El Dorado, Part 1

The streets are paved with gold, I tell ya!

Forgive the lateness of this missive; I got sick in early February with what turned out to be COVID (probably; an attenuated case) then pneumonia and it kicked the hell out of me. I was in bed for two weeks. Pneumonia is definitely an 800# gorilla of a bug.

One thing I hear a lot of are “big fish” stories. Every walk-in at a show and every dealer in a flea market has a magical storage facility brimming with tens of thousands of vintage and rare cards and other collectibles. I must hear at least five or six a day at every show I work. Like the mythical city of El Dorado, it is always promised and never delivered.

One guy I dealt with was typical for the type. He told me that he had an entire file cabinet of 1950s-60s cards. I cultivated that lead for months, just in case it was true. He finally called me and said he was moving and needed to clear the cabinet, so could I come over and buy the cards that very day. Heck yes! I dropped what I was doing and flew out the office door with every dime in cash that I could get my hands on.

I arrived at his house and clearly it was moving day; boxes and piles all over the place. He sat me down and made me wait for an hour while he was doing all sorts of puttering around his house. Normally, I’d have walked after ten minutes, but I am a greedy one, so I sat there stoically. Finally, he took me to the garage to see the treasure trove.

I walked into the garage and saw that it was indeed a four-drawer file cabinet. There were also a couple of monster boxes on top. I started by opening each drawer quickly, to get some idea of how much stuff I had to go through in order to formulate an offer. In each drawer, I saw stacked boxes of 800-count cards with layers of dust all over them. That was promising. Some of the boxes looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. Even better. I worried that the $2,000 I had with me might be a bit light.

I grabbed the monster boxes off the top of the cabinet first. I opened one and found 1990 Pro Set football. Thousands of them. Ugh. My heart sank. Pro Set cards are like rat turds; when you first see them you know there is a major infestation and there are a lot more where those came from. The next box was a mixed lot of the worst junk wax imaginable. Just garbage. My disappointment grew with each drawer I went into; more 1990s crap. I finally found a 1950s-1960s baseball box in the third drawer. The massive collection of 1950s-1960s cards he promised me turned out to be a small stack of common beaters. Worthless.

In the third drawer, I came across an 800-count box holding an ex-mt 1973 Topps baseball set. OK, now we’re talking. I went spelunking for the key cards, which is easy since Topps used the 100s, 50s, 25s and 10s to reward better players and the key rookies are stacked together. The #1 Ruth-Aaron-Mays was missing. Not a good start. The other all-time leaders were missing too. Really not a good start. Card #100, gone. Every card ending in 00 or 50 was gone. Schmidt RC? Nope. Someone had picked it clean before I got there; all the stars and key rookies were removed, and judging from the dust, it was years before. I think the biggest card left was Denny McLain.

By that point I wasn’t even certain I would make an offer. Last drawer, last chance. I found a full 800-count box of 1970s football in the bottom drawer. I flipped through it quickly. The box was almost entirely composed of stars from the early 1970s, with a good supply of 1971 posters and game pieces. I saw Bradshaw, Staubach, Simpson, and a bunch of others and was confident from the mix and the dust that no one had been through that box, ever. Conditions varied but all of the keys were there. Even a signed OJ 1971 poster; I guess the guy didn’t know football, so he didn’t pick it clean before trying to sell it to me.

I was both disappointed and really pissed off at how this guy wasted my time, but I never pass up a chance to make a deal if I can get it at the right price—make money on the buy, right? The baseball commons and the football cards had some value but would require a lot of work to turn out. I wasn’t feeling real charitable at that point, either, given that the guy had brought me in on a pretext that he clearly knew wasn’t true, and then there was that ridiculous flex of making me sit around. After much haggling and disappointment on his part, I paid him $100 and agreed to haul away the rest.

After I finished going through the entire lot back at the office, about 90% of the volume went straight to Goodwill because it was unsellable. I kept the 1973s and the football for resale, and a small stack of all but worthless junk wax stars (which eventually made their way to Goodwill too). I made a modest profit, eventually, but I went in to harpoon a whale and ended up spearing a goldfish.

My experience with the file cabinet of gold is typical of what happens on these snipe hunts. In other words, when someone tells you about the El Dorado in their garage, don’t get excited because it ain’t so. Well, almost never. Next time, I will tell you about my experience with a real El Dorado.