been sitting in folders collecting digital dust. So with that being said, today's card is a bit of a treat, in that it's actually new -- or at least, new to me.

I may not be buying much, but I still look around, just to make sure I don't miss any great deals. Today's card comes courtesy of a recent auction on Sportlots, I just couldn't pass up a cheap opportunity to add a card to my small collection of autographs featuring Heisman Trophy winners.

2012 Fleer Retro 1961 parallel autograph

Johnny Lattner capped off his senior season at Notre Dame by winning the Heisman in 1953, which paired nicely with the Maxwell Award that he also won that year and the year prior. Johnny was never great at one particular position, he was just really good at multiple positions -- playing on both sides of the ball as a halfback and defensive back. He was also used as a kick returner and was an accomplished punter as well.

Drafted by the Steeler's with the 7th overall pick in 1954, he would play one season with the team,    before joining the Air Force for the next two years. It was there that some point (I couldn't find the date), that during an exhibition football game, Mr. Lattner suffered a knee injury of such severity, that he was never able to play football again.

Racking up over 1,000 all-purpose yards and being named to the 1954 Pro Bowl, his one and only professional season with Pittsburgh was considered a success, there is no way to know just how well he would have fared, had the opportunity at a longer career not been taken from him so soon.

Before getting this card, I wasn't familiar with the 2012 Fleer Retro football set in the least, and even after reading about it, I can honestly say that I'm still not. It seems like a very confusing set. Among other things, it looks like they had four different insert sets featuring players on the old Fleer designs from 1960-63, with each of those sets then having autograph parallels. The odds of pulling these inserts varies by year. The odds of pulling a card from the '61 set were 1:20 packs, unfortunately I couldn't find any stated odds of pulling one of the autograph parallels, so I have no idea how difficult this particular card was to get. I do know however, that from searching around some, the autograph parallels on the old Fleer designs don't seem to be very common, in fact one could almost say that they are somewhat scarce in the wild. Which is par for the course, I find something I like, and then I can't find anymore (at least reasonably priced). And after doing some research, I think getting the above card for $7.50 turned out to be a pretty good deal. Had it been listed on eBay instead of Sportlots, I suspect it would have gone for much more.


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TTM Triumph: Bob Weiss

A recent success from the former player and longtime coach:

Always considered a very reliable player, Mr. Weiss played for twelve seasons in the NBA, which included being a member of the Warriors 1967 Championship team. Early in his career with Philadelphia, he spent some time playing in Eastern Professional Basketball League (or EBL, which would later become the CBA) as well. While there, playing for the Wilmington Blue Bombers, he led the league in assists during the 1966-67 season and was named to the All-Star First Team.

As always, I would like to thank Mr. Weiss for taking the time to sign my card.


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