By Karina Martinez-CarterThe Daily Northwestern
When Evanston resident Lionel Carter purchased his first baseball card, Babe Ruth was still hitting home runs.
Seventy-four years and about 50,000 cards later, Carter, 89, has been forced to put his collection up for sale.
Burglars ransacked Carter’s home last November. They took his wife’s jewelry and emptied a drawer filled with a number of his baseball cards.
The stolen cards were recovered, but the jewelry was not. Carter feared the thieves would return. He said the police gave him two options to ensure his safety: Either put the cards in a safety deposit box or sell the collection.
“I sold every one of the cards because I didn’t want anything to remind me of them,” Carter said. “They meant so much to me (after) so many years of collecting. They were just a big part of my life.
“But you can’t put 50,000 baseball cards in albums in a vault, so I had no choice but to sell them.”
The sale is being conducted in three installments through Mastro Auctions, a prominent online auction house that specializes in vintage baseball cards. The first part of the collection opened for bidding on the Web site Monday and will close April 27.
One set of 48 cards from 1938 – including cards of Joe DiMaggio, Jimmie Foxx and Mickey Mantle – already fetched a bid of $139,493.
Brian Marren, Mastro Auctions’ vice president of acquisitions, called Carter a “real gentleman and nice guy” and “one of the true pioneers in the hobby.” Marren said he expects Carter’s collection to sell for between $2 and $3 million when the last auction closes in June.
“He was very condition-conscious years before anyone thought about it,” Marren said. “Scarcity and condition are the two important ingredients with antiques, and what makes (the collection) really special is that he had the foresight to pay attention to those things.”
But collecting cards was never about the money, Carter said.
He began the collection in 1933 at the age of 15. Carter went into a drugstore with his brother to buy candy when he noticed the cards wrapped in cellophane. He asked for five cards and handed over the nickel he had planned to spend on candy.
That day, Carter spent all the money he had on baseball cards. He bought most of his cards for a penny each, and every year he purchased a case of Topps Gum for $50 and sorted through the cards that came in it. He kept the best cards and sold the rest for two cents each to break even.
Carter, who grew up in rural Colfax, Ill., also formed a correspondence circle with the few other early collectors, who wrote letters and swapped cards through the mail.
“I was probably the only collector (in Colfax), so I did a lot of writing,” Carter said. “I was making swaps all over the United States, putting ads in papers and things.”
One of the collectors Carter corresponded with was Jefferson Burdick, who is considered the father of the hobby, said George Vrechek, a Chicago resident and fellow collector.
“If Burdick was the father of card collecting, then Lionel Carter was one of his older sons,” said Vrechek, who has known Carter for five years.
Carter, Burdick and other early collectors often set up and attended shows to view and exchange cards. But Carter said he has since stopped going to shows because he thinks collectors now focus too much on money.
Marren said he understands Carter’s disappointment in how the hobby has changed.
“I think it’s something all dedicated collectors go through,” Marren said. “The dynamics have changed financially, and it’s turned into a big industry. He longs for the days when it was more intimate.”
Carter also said he’s hesitant about all the attention he is getting for selling his cards and that he’s not thinking about the money he will earn from their sale.
“(My wife and I) haven’t made any plans at all,” he said. “We were doing fine without the money before.”
Reach Karina Martinez-Carter at [email protected].
