Woman Finds 139-Year-Old Baseball Card (featuring the Cincinnati Red Stockings)

[WilliamPitt]

FRESNO, Calif. - Bernice Gallego sat down one day this summer, as she does pretty much every day, and began listing items on eBay.

She dug into a box and pulled out a baseball card. She stopped for a moment and admired the picture. "Red Stocking B.B. Club of Cincinnati," the card said, under a sepia tone photo of 10 men with their socks pulled up to their knees. The card itself was dirty and wrinkled in a few places.

It was definitely old, Gallego thought. As a collector and seller, it's her job to spot old items that might have value today, to find the gems among the junk.

It's what Bernice, 72, and her husband Al Gallego, 80, have been doing since 1974 at Collectique, their antiques store in the Fresno, Calif., Tower District full of old jukeboxes, slot machines and records.

This card, she figured, was worth selling on eBay.

She did what she does with most items: Took a picture, wrote a description and put it up for auction. She put a $10 price tag on it, deciding against $15 because it would have cost her an extra 20 cents.

Later that night she got a few odd inquiries — someone wanting to know whether the card was authentic, someone wanting her to end the auction and sell him the card immediately.

Hmm, she thought, this could be something special. It could be worth $50, or even $100.

Or, as Bernice Gallego came to find out in the following weeks, it could be worth a lot more.

The card is actually 139 years old. It, and a handful of others like it, are considered the first baseball cards. Sports card collectors call the find "extremely rare" and estimate the card could fetch five, or perhaps, six figures at auction.

And Bernice was worried about 20 cents.

The rest: http://www.courant.com/features/hc-webbaseballcard.artjan07,0,2557404.story