Small Card Show Recap - Part Three

Appetizer on Wednesday

Main Course on Thursday

And today I have some dessert.

No, not the Wrigley Field cake kind of dessert.

I've mostly avoided vintage when I go to shows because it tends to eat up the budget pretty quickly. Usually I’m all for quality over quantity, so as irrational as it may be, the length of my post-card show euphoria tends to be directly proportionate to how fat my latest stack of cardboard is. After a couple of good deals that netted me that hefty stack already and some money still burning a hole in my pocket, I stopped at one last table on my way out the door and picked up a few new-to-me cards.

I don’t know if these cards are, as the joke goes, older than your mom but I can say for sure that they are older than my mom.

The year these cards came out…

Sports Illustrated released its first issue.

Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in less than 4 minutes.

Two of the NL West teams were still in New York. The other three weren’t born yet.

The Cubs were only 46 years removed from their last World Championship and 9 years from their last attempt. (Those totals now stand at 105 and 68 years respectively.) Despite currently having a positive run differential (+4) and a winning Pythagorean W-L record according to Baseball-reference.com, the Cubs sit at 11 games below .500 and look to continue the streak this year.

But on a much happier note, these four cards, all 1954 Bowman, now represent the oldest cards in my collection.

They are in surprisingly great shape. There’s a small crease in the lower right corner of the Bill Serena that shows up in the scan if you squint but you can’t see it on the front in person. You can feel it on the back but it’s still barely noticeable. The edges on all are pretty nice and the corners have minimal wear.

The seller had a $12 price tag on each one that was crossed out and marked down to $5. I’m guessing that was his way of showing he was selling them below book value. I picked out these four Cubs but had my eye on two others to be sent out into the blogosphere if negotiations went my way. After the dust settled on a little back and forth, we compromised on a 6/$20 deal.

The previous record holders for oldest card(s) in my collection that were just bested by four years were this pair of 1958 Topps cards.

Turk is stunned by the dethroning!