Jay's Newspaper Column - Treasure in the attic is the topic

Old Treasures - January 2010
By Jay Anglin

Occasionally you hear a story about somebody that literally stumbles into a treasure virtually right under their nose. I recall a couple years ago I read an article about a guy that was refurbishing his home and found hundreds of vintage movie promotional posters inside the walls of the home. Apparently the previous owner of the home had operated a movie theatre during what is known as the “The Golden Age of Hollywood” and took the posters home to insulate the walls. Obviously those Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane posters didn’t seem all that valuable at the time. Today there are worth a fortune of course.

Some of these treasure troves stories have become almost cliché. Though, I am one of the lucky ones that discovered an attic full of vintage baseball cards so it does happen. Well I guess I didn’t really discover them, the entire family knew they were there. Like many kids, my Uncle Bill had a neighborhood hideout with a couple buddies. He came up with a brilliant concept for others to gain membership into his “club” which amounted to bringing a shoebox full of baseball cards to the next meeting for the initiation fee. Fortunately for me my uncle was popular and those kids had lots of Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron cards mixed in with their Yogi Berra and Ted Williams cards…among others.

At the beginning of each semester on my way back to college I’d stop at a well known card dealer in Grand Rapids and set a shoe box half filled with cards on the counter. The dealer would literally walk away from other customers like they weren’t even there, sometimes in mid sentence. He’d take my box of cards and say, “We’ll see what you have for me this time kid” and we’d disappear into his office where he’d use a loupe to examine each card.

Sometimes this took a couple of hours but he was a straight shooter and wanted to be sure I got at least a decent deal. After some deliberation, he would write a figure on a very small piece of paper, fold it and hand it to me in the palm of his hand. I always figured this was so there was no confusion, it was right there in black and white. This little act certainly added to the drama which I always appreciated.

I knew that he was going to make lots of money off these cards but selling them as I did served my purpose well at the time. I’d always drive north to the UP with a wad of cash big enough to cover those expensive book fees and hopefully enough left over to be the hero at the bar for at least a few days.

Not surprisingly, sportsmen have been collecting all kinds of knick knacks, guns, decoys, firearms, and what not for centuries. Just imagine if your Uncle was Daniel Boone. Think about it. Behind the scenes of the “outdoor world” there is a bustling industry of sorts, constantly shifting things from collector to retailer and vice versa.

Wednesday afternoon I was straightening out some of my fishing gear and enlisted the help of my son Mitch. At some point he was digging around in a cabinet and pulled out a couple of vintage fishing lures that I had plucked from my Grandfather’s tackle box a couple years ago that I had come across in….the attic at my Mom’s.

I never had taken the time to see what they were worth so I sat down at the computer and did some research. The first figure I came across for the better of the two was nearly $3,000 so I had to take a deep breath before I said, “Honey…take a look at this”. Like baseball cards, the value of vintage lures is based on how the lure is “graded”. It was obvious that this one wasn’t worth three grand based on its appearance alone but I knew it wasn’t junk either.

I took a bunch of close-up photos of the lure with the digital camera and emailed them to a few collectors I found online that I thought may be interested in purchasing this antique. I received a couple of replies almost instantly. One was laughable, the standard “it isn’t worth much, I’ll give you $50” reply which I fully expected. The next one was a little more reasonable but the guy had the “take it or leave it” thing down pat which is never a good sign.

The third reply came in and it was obvious that this collector was sincere and had a genuine interest in the lure.  After we exchanged a couple more emails he bought the lure for a very respectable amount of money. He even covered the shipping! To think that with one flap of the garbage can lid this lure could’ve been lost forever with all the other junk that accumulates in my fishing stuff.

I wonder how many of those old fishing lures are waiting in the corner of some attic, long forgotten. Hey, your uncle may not have been Daniel Boone but you might want to take a look around the attic at Mom’s anyway.