Once someone dies, there is a certain kind of quiet that falls over a storage unit. Rows of boxes, unwanted furniture, and plastic bins full of things that meant a lot to one person but not much to anyone else at first glance. A woman in Omaha knew what to expect when she went through her late brother’s unit: the slow, boring work of going through someone’s life. A tin box wrapped in cardboard and tape sitting inside another box inside yet another box inside yet another was not what she was expecting. She almost threw it away. She stopped for some reason.
There were almost 200 1933 baseball cards in that tin, hidden inside what looked like a set of Russian nesting boxes. Not just any cards, but cards from the 1933 Goudey set, which is one of the most sought-after sets of old baseball cards ever. There are four Babe Ruth cards. Mel Ott, Jimmy Foxx, and Hack Wilson are all types of Lou Gehrig. Names that evoke a sense of time and place, not just sitting on cardboard pieces.
Before going into Legends Sports and Games on 28th Street in Kentwood, Michigan, she kept them for more than two years. The store is run by Lou Brown, who has spent most of his adult life buying and selling trading cards. Interesting things have come through Brown’s door. He knows what a good group of things looks like. But he stopped when the woman put these down.
“Once every couple of years, something like this happens,” Brown said, describing the moment not with fake excitement but with the surprise of someone who doesn’t get caught off guard very often. He went through the cards like someone reads a sentence twice to really understand it.
The woman said what she thought she might be carrying: “either duds or diamonds.” She said herself that she was leaning toward duds. That instinct might come from the way grief makes you sort things: when everything around something valuable looks like normal clutter, the valuable thing starts to look normal too. Brown had to take her time to explain what she was holding. Each of the four Ruth cards was worth more than $10,000 on its own. Nearly $18,000 or $20,000 for the nicest of the bunch. The whole collection, which is worth more than $100,000.
Brown said that she was shocked and shocked. Not the loud, right away kind, but the quiet, delayed kind. The kind that happens when you can’t handle a number at once.
It’s not just the money value that makes a find like this feel important. It’s a reminder that the 1933 Goudey set—there are 240 cards in total, and she brought in almost 200—is a nearly complete record of a very specific time in American history. These cards were made during the Great Depression and were sold with gum. Kids handled them without thinking about it because they didn’t have to be careful. The ones that are still in good shape after almost 100 years are really rare. Brown said that they end up in the hands of serious collectors and stay there. They’re hard to get to the surface.
There’s something interesting about the way those boxes are nested. Someone worked hard to protect and wrap these cards, one layer on top of the other. Right now, no one can say for sure if her brother knew what he was packing or if it was just an instinct to protect it without really knowing how valuable it was. Brown asked her where she thought he got them, and she said she had no idea. That part of the story is still unfinished.
It’s clear that something else was kept in a Nebraska storage unit, the kind of place that usually holds furniture, old tax papers, and other things that are hard to part with. There are almost 200 1933 cards in a tin, waiting for someone to decide to open them.
