The story behind the rediscovery of two brothers’ boyhood baseball card collection is truly miraculous, I learned in a one-hour phone interview with the younger brother John who lives in Metuchen, New Jersey. The find resulted from an incredible sequence of events.
I first broke the news in two stories back in May. After seeing an advertisement in the New York Times about the mint 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card NFL Super Bowl champ Evan Mathis sold in April for $2.88 million, John decided to look at his 3,000 cards. It was his first inspection since he and his big brother Ed acquired the cards from 1951 through 1952, the only years they collected before “it wasn’t cool,” John said.
While growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, they acquired them by buying packs, mostly for the bubble gum, and by trading his Red Sox cards for his beloved Yankees.
The brothers had five 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles— the world’s most popular baseball card—and four 1952 Topps Jackie Robinsons, plus many other valuable cards from the two-year period they collected— mostly in top-grade condition.
The best in the collection is a PSA 8.5 (Near-Mint-Mint+) 1952 Mantle that headlines Heritage’s Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction running through Aug. 19. Eighteen bids have lifted it to $720,000 with the buyer’s premium, about $500,000 below its expected hammer price. (The auction page has an astonishing 4,700 page views.)
In July, 26 of the brothers’ cards sold in Heritage’s auction for a total of $384,000. Two of the Mantles fetched $230,000 combined. There will be plenty of more valuable cards for sale in upcoming auctions, including the two remaining Mantles in the fall.
John, 76, agreed to share his inside story with me on the condition that I not use his last name. He did reveal, however, that he worked as a mid-level manager in Manhattan company.
In an exclusive, John also shared a photo of his brother and him at Yankee Stadium from the era they collected. “You can publish it because all boys look alike,” he told me.
The first time John and Ed even remembered their boyhood collection was in 2007, Their mother, Kathleen, a homemaker, died at 102, and they were cleaning out her house. (Other family members took family china, crystal, and assorted bric-a-brac.) The brothers then put the cards in inexpensive binders with plastic sleeves and John relegated them to his basement.
The baseball gods smiled on Kathleen and her boys’ buried treasured. Kathleen had lived in the same house since 1947. “We were so lucky she never moved,” John said. “That’s when families throw things out.”
They were so lucky, too, that she kept everything associated with her two sons in her big attic: “We had leaf collections, insect collections and model planes. Cub Scout uniforms and things we would send home like our army uniforms.”
A few artifacts did slip away. “My mother wasn’t absolutely perfect,” he said. “She threw away all our comic books. Most of the really valuable comics were from before World War II [before he and Ed were born].”
His father, Ed Sr., who worked in a small tool and die company, was a blessing, too. “He was an inveterate collector,” John said. “There was a coin collection and three stamp collections. He collected United Arab Emirate stamps for reasons I don’t understand. Also campaign pins and postcards. He was a collector of collections.”
“We were lucky about a number of other things,” John added. “Most parents discouraged their kids from buying cards and chewing bubble gum. Our father appreciated our collecting things and put them away for us.” He died in the late 1960s.
Their father’s collecting philosophy also happened to be ahead of its time. He kept his items in immaculate condition and taught his sons to treat their collectibles similarly. As a result, the brothers never fastened their baseball cards to bicycle spokes to replicate the sound of motorcycles like millions of other boys, including me, did. “For that we used playing cards that had lost a card or two in the deck,” he explained.
Another miracle, in hindsight, is that the brothers attended Catholic school. “The nuns would not allow us to have the cards in school,” John said. “Flipping was never permitted, That’s gambling.” Not only were the cards spared from flipping’s wear-and-tear, they were also never bound in stacks with rubber bands and transported to school in the back pockets of Levis.
CBS Morning News video after the story broke in May (below).
At the time the brothers collected, they had easy sources for their purchases. “We had two drug stores about equidistant within bike riding distance,” John said.
On visits to their grandparents in Patterson, New Jersey, they would send John, a 9-year-old, to get a pack of cigarette (those were the days). Of course, he used his pennies and nickels for baseball cards. “Sometimes those stores had cards nobody else in my neighborhood did,” John said. Naturally, that increased his trading leverage back in Hartford.
Timing was everything. “Two weeks later, they were a dime a dozen,” John said.
As for all of the Mick’s cards he kept, John put it succinctly, “I was a Mantle fan.”
And what about the virtually perfect centering on his 1952 Topps, a set notoriously known for being off-kilter? “I’m proud of the fact we couldn’t do anything about the centering,” he explained. “A lot of this was just plain dumb luck.”
Ed and John will figure out how to divvy up their windfall. For his part, John has three children and four grandchildren. “I haven’t made any plans,” he said. “I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch.”
He harbors zero remorse about his sale. “For 70 years, no one has enjoyed them,” he said. “Now, some people will.”
