Celebrating Opening Day with a scan dump (Part 2)

Given how things have gone in recent years, it's hard to believe that there was a time when I was able to post once every 2-3 days on here. These days, I feel like it's a win if I can finish 2-3 posts a month. I still haven't fully adjusted to this new normal though, and often end up scanning more stuff than I'll ever be able to get to. I need to learn how to start picking my spots a bit better. In the meantime though, I've got scan folders galore. 

I know now that I won't ever be able to get all of the themed posts that I had planned on doing, done, but do still want to show the majority of the cards in said scan folders, if only so I don't feel like I wasted my time doing all of that scanning. The easiest (for me) way that I've been able to think of to get all of these scans out there is to do a series of scan-dump posts, which is why you've already seen a couple this year, and by my calculations, will likely see four or five more by year's end. Today's edition will cover the last of the old baseball scans. All but the last card came from COMC, and all have been sitting in folders for between 2-4 years now.

I can remember thinking at the time that I probably shouldn't have gotten Bobby Shantz (despite his cheapness) because this card is in every single '61 Post lot that you find on eBay, and since I still need a bunch of cards from the set, I figured that it wouldn't be long before I got one of said lots which would've included the Shantz. Fast forward a bit, and I still haven't gotten one of those lots, so Bobby's purchase doesn't look so bad at this point.

Everything I said about the Shantz card applies to Elston here, too. I wrote 95¢ under this scan, so I guess looking back that wasn't too bad of a price.

I'm no longer actively collecting Larry Doby, but am still keeping what I have, and wouldn't hesitate to add to his inactive collection were I to come across any more cheap cards of his. And in case anyone's wondering, the only reason I stopped looking for his stuff is simply because it's gone up so much in price since the boom started.

Because of how much time has passed since purchasing most of them, I don't recall too many details about most of the cards in this post. This Kenny Holtzman (and the next card) is the exception though. This was the first card I bought during 2022 Black Friday sale. It set me back a whopping 47¢. And despite not being the biggest fan of the Kellogg's 3-D's, I couldn't pass up this uncracked copy for that price.

Kenny was the first card that I bought during the 2022 Black Friday sale, and here was the last. I don't remember why I did it, but right before requesting my shipment Monday night (the last night that one could qualify for free shipping), I decided to look and see what the cheapest Red Man (w/ tab) on the site was. Low and behold, it was somebody that I actually collect! At around $7.50 this was also the most expensive card that I had gotten that weekend. No regrets. If I wasn't already now working on half a gillion different sets again, I'd strongly consider going after all of the Red Men. And speaking of collecting Red Men, if you feel like following someone's progress on the '52 set, go check out Eric's.

Despite my interest in collecting real stamps, I don't have a lot of desire to do so with those of the Topps variety. I've never taken the time to see who's on the checklist for these various sets, but I don't see myself ever getting too many more of them.

I know that when I got this card that it was for a very specific reason, but this was during the delayed shipments era (aka the 'Rona), and by the time I finally got it in hand, I could no longer remember why I had wanted it so much. I'm hoping that it'll come back to me someday. In the meantime, it was added to my pseudo set-build.

This is just nice looking card, isn't it? The blue sleeves of Luis' warm-up jacket blend in well with the background color.

It's subtle, but I'm thinking that this card was meant to be used in some sort of promotionial capacity. 

I know why Upper Deck wouldn't have done so, but this card would've been so much more interesting if they had swapped the pictures. The Jay Buhner Fan Club T-shirt reveal is considerably better than a headshot.

I don't go out of my way to seek out Junior cards anymore, in fact these last two are probably amongst the last 3-4 that I've gotten since the Boom got going. This one was actually from one of their eBay auctions, and while the background does pop a bit more in person, overall, the card was a bit underwhelming. As an aside, I won a few more of their auctions last month (not an easy thing to do anymore) for cards from a considerably older, and more interesting, set. It'll be awhile before you, or I, see them though, as they're currently sitting in my account waiting to be shipped.

This was a bit of an impulse purchase. I saw it for the first time while looking through someone's sale, thought it was very neat looking, so I bought it. Five dollars (and some change) seems like a lot to spend on something "just because", but in this instance I think it was worth it.

Vic Raschi is a guy I collect solely because of his being a Portland Beaver. I don't add to his collection very often, but when I do...

To my knowledge, there aren't a lot of locker room shots in the '54 Bowman set, or very many other sets from this era, so in my mind it makes this particular image stand out a bit more.

That's it for the COMC portion of the post, but before I call it a wrap, I'm gonna squeeze in an eBay purchase from either last year, or the year before. I just don't know, it got scanned right away, stuck in a folder, and then forgotten (the scan, not the card -- I've seen the card in it's binder many times since).

I know that a lot of collector's aren't too keen on mis-registered cards, and I'm not either when it's just a slight blur, but I absolutely love them when they're this off. This is my second 1970 Topps that's this wonked, and unlike the Tony Perez, which is even better, this one fit into a player collection; that being Mike Cuellar. Since these are listed under so many different descriptions, they're not always easy to find. In fact, I only came across this one while doing a general search for Mike Cuellar. I think it was just described as an error. At around $5, I know that I overpaid for it, but I really wanted, and had been prepared to go higher if need be. As much as I love the individual card, I can't help but wonder how awesome this whole sheet would've been to see (and potentially own).

There's a part of me that would like to just get the rest of scan dump posts done (so that I no longer have to see my folders of shame), but I have a couple of thank you posts that I really should get to, so those'll probably be what's on tap for the coming month.

A Post post (Part 1)

For someone whose generally as unfocused in all aspects of their life as I am, I've been surprisingly focused when it comes to card collecting the last few months.

I think I'm past the days of being distracted by shiny objects, and aside from a handful of guys, player collecting hasn't been doing much for me, so I'm pretty much left with just sets to focus on. And that's what I've been doing.

One of my primary focuses has been on the '61-63 Post sets. I've acquire maybe 30 across the three sets since October, and while most of them have just been commons, they've all been new to me, and even more importantly; each one of them is one card closer to completing their respective sets.

Not wanting to bombard folks with too many cards in one post (like I used to do), I thought I'd break the Post's into two posts, '61 and '62 today, and then, since there's more of them, give the 63's there own post next weekend.

Don Cardwell played on a lot of bad teams and more often than not, finished seasons with a losing record. In fact, all but three of his fourteen seasons were finished with a losing record. His first winning season would come in 1961 when he went 15-14 for a Cubs team that finished 64-90-2.

I generally strive for a bit better condition on my Post cards than this, but for less than two bucks I couldn't not get Saint Ron. Of course, one of the nicest things about Post cards is that they are one of the few types of cards that you can trim; and not be called all kinds of bad names my folks on the internet. And for the record, I did clean these edges up a bit before it went into the binder.

I've got a few more 61's sitting in my COMC account, but it'll be a while before I get those. I've done a bit better with the 62's though...

Usually overshadowed by brother Ken, Clete still had more than a respectable career; and one that most guys going into the pros would love to have. He also ended up with one more ring than his brother, though I'm sure playing for the Yankees played a bit of a part in that.

The good folks of Post wound up being a bit off with their prediction. Early finished the '62 season with a record of 7-15, which left him sitting at 299 wins. #300 would come the following season (his last). Between his gout and the mileage that he had incurred, those last two seasons sound like they were an absolute slog to get through. Of course, if he hadn't lost a few seasons to the war, he probably would've reached 300 a few years earlier, and most likely would've been retired before this set was released.

This card isn't a short print, but does tend to sell for a bit more than your average card in the set. Don't ask me why though. It's not a HOF bump, because there are a number of those from the set that sell for less. And to my knowledge, there aren't a lot of rabid Early Wynn collectors out there. I guess if anyone knows what's what, I'd love to hear about it.

After a poor start to the '62 season, Willie was traded to Cleveland after just 11 games. He put up serviceable numbers with the Indians, but still started the next season in the minors. He got called back up but struggled mightily during limited playing time, and would be done in the majors by seasons end.

1962 saw Albie set personal bests in games played (which naturally led to bests in plate appearances and at-bats), runs scored, doubles, and triples.

Harmon might just be the most common HOFer from this set, and is therefor often the cheapest. I probably could've held out for a nicer copy (I did clean this one up a bit though), but this one came in a small lot. I have no doubt a better one will probably be gotten in another lot (there's one in practically every '62 Post lot that ever shows up on eBay) at some point, and when it is, this one will be given away to whoever needs it.

Joe is one of only 18 players to hit four home runs in a single game, which he did against Brooklyn in 1954. I tend not to have a great memory when it comes to watched sporting events, but I do vividly recall watching Mike Cameron accomplish this feat back in '02. Of course, that game was also memorable because Seattle scored ten runs in the first inning, with four of those runs being a pair of back-to-back home runs by Bret Boone and Mike Cameron.

It's nice to have the both of the Boyer boys out of the way, at least for '62. I've noticed a big push in recent years for Ken to make the HOF. Admittedly, I'm terrible at figuring out who should and who shouldn't be enshrined, but with that being said, I've looked at his numbers on multiple occasions and am not seeing what the pro-Ken crowd is. I do see a really good player, just not one whose career screams HOF.

Despite my recent focus on set collecting, there are occasions where it's very difficult not to add certain cards to player collections instead. This is one of those instances. It's not terribly expensive, so I can get another one at some point, but the temptation to add it to Dick's pages was very strong.

I mentioned at the beginning of the post that I have some more Post's sitting in my COMC account, which were gotten during the recent Black Friday sales. I saw a number of a people lamenting online this year over the lack of deals during the sales, which is funny, I did quite well as far as finding things that I thought were good prices go. I'm not gonna try to bullshit anyone by saying that this years offerings were as good as they were ten years ago (those days are not coming back), but all-in-all I did pretty well. The lack of free shipping this year was kind of a letdown though. I was still gonna have my stuff shipped after the sales ended, but after thinking about it some, I figured I might as well wait until after the new year to do so. At least that way I'll be able to avoid the rush, and possibly be able to add a few more cheapies to the shipment in the meantime.

Better late than never

Is there a record, amongst bloggers who actively exchange cards with other bloggers, of who's gone the longest before trading with the Night Owl? If there is, I think I now own it.

I started this blog almost 7 1/2 years ago, and have been fortunate enough to receive, and send out cards to quite a few different bloggers, and blog readers, during that time. However, it wasn't until just this past December that I partook in my first bit of extra-curricular activity with the ever popular winged wordsmith behind Night Owl Cards (and now 1993 UPPER DECK as well).

Some of you might be wondering what took so long, and honestly, I don't really know. I don't think that there's any reason why, it just, for whatever reason, took us a while to swap some cards. For blog purposes, it would've probably been more exciting if their was some great backstory involving murder and betrayal, but there isn't, sorry. 

 

I think I could count on half a hand that number of times that 1987 Topps has appeared on this blog. At this point in time, most collectors seem to either really love the set, or really hate it. Haven't you heard, it's 2023, the internet demands that you pick a side! Me though, well, I guess you could say that I'm indifferent to it. Thanks to my brain slowly turning to mush, I can't say for certain anymore, but it's possible that the very first pack of cards I ever got were 1987 Topps, and if it wasn't the first, it was certainly one of the earlier sets that I collected. With that in mind, there should be at least some nostalgia attached to the set for me, but it's hard to be nostalgic for something that's never gone away -- and from what I've been able to gather, is never gonna go away. I may be neutral on the set, but after all of the blog posts that I've seen in recent years, I'm very glad that I'm not collecting anything current, because I'd probably have a very different take on it, what with it's design constantly being rehashed and all.

These two cards stem back to last year when, much to Mr. Owl's chagrin, he was "gifted" a vending box of 1987 Topps from somebody at work. The resulting blog post was equal parts "Look what someone had the gall to give me!" and "Please take these off of my hands!!!". I knew that I couldn't help him move very many, but I did rattle off a couple of names of guys that I seem to be in need of, and Jamie and Joe were the two that he was able to take care of (please don't ask who the other names were, because I cannot remember anymore). I have a blank backed copy of Jamie's rookie, but somehow did not already have a regular one. And Joe is one of a handful guys that I'm trying not to collect, but still am sort of anyway.

As nice as it was to get them, I'm not sure that these two would've been enough to justify the cost of a stamp. However, they had company...

I suspect that this, and the next card, are copies that have both been upgraded, thus rendering their slightly off-condition counterparts expendable. I too will undoubtedly upgrade this one at some point, but for now, it's just fine for my set. And given current prices, it'll probably continue to be fine for at least the next couple of years.

If the Post was unexpected, which it was, I don't know how to describe this one. I mean, it's not everyday that someone sends me a playing days Erskine. Sure, there's a vertical crease going down the middle, but it doesn't detract from the overall image very much. I've come to realize that if I want to pursue this set in any sort of serious fashion, I will have to be more tolerant towards acquiring cards that are in a similar state. If not, I'll have to be content to sit on the sidelines until the moneyed crowd moves on to something else.

Many thanks to our resident avian author for the envelope, hopefully it won't be another 7+ years before we can do this again.

On an unrelated note, I noticed yet another new blog on the block, and as usual, thought it was worth mentioning. So, if you have a few spare minutes, and are inclined to want to do something nice for someone else, go show Dillard's Dugout some love. One of the best ways to prevent a new blogger from getting discouraged is to let them know that they aren't typing into a void.

One card at a time

Given some of the prices that I've encountered over the last few months, I think I may have chosen the wrong time to start working on my Post sets again. Mind you, I don't regret doing so, as I have been enjoying the "hunt" (despite the lack of successes), it's just that prices seem to be a tad higher than I had anticipated. And I know, the BOOM is still very much alive and well, I just didn't think that those folks would be caring too much for the Post cards; apparently I was wrong.

So far, I've had zero luck on eBay when trying to bid on lots, and zero luck when trying to bid on any bigger names/HOFers. I have however, had two recent successes when bidding on random needs from sellers that I've already gotten other things from, and was just trying to take advantage of their free combined shipping offers. Sam Taylor being the first of these. According to the TCDB, this card has a "dark blue hat" version and a "light blue hat" version; mine being the former. Maybe someday, if I have absolutely nothing else to collect, I will chase down the other version, but for now, dark blue hat is good enough for me.

It's funny how differently two cards from the same set can scan. Sam scanned fine, but Frank looks like 💩 (looks great in person though). I should probably just stick to photographing any future cards. Anyway, Frank isn't a short print, but does seem to command a few bucks more than your average common from the set. Why I don't know? I got a pretty good deal on this one though, it was the only Post card from this seller that didn't have a lot of bidding activity, and since I had already won three other cards (for my Portland Beavers collection) from them, I figured I might as well try to add a card to the '61 Post set as well. The box version, which this is, is supposed to say Charlie Gehringer, but instead cites a Charley Derringer as having been a former Tigers second basemen. This error was corrected for the mail-in version.

I mentioned not having any success on eBay when it comes to big names from Post, but I did just recently land a pretty big name from a Jell-O set...

This win came via a COMC auction on eBay, and represents my first 1962 Jell-O. Roger's got a few problems, but I couldn't be more pleased to have gotten him. And the good news was, being from COMC, I was able to use store credit to pay for it, thus avoiding sales tax (and the $4.95 shipping price). The bad news is, I won't be seeing him in-hand anytime soon, as I just got last years stuff, and won't be requesting another shipment until after the next Black Friday promotion (free shipping). I didn't want to wait that long to show him though, so just try to look past the watermark for now. 

Unless my (public) prediction from a few years ago about the BOOM lasting 5-10 years is wrong (I'm actually starting to think that I should've said 10-15), I think I'm gonna have to be content to play the role of the tortoise in this Post race; which is fine, I've gotten much more accustomed to moving slower as I've gotten older. And who knows, maybe all of the hares will get theirs in the next year or two, and then move onto another "hot" set. I know, probably not, but a fella can dream, can't he?

The 700 Club

Today's post is #700 for this blog.

On one hand, it doesn't seem like a lot compared to some other folks, as that's less than two years worth for the daily posters; it's taken me over seven to get here. But on the other hand, a lot of other blogs have come and gone during the last seven years, the majority of whom never even got close to 700 posts. 

It does feel like something to me, but I don't know where it would rank on the chart of great blog accomplishments. So, with that in mind, I'll just be conservative and call it a mild accomplishment... yay me!

A much larger accomplishment was recently achieved by another blogger, that being, Nick, who just celebrated his 11th year over at Dime Boxes. 

Like the previous year, Nick celebrated his anniversary with a giveaway, which as luck would have it, I was actually kind of early for. 

Normally, I wouldn't refer to working on, and then getting stuck on, a blog post, as a good thing; but that's exactly what happened on the night of Nick's giveaway, and it actually worked out fairly well, for me that is. I don't know if it's because I'm looking for inspiration, or just seeking out a distraction, but I will often go check my blog reading list if I get stuck somewhere on a post in progress (which happens more often than it probably should), read a post or two, comment where I can, and then come back to my post and see if I can get it moving again. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. On the night of Nick's giveaway for example, it didn't.

Early as I may have been on this particular occasion, I wasn't the earliest. I think I was #3 or 4, but was still able to get my top want, so you'll not hear any complaining from me.

Having just started back up with my Post sets, it seemed rather fortuitous that a '61 Post Jim Bunning would be amongst the freebies, and what's more, it hadn't been claimed yet! I think it's considered a win anytime you can add HOFer to a set-build. I would've been more than content with just that card, but did push the greed boundary with two more claims.

I've mentioned it a few times before, but when I was a kid, the only Mother's Cookies I ever saw (and owned) were those of the Mariners variety; thus leading me to think for the longest time that they only ever made them for the Mariners. In fact, I don't think that it was until I started reading the blogs that I found out that there had been whole mess of non-Mariners Cookie cards produced throughout my childhood. Nick had 4-5 A's up for grabs, I missed one that I would've liked to have by just a couple of minutes, but still managed to get these two. I say that I collect Blue Moon Odom, but that collection consists of only a few cards, and almost never gets added to. And I just a said few posts back, I've been very tempted to add Carney to the list of player collections, but have yet to officially do so. In the meantime though, it doesn't hurt to pick up a few of his cards here and there.

Thus ends the claims portion of the post, but if you were fortunate enough to participate in the giveaway, you're probably already well aware that Nick included some extras in each envelope/package...

It's funny, I didn't grow up an A's fan, nor did I ever even know an A's fan, and yet, as an adult, I seem to be drawn to a lot of former A's. Gene Tenace, Ken Holtzman, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue, Joe Rudi, Bert Campaneris, and John Odom are all players that I collect. And Sal Bando and Carney Lansford are among the players that I've thought about collecting. It's also interesting, and a bit odd, that aside from Carney, all these guys [Edit: save for Vida] retired before I was even familiar with baseball. It's just strange.

Worst scan you'll see on the blogs today!

I'm pretty sure that this is the first card from this set that I've ever seen in person, and even though I'm sure that I've seen cards from it on the blogs, it feels like this is the first time that I've even heard of the set. And without even looking at the checklist, I'm just gonna go ahead and say that this would be the card that I'd want the most from it. Oh, and aside from a suspicious "relic" card, this is now my only other post-playing days card of Senior.

Nick always includes a couple of extra Juniors, and the last couple of times they've all been new to me; this time being no exception.

These were the random portion of the extras. The is pretty neat, so I'll be keeping that one. The other two though, well, if anyone wants them, just say the word. I am thinking about working on a Kellogg's set, just not this one. And as good as Johnny Bench was, he is of almost no interest to me collecting-wise. 

Thanks again for the giveaway, Nick. And congratulations, again, on hitting the 11-year mark, it really is quite a remarkable achievement.

Cubs, trains, and other assorted vintage goodies

Two Saturday's ago was a card show day, and not to brag or anything, but I think I did pretty well.

Having not been to a show since March, I was really looking forward to this one. However, I wasn't looking forward to going and having considerably less money to spend than usual, thankfully though, I ended up selling a fairly rare record for a decent chunk of change about a week before the show... so I had plenty of paper folding money to play with. The only downside was that I probably should have been trying to save some of it for potential future wants, but no matter how old I get, I'm still like a small child when it comes to money, in that, if I have it, I spend it!

As per usual, I'll be spreading out the purchases across four or five posts, starting first with the vintage portion, as that always seems to be the most popular with readers.

My favorite seller (he's a lot of other people's favorite seller as well), Jim, was there with his usual array of insanely low priced items. This time though, he had a large selection of vintage cards, which isn't the norm for him, not surprisingly, going through those vintage cards was my first priority upon seeing them (I always go to his tables first).

Have you noticed how many people seem to be in a collecting funk as of late? I guess this is a good time to mention that you can add my name to that list as well. It sounds like a lot of folks are becoming disenfranchised over the ever increasing amount of new products flooding the market, and even though that's not what's causing my malaise, I can certainly understand why it would be having such a negative impact on so many people.

This post is already fixin' to be excruciatingly long (hopefully in a good way though), so I don't want to get too deep into this right now, but the short of it is, that I realized a couple of months ago that I just wasn't having very much fun collecting cards (or anything else for that matter) anymore.

Set collecting, vintage baseball set collecting, to be more specific, has been causing me a great deal of stress as of late, and collecting should never be stressful. I'll go into more detail in a future post, but for the moment, I can tell you that I have stopped working on a number of vintage sets (they've been removed from my want lists too).

For some time now, I've been thinking about starting a side collection of guys who played in the PCL, so now with a bunch cards from broken up sets sitting around doing nothing, I thought that this might be a good time to start putting together such a collection... apparently I was wrong! It only took a couple of days of trying to figure out who played where for me to get overwhelmed, so for the moment that idea is going to be shelved, and will likely revisited at the end of summer.

Some of you might be wondering why I even bothered going to the show then? And that would be an easy question to answer, I went because there's a number of sets that I still do enjoy collecting. There's also a number of sets that I have no illusions about ever being able to finish, but still enjoy getting cards from, case in point, the '49, '51, and '52 Bowman's that you've already seen.

I've been on a bit of a Bowman kick ever since I found that cheap '52 Bowman Casey Stengel back in March. And like I said, I know I'll never be able to finish these, but that's okay, I'm just having fun picking up cheap semi-decent condition examples when I can. I have a few currently sitting in my COMC account too, all though, with these old Bowman's, I've noticed that for me, it's much more fun to buy them at shows, than to buy them online. I don't know if that makes any sense or not, but hopefully somebody what I'm talking about.

This is only my third '55. I'd love to know the story behind Gene Baker's giant Band-Aid.

I have mixed feelings about this set, mainly because of the action shots. I mean, some are so cool, like with this Hank Sauer, while others are of guy's just standing there doing nothing, which is kind of the opposite of "action". Either way though, I had to have this one.

Hey, this guy was pretty good, wasn't he? I didn't realize how many vintage Ernie Banks' that I had until I started going through all of my recently stopped sets. Even though I've shown most of them on the blog at one time or another, I'm thinking that I might try to get all of 'em into one post coming up in the near future.

One thing that I'm definitely not giving up on, is the Post sets. Unbeknownst to me, and I'm pretty sure Jim too, the Frank Thomas is a short print, and one of the harder to find one's to boot. There seems to be no rhyme or reason with the Post short prints, at least in my mind, so I was kind of surprised to find this out after I got home that day.

Another thing that I've been thinking about doing is to start a few mini-collections, which is something that a lot of you do, but I've always been a set collector, so this is kind of new territory for me. Recently I was reading a book that had a chapter about the first live transatlantic television broadcast on July 23rd, 1962. As part of that broadcast, a 90 second clip of a Cubs-Phillies game was shown, so I thought it might be kind of fun to start a collection of the four player's who were featured in that clip -- George Altman, Calvin Koonce, Johnny Callison, and Tony Taylor.

This guy was pretty good too. My first vintage Lou Brock. It's off center, has some scratches in the middle, and a crease at the bottom... but I don't care, it's still a cool card!

As I mentioned, Jim doesn't usually have a lot of vintage, so I was pleasantly surprised to see all of it when I got there. When he does have it, they're usually just stacked up in top loaders in the middle of the table, between his dime boxes, 5/$1 boxes, etc.

None of them are priced, and if it was anybody but him, I wouldn't even bother -- but after buying stuff from him for over three years now, I know that once you ask him how much? He's not going to reach for a Beckett, or check anything on his phone -- he'll just look at everything, and give you a price, a price that is usually negotiable too. So what was the price that I was quoted for all of the above? $42... sold! Even though his prices are always low, I still expected the quote to be higher.

If anybody thinks that that price seems like a lot, well, you remember that Frank Thomas short print? It looks like that when it does come up on eBay, $40 or more, is not an uncommon selling price. I'm sort of feeling a bit guilty about that one, I might have to let him know about it the next time I see him, and give him a few extra bucks too. If it was someone else, I might not feel the same way about it, but it's Jim!

 

Behind his sports GU/auto's box, Jim usually has some non-sport relics/autos stacked up, this time being no exception, but he had also had a small stack of what were clearly tobacco cards back there as well. I might have missed them, had another dealer not come over and inquire about them. I guess that guy didn't think that he could flip them (even though I didn't hear a price being quoted), because he walked away, and then I pounced.

Jim knew that they were German tobacco cards, and that was about it, which was fine, because that's all I knew about 'em too.

Initially I was only interested in three of them, but when I asked for a price, Jim said "just the three?", to which I replied, "yeah, well... unless there's a discount for taking all of them". So he looked through the stack one more time, and said "how about four bucks?", which sounded like a really great deal for all sixteen of them, so I of course accepted.

I still haven't gotten around to trying to research this Schienen-Wunder set yet, but I will one of these days.

Jim had so much vintage this time, that some of it even made it's way into his dime boxes, namely a bunch of mid 70's basketball. Most of it was 1974-75 Topps, a set that I'm almost done with. Even though I figured that I wasn't going to need any of it, I still grabbed all of the nicer one's just in case any of them were in better shape than my copies.

On the following day when I was going through them, I was stunned to find that I actually needed two of them. With those removed from the checklist, I'm down to needing only seven.

I also found this 1972-73 Topps in his dime boxes as well. It's got a little bit of staining, but since I never come across vintage hockey cards, I thought it was still pretty cool. I thought it was kind of funny too, to see that COMC has this listed as the Stanley Cup's rookie card.

Moving on to a different seller, a guy named Tom, who was the only other person that I bought from that day. I've seen Tom set-up there a couple of times before (he's not a regular), but other than the exchanging of pleasantries, I had never really talked to him before. We ended up talking for about 20 minutes, which was kind of nice because my social anxiety usually prevents me from having such lengthy interactions. Although I think that my brain was too occupied with the ever increasing temperature inside the gym to notice that I was actually talking to someone. By 10am, the real feel outside was over 100 degrees, and I swear that it must have been like 90 inside, because I was getting a tad bit uncomfortable (understatement).

I don't know if the AC was having a problem or what, but it just kept getting hotter and hotter in there, and after having been there for three hours, I was now thinking that it might be a good time to leave. I probably didn't look through Tom's stuff as much as I should have, because he had a lot of good stuff, and a much larger spread than I've seen him have in the past. That being said, I still picked up quite a few neat things (more of which will be in subsequent posts).

Oh, and that '69 Lou Michaels up above, that was in a dime box, I was hoping that I would find more from that set, but the rest of that box was just mid 70's, aka stuff that I'm not collecting. I didn't look at my checklists at all, so I did end up with a few duplicates, Lou being one of them, so he's available if anyone's interested.

And one other thing to note, I ran out of usable sunlight on the day that I was doing these pictures, so the rest of the cards in this post were scanned. I only mention it because the scans look terrible to me.

The Hank Bauer was a buck, which didn't seem too bad considering that he's a high number. The Cepeda and Morgan were $2 each. All three of these are likely going to be part of some new mini-collections (I'm going all in on this approach to collecting).

All former PCL guys, and all were 20 cents each.

The condition of most of Tom's vintage cards was pretty amazing. These kind of got mixed up, so I can't remember which cards came from what box, but some were from the 5/$2 box, and then a couple were from the 5/$1 box -- not that it makes too much of a difference though, as they were really well priced either way.

The two 72's were in the 5/$1 box, I think I might already have both of them, but I still haven't double checked yet. Red was only a dime!

And finally, some more 72's from the 5/$1 box. Boog's a duplicate, so if anyone needs him, don't be shy about saying so.

Originally I had planned on doing three card show posts this week, but I've just been too tired to work on them, but I'll have one more on Saturday. And if I can be a little less rambly, maybe I can crank out the rest for next week, as I don't want to drag these out for too long.


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