Tim's Gauntlet: Day 1

As I'm sure most of you are already know by now, Tim, from the recently renamed, Cardpocalypse, started up a challenge for the blogs a couple of weeks ago, a challenge that's proven to be rather popular, and is currently taking place across many a blog. And I suppose if you somehow weren't aware of this challenge, you are now!

I'm a little late in getting this one started, and I will have to modify a few of the topics in order to participate, but am still wanting to give it a go, so this is me going. I'm also fairly certain that I've never posted for seven days straight, so that'll probably end up being my biggest "challenge" with this challenge, seven posts across nine or ten days is more realistic for someone like me, but we'll see.

So, the topic for Day 1 is: Favorite card acquired during quarantine?

Hmm, looks like I'm only on the first question, and I've already got a modify it a little bit... not a good start!

Thinking back, I don't think I did the quarantine right, and I say did, because it's been almost a month since it was lifted here in TN. From what I've seen on the interwebz, I was supposed to spend the quarantine buying large amounts of cards, for any inflated price that I found them at, correct? And I know that the term "acquired" doesn't have to mean "bought", but in my mind it does - or at least in this instance it does - so that's what I'm going with here today.

Thinking back on it, I didn't buy a single card during the two-month quarantine, I mean I guess I picked up a couple on COMC, but those were "paid" for with credit from doing the Challenges, and that has always felt more like trading (my time for cards) than buying, so those don't count for this exercise. I did receive quite a few neat cards from fellow bloggers during the lockdown, but again, those don't really fit my criteria for "acquired", so what's a boy to do?

I did buy one card off of Sportlots before the quarantine, and two small lots from the site after, as well as a recent two-card autograph lot off of eBay, so I think I'll go with the one pre-quarantine card for this challenge, a card by the way that took two whole months, or in other words, the length of the quarantine, to be delivered.

I won this 1938 Ogden's Actors: Natural & Character Studies of the great, Boris Karloff, back in late February, from a Sportlots auction no less, which was something that I hadn't done in a long while. This is one of the few Ogden's sets that still sells really well, and that's primarily because of this card alone, one could easily refer to this as the "money-card"! Karloff is as popular as ever (it's gonna take awhile for all of us monster kids to die off), and he doesn't have a lot of tobacco cards out there, so the few that were made, are still incredibly sought after. It also doesn't hurt that this card features an excellent rendering of Boris as Ardath Bey aka Imhotep aka The Mummy.

Film-wise, 1937 and '38 were not amongst Boris' most active, as he would appear in just four films during those two years (none of his best work BTW). But things picked back up in '39, with six films being made, and eight in 1940, before the war would show up and slow things back down for a few more years.

I won this card sometime during the middle of February, after two weeks passed and I still didn't have the card, or any word as to if it had even shipped yet, I sent the seller a message to see what's what. They replied that yes, it had shipped, but I did know that they were in Canada, right? And of course I didn't know this, because a) Sportlots doesn't tell you where the seller is located, and b) The seller didn't tell me either, otherwise I wouldn't have sent a message so soon. Anyways, since I had heard that mail coming across the border was slowing down, so I waited six more weeks, and still nothing! So I sent another message only to find out that it had come back to them as a wrong address at some point, and apparently the seller was too busy to let me know. I've yet to not get any of my expected mail in the 5+ years that I've lived here, so I suspect that this might have been a seller error, but either way, and to their credit, they did resend the card without asking for more shipping, and five short days later and over two months after the initial purchase, I finally had the card in hand... Huzzah!

Alright then, I guess day 1 is in the books, day 2 should be nice, as I actually have a new card with a unique photo, meaning that I won't have to be stretching the rules any, so until then...


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.