Bleacher Bums Forum

I collected baseball cards when young, and like most, my mother discarded all of them, including Ernie Banks rookie card.  However, there was one piece of memorabilia that I got later in life, and she didn't have the opportunity to destroy.

When I got out of the Air Force in 1976, I bought a house in Palos Heights.  The owner was a severe drunk lady that left chests of stuff in the basement when she moved out.  It turned out that she was the widow of the adopted son of Ray Schalk, the HOF catcher of the old Black Sox of 1919.  In the stuff she left behind was about fifty photos of the players he had played with (no baseball cards) many of them signed.  It included a team photo of the 1919 Sox.  It was interesting in the fact that each player had a hand written name across his chest, about half of them in the same hand, but probably the other half real autographs.  I had no interest in baseball memorabilia at that time, so I left them in a drawer of a dresser she had left behind.  When my daughter went to college 20 years later, she refinished the dresser to match her dorm room, and discarded all the contents.

If anyone has any idea of the actual value of something like that, please keep it to yourself.  I am still mourning my mother's burning of my mint Mad Magazine #1 while I was in the Air Force.