Istill have the first T206 card I ever bought, and I still remember leafing through a guy’s binder at a show and flipping page upon page of T206 cards. I didn’t have the bug then. I just wanted to own an old card. A card that was in someone’s possession when the Titanic went down. When World War I broke out. When America suffered through the Great Depression. When Pearl Harbor was attacked. When Kennedy was shot. When the Beatles arrived. When man walked on the moon …you get the idea.
I picked out one card from those sheets, but if I could do it over I would take every card the guy had. But for $5 I walked away carrying a Fred Payne card witha Sweet Caporal back. It’s still in great shape, too. I picked Freddie because we seemed to have the same last name. I thought maybe I would discover that this guy was related to me. He’s not (at least I don’t think he is), but that Payne helped this Payne discover the absolute beauty of T206 cards.