The mint condition 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle Rookie card was just one example of what Lionel Carter's collection included. That alone is worth $5k-$10k.
Before he worked as a bank officer, before he fought in the Pacific, before he amassed a baseball card collection that might be worth a ton of dough, Lionel Carter was a shy teenager from a small Illinois town with a bad stutter and an abiding love of baseball.
He never asked much from life, though in 1953 he made his wife promise to let him keep Sunday nights free to improve his meticulous collection.
From 1935 until the early 1980s, Carter groomed it like a prize rose garden, adding a near-mint 1910 Ty Cobb to a complete set of flawless 1909 Philadelphia Caramel cards that included Honus Wagner. He added Mickey Mantle's 1951 rookie card next to a weathered-but-worthy 1910 Eddie Plank, considered the second-rarest card in baseball.
"I don't really have favorites. I kind of like 'em all," Carter said. "I would keep buying the same cards until I'd get the best one, and then I'd sell the others. Until I got 'em all perfect."
When it goes up for auction at Mastro Auctions in Burr Ridge this month, the market will determine if Carter's baseball cards are among the world's most valuable collections.
The sale of his collection, already boxed and sent to the auction house, comes at a time when overall enthusiasm for baseball card collecting is waning. But the auction house selling the cards estimates their value between $1 million and $2 million, a number in keeping with other expert estimates and recent sales.
One question I have is-why the hell did he wait so long to sell?
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