The Lost Box of Total Awesomeness - This is the Awesome Part

We are at the climax, the crescendo, the pinnacle, the apex, the summit, the zenith, the absolute height of Awesome, the grand finale. This is the reason I flipped out over finding this box. This is the reason I wrote all these dang posts. This is melting nazis, Rocky screaming for Adrian, the crowd at the Astrodome chanting "Let them play!", Return of the King finally ending, the Death Star blowing up, everyone showing up at George Bailey's house to give him some money, the stuff dreams are made of, Dr. Strangelove walking, Nemo finding his dad, the start of a beautiful friendship, Willie Mays Hayes sliding into home and "You met me at a very strange time in my life" all rolled into a pile of old baseball cards.

But first, let's recap this box.

The box itself and random stuff
A big pile of Braves
A whole bunch of Topps
Even more bloody Topps
More Topps, all 1984 this time
Box Bottoms
1987 Topps
Two Packs
Finally, some Fleer
Fleer Ultra
Old Donruss
Score and Upper Deck
Topps Venezuela issue
60's Oddball stuff

And now this.

The thing you've all been waiting for.

TEH AWESOEM

1959 Fleer Ted Williams

Twenty-Six of Them

Background on this: A very large chunk of my vintage Topps collection was aqcuired in the '80s at a card shop called Atlanta Sports Cards. They would sell bricks of old junky commons for a few bucks each, and every time I went I'd scrounge through it and pick up some old cards from the 60's and 70's. Very rarely they'd have some from the 50's, usually dirt commons in bad condition. Almost never was there a brick with a superstar or Hall of Famer showing on the top. One time tough, this was in the box. A pile of '59 Fleer Ted Williams cards. It was something like 7 or 8 bucks, which was what I normally paid for three or four bricks, not just one. But it was TED FREAKING WILLIAMS. Now, back then, this was not a sought after set by any means. A card investment guide from 1988 lists its prospects as "Below Average" due to the focus on one player and all the non-baseball subjects in the set. But it was TED FREAKING WILLIAMS. Hall of Famers like Mantle, Mays, Aaron and Williams were normally completely out of my price range and here I got 26 of them in one fell swoop.

I got the brick, drooled over the old Ted Williams cards and then one day they vanished. I looked everywhere for those damn cards and I couldn't find a single one. It was frustrating as hell and I was almost certain that I had lost them in a move or something. I was afraid to buy more because I couldn't remember which ones I had. I eventually got one, but it was in terrible condition and cost more than the original brick cost. So after I had given up on ever finding these cards again, I found them. And flipped out. And wrote fifteen posts about it. Using the word "awesome" 1,782 times in the process. AWESOME.

And now you know the rest of the story...

Here's all the cards in a big pile, soon I'm going to do a post on each one. It's a great set and I can milk it for 26 more posts easy. I hope you enjoyed the awesome, I have one more post for you this weekend to tie up some loose ends. Enjoy...