What is your Favorite local PreWar Card Find?

If you take the time to search and talk about vintage baseball cards, you could be suprised at what you could find close to where you live. I have been fortunate to find a few neat PreWar Items within 10 miles of my home. The first was a T207 Red cross, which I no longer have. The second was a Fan for A Fan Baker, which I still own.

What is your favorite local PreWar find and how did you aquire it?

Being a Canadian, local prewar baseball card finds are few and far between. I can't claim to have a true local "find" under my belt, but I did come close once without really even knowing it. One winter in the late 90's I was scouring an antique shop with my father in Montreal and noticed a sign reading "cartes sportif" with an arrow down to the basement. It was chained off, but the owner offered to take me down there to check out what he had.

At the time I was just getting into prewar baseball, but collected mostly pre-1970 hockey cards (all the way back to the tobacco era) so that's what I was interested in looking at. And the owner had a bunch. While flipping through hundreds of C55's, c56's, '33 Ice Kings, and '33 OPC's with amazement, I noticed a large stack of brownish, woodgrain baseball cards with oval portraits. Can you guess what these were by this brief description? Well I didn't know it at the time, but I later found out that they were C46's. Many, many C46's in great shape, all marked at $10 apiece. Like I said I didn't know what these were so I didn't know that I should have been searching for a Gandil, McGinnity, or Kelley. But even if they were all commons, that would have been a nice "find" if I had known to buy them.

The closest thing to local find for me was the warehouse full of pennants from the 40s-60s I had access to while living in San Fran. I don't really count collections of 50s cards. Those are a dime a dozen.

Indirectly, while living in SF, I bought a collection of complete Wheaties boxes from the 30s, from a friend in MN who got them from the original owner.

Jay

Cool story Ben! You should go back and see if they are still there

Nice Gandil by the way.

I can't say that I’ve found anything local, unfortunately, but I have been lucky enough to win a few notable 19th century cards in different estate auctions. A few months ago I came home with an N162 Beecher in vg (now sold) and nearly two years ago I came home with an N28 Cap Anson (the same find uncovered a few N36s, too, including an ex+ Red Cloud). I was also the third-underbidder (with a partner) on a mint set of FanCraze cards that showed up in their original box in a very small time auction in Penn. Finds are getting more difficult but I think many will be shocked to see what is still out there.