Lost & Found

As I've mentioned in the past, I have storage units. What I may have (purposely) neglected to mention is that the storage units are..well..a mess. We've had them since 1998 and we've just been piling stuff into them. We have three of them and we are working to get it down to two by the end of 2016.

I come from a long line of hoarders- I am a hoarder myself, I am aware of that and I am making an attempt to stop doing that- I've mostly stopped buying things- any things- I've even dropped a couple of magazine subscriptions, despite the fact that I love to read. We're just basically at capacity for storing what I've already got. I've been collecting stuff since I was born, pretty much, and I've never stopped...I'm 32 now. I plan to be here for a long time to come but I digress.

One of the good things about having so much stuff is that you really can't remember everything you've got. I certainly can't, heck, I can be looking at something and forgot I had it.

Yesterday we started working on the unit in earnest, and lo and behold out of the very first box was a gift bag full of cards! Amazingly, most of them are still in pretty good shape, considering.

Here they are sorted by subject-

The largest stack, which I mostly cut off in the picture, is DC Comics, with NASCAR the second highest, then Craftsman and ET are about even.

I have not sorted the cards by set yet, but my gut reaction is that these were all duplicates...or at least cards I didn't really care much about at the time I last saw them (Football and Star Trek). But then again maybe they were totally unsorted as I was always a big fan of the Sports Illustrated for Kids cards, and that one was found with them, and it is certainly not a duplicate. Yet, just sorting them by subject, I saw several DC cards where there were multiple copies; In the end, I don't know.

I remembered having some of the gray border DC set, but it was long missing. Some are in here. I knew I had more of the 1995 Power Chrome Legends '95, and they are here too. I thought I had complete sets of both, but those are NOT here. I know there are more Archie cards; I did a box of that set in the 1990s. (I was a huge Archie fan for a while- my oldest comic is an Archie issue and I've got hundreds of them- Archie's lack of popularity makes them cheap to purchase, even back into the 1960s)

If these ARE duplicates, then that means that there are hundreds more cards waiting to be found, that I don't have any memory of having, because there are cards here from sets that I didn't think I had any of! Time will tell.

Oh...I found a receipt in the bag dated May 25th, 1996. The SI for kids card is dated July 1996 but it was probably around that time that I was last into the bag. Interestingly, the only NBA cards are the 1995-96 Panini stickers seen partially cut off at the very top left. Once I got into the NBA, in February 1996, I mostly stopped collecting non-sports, which this bag primarily was, until 2009. I believe, although I have yet to check, that all of the Panini stickers here are duplicates, which lends credence to the idea that the whole bag may be duplicates. I'll really know when I check the NASCAR cards, as I put some more effort into them than I did the non-sports cards once I discovered the NBA...most of the NASCAR in the bag were 1995 Upper Deck, which is shown, and 1994 Action Packed, always my favorite NASCAR set. If any of the NASCAR cards are "new",  by which I mean not currently in my collection, or were added to my collection after I finished my paper listing in 2007, then I'll know that the bag was NOT just duplicates.

Surprisingly, considering the mostly total lack of care I gave in protecting these, the only real damage was to one of the oversize Star Wars cards, which I had in the middle of the bottom row of the bag, it's curved/bent badly. You can barely see the small stack of Star Wars cards on the very bottom right (Princess Leia is showing in the stack) and the bent card is visible bending up in the picture.

It isn't just cards that were found. We found a box of my dad's stuff. My dad first got this unit around 1999 so some of the stuff in it, we've probably never seen, ever. (My dad was a hoarder, I inherited it from him).

The first box we went through had nothing newer in it than 1966. (The Rambler "Dollar" in the card photo above came out of his box).
No idea why he had this old football bobblehead, he loathed football. I am looking for more information about it, if anybody has any.

but there was some stuff I really liked, like this vintage plastic Indy car.

Not sure when exactly it's from, but I will try and find out. 1950s is my guess, that's when this kind of car was raced.

There is some more cool stuff like a pennant from his trip to Niagara falls in 1954, an old cap gun, and more. I wish he was still here to ask him about this stuff. I have not photographed everything yet.

I know there are more cards lost in the world of storage....and all kinds of stuff waiting to yet be rediscovered. There will probably be more posts in the Lost & Found series as stuff is found (or at the least, when I get around to photographing/typing it!)