Mile High Card Company auction recently concluded a great auction that included some very rare cards and memorabilia.
First, I'll start off with a Dodger related card of one of the scarcest 1950's issued region sets made. Below is a 1954 Wilson Franks card of Carl Erskine. These cards are very difficult to find, especially in this condition. The card sold at a healthy price of
$775.00.
Now, on to something that truly boggles the mind. Mile High had the honor of auctioning off one of the rarest
Topps test issues ever produced. Below is possibly the only complete master set of
1968 Topps All Star Player Plaks. Last year a huge lot of these rare plastic bust were found hidden in a small bucket inside the garage of a former
Topps employee. They were discarded and forgotten about.
Acting on a phone call from a couple outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Brian Drent, founder and President of Mile High Card Company, recently traveled to The Topps Company's former hometown to examine what he'd been told was a pile of plastic baseball parts produced sometime in the late '60s. The owner's mother had worked at the Topps factory for a number of years and would occasionally treat the neighborhood kids to free candy and miscut cards. She also had permission to take home any of the failed test issues, as she did with an armful of Topps Plaks wax packs.
She quickly learned, however, what Topps management had already concluded, that what kids wanted most was cards and candy, that you couldn't really flip a plastic bust, and that they had no negotiable street value. So she put them in a bucket on a shelf in her garage where they sat for the next forty years.
As proof of it's scarcity it sold for an amazing
$55,612.00.
Here is a
Type 1 vintage photograph of a very young Jim Thorpe.
One of the single greatest athletes of all time, Thorpe won Olympic gold medals in both the pentathlon and decathlon, excelled in football (his favorite sport) at both the collegiate and professional levels, played professional baseball and basketball, collegiate lacrosse, and even ballroom dancing, winning the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom championship. On the gridiron, he excelled in almost every position, routinely scoring all of his team's points as running back, defensive back, placekicker, and punter. His athletic career, according to legend, began in 1907 when he walked past Pop Warner's track practice and beat the team's best high jumper with a spontaneous 5'9" leap while still in his street clothes. Pop Warner immediately took his new track star under his wing, discouraging Jim from playing the comparatively violent game of football. Thorpe, however, eventually convinced Warner to let him run some plays against the team's defense, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It sold for $1,433.00.
