Pre-War Cards

This week’s card pickups included caramel cards, strip cards, and a rare international card

Last week, I opted to start a new feature where I wanted to focus on talking a bit more about recent card pickups. These will give a bit more insight to the cards I post on the Twitter account.

I was inclined to make this a ‘once in a while’ type of thing but know that people really enjoyed the last one I did. I’m not quite committing to it being a weekly thing but I’ll try to do it more frequently than I initially anticipated. Sundays may be a good time to try to do this, but we’ll see.

Last week, I had quite a few new pickups and you can read about those here. I didn’t nearly as many this week but did get some interesting cards.

A couple of those were more E90 American Caramel cards. I’ve been working on the E90-1 American Caramel set for some time now and am more than 80% complete on it.

One card in particular that had eluded me was Hall of Famer George Davis. Davis is a fairly tough card and you don’t see it too often. It’s not quite up there in terms of scarcity as many others in the set but it is not abundantly common, either.

I found a Davis card on eBay and couldn’t resist. This one’s in rough shape, obviously, but with any of my sets, I will start with a card in just about any condition and then worry about upgrading later.

I didn’t realize it at the time but the card actually came from a collector of Tigers cards on Twitter that I knew. Always great to buy a card from someone you actually know and this one inches me closer towards 100 cards for the set. I’m currently at 97 of the 121 needed and my goal of getting to 100 by the end of the year seems feasible.

Also in the E90 camp was this E90-2 card of Hall of Famer Fred Clarke. This is another low-grade card and one that I got from Fritsch Cards, who worked with me on the price a good bit.

This one not only has rounded corners but is also laminated. I don’t have many of those types of cards in my collection but interestingly, bought a laminated E90-1 last week in another auction.

Back to this card, though. I had not decided to pursue the E90-2 or E90-3 sets (separate team sets also produced by American Caramel in addition to the large E90-1 overall set) but when I found an affordable E90-3 of Hall of Famer Ed Walsh recently, figured I’d pick the cards up when I could. I then spotted this E90-2 (Pirates team set) of Hall of Famer Fred Clarke and had to have it. Like the Walsh was for E90-3, this is my first one in the E90-2 set.

My quandary with the E90-2 and E90-3 sets is that both have two expensive cards. E90-3, the Cubs and White Sox, set has an early card of Black Sox player Chick Gandil. The E90-2 Pirates set doesn’t have as many big names as are found in E90-3 but there’s some guy named Honus Wagner. Finishing those sets may never happen but if I could get the rest of the cards besides those two, I’d be happy with that.

I continue to make boxing buys when I can. It’s not my primary focus but I do buy them.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a pair of W529 Jack Dempsey strip cards this past week. The cards are generally classified as W529 but they are clearly from the same family as the uncataloged Big Heads baseball strip cards.

The W529 classification includes many different types. While the cards have different designs (many, for example, have a layout that is similar to the W516 baseball strip cards), they are grouped as W529s because they have the same checklist. This type with boxers that have thicker heads and bodies is merely one type of subset.

Frankly, you don’t see these all that often. Boxing cards weren’t produced in the same large quantities as baseball cards were and this particular subset of the W529 cards are somewhat hard to find. Dempsey is the biggest name in the set and I was glad to get them.

Finally, another key card in this week’s mail comes from a rare, mostly non-sports set.

The 1934 Garbaty Moderne Schonheitsgalerie set is one of several Garbaty issues that consisted of all sorts of men and women. Most of the women in this particular set were actresses but several dozen athletes were included in it, too.

I am not collecting the entire set but was working on the athletes. For some time, I had been down to needing only two. One was well-known Hall of Famer tennis player Helen Wills Moody and the other was a more obscure athlete in aviator Hanna Reitsch.

Reitsch, by the standards of history, was not an insignificant figure. She was a world-class aviator and was best known for being a pilot to Adolf Hitler. But in the world of sports, of course, she is not as known.

I found this card as part of a lot on eBay and, after winning it, it arrived this week. That leaves only Wills Moody for my athletes subset.

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