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Renovating a 103-year-old house normally means discovering ancient wiring, questionable plumbing and several decisions made by people who apparently feared building codes. One Chicago-area homeowner instead dug through his attic insulation and uncovered evidence that somebody was ripping packs of 1933 Goudey baseball cards up there more than 90 years ago.
The homeowner recently found two original Goudey wrappers buried underneath loose-fill insulation while working on the house, according to Sports Collectors Daily. Even better, three corners had been deliberately cut from each wrapper, providing a pretty obvious clue that whoever originally opened the packs was trying to cash them in for one of Goudey’s mail-in premiums.
Somebody Was Chasing Baseball Cards In That Attic During The Great Depression
The cut corners are what turn this from random old garbage into an extremely cool time capsule.
Goudey’s 1933 Big League Gum packs came with numbered tabs at all four corners of the wrapper. Collectors who saved 50 wrappers could cut away three corners while leaving the number corresponding to the oversized premium card they wanted and mail the wrappers back to Goudey.
The redemption program offered four choices: Babe Ruth, the 1933 National League All-Star team, the American League All-Star team, or the World Series champion New York Giants.
So somebody living in this house was not merely buying baseball cards. They were accumulating enough packs to participate in an early version of a rewards program.
Imagine doing all that work for an oversized Babe Ruth premium, throwing the leftover wrappers into an attic and accidentally leaving the evidence for someone to find during the second quarter of the next century.
That is commitment with an extremely delayed audience.
The 1933 Goudey Set Is Already One Of Baseball’s Holy Grails
The wrappers also happen to come from one of the most famous prewar baseball-card releases ever created.
The 240-card 1933 Goudey set featured four separate Babe Ruth cards, two Lou Gehrigs and stars including Jimmie Foxx, Rogers Hornsby and Dizzy Dean. Its brightly colored designs helped establish the basic gum-and-baseball-card model that eventually became standard throughout the hobby.
Today, high-grade Ruth cards from the set can sell for six figures.
The wrappers generally received considerably less respect.
People ripped them open, removed the cards and gum, redeemed them for premiums or simply threw them away. That basic behavior is exactly why surviving packaging can become collectible itself.
These particular wrappers are hardly pristine. Three corners are missing by design, and spending decades underneath attic insulation is not PSA’s recommended storage method.
But condition is almost beside the point.
They sat untouched inside the same house through World War II, the invention of television, baseball integration, expansion, free agency, and approximately 90 years of people wishing their grandparents had kept their old cards.
Then somebody started renovating.