Vintage Show June - My Bowman Beaters

I just put the old card show to bed, that means you're going to have to deal with the stuff from the new card show. Don't worry, It's cool. Just good old-fashioned baseball cards. There's only one card in the bunch that is not a true baseball card, but it's tied in with one of the top five sets of all time so you'll probably like it. I went to this show with a plan. You gotta have a plan. Run into a card show half-cocked and you'll end up walking out with bent 1974 Topps Dock Ellis card and three boxes of 1990 Upper Deck. Here was my plan:

1) Hit the Braves team set needs
2) Find a 1953 Topps card I don't have
3) Hit these sets hard:

• 1960 Topps
• 1963 Topps Series 1
• 1965 Topps Series 1
• 1972 Topps 

4) get some cheap stuff for the 1954-1956 sets
5) find a really cool non-sport card

I hit all my goals except for 1963 Topps. I just didn't find anything that jumped out at me. I'm also alyways prepared for the unexpected and something really unexpected jumped out at me at the show. 1955 Bowman. Here's an example:

Hall of Famer Robin Roberts. With paper stuck all over the front of the card. I didn't bother to scan the back but there's paper missing from there too. Basically what appears to have happened is that a box filled with a bunch of '55 Bowmans got some severe water damage, which caused the cards to stick together. In the process of pulling them apart, many of the backs of some cards ended up on the fronts of other cards. This was mostly around the edges however, so the picture of the player was in most cases unobscured. I'm guessing Roger either purchased these cards in a collection or had one of his own boxes fall into the toilet. at any rate, there was about 400 poor abused Bowman cards at the show for sale. Dodgers and Yankees were $2.00 each, Everyone else was a buck a pop. Except for a stack of really awful looking cards like this one. These Bowmans were a quarter each. How could I pass up '55 Bowmans for a quarter? I couldn't. that's what. I snagged 28 of the quarter Bowman beaters. If you would have bet me that I would come back from the show with over two dozen 1955 Bowman cards you would have made a lot of money.

Picking out the Bowmans was pretty much the last thing I did before cashing out at the show. I had already been shuffling through cards for over an hour at that point and in retrospect I probably could have done a better job. My basic criteria while picking out cards was to pull any Hall of Famers like Robin here, pull anyone who I thought should be in the Hall of Fame, pull cards of players I liked, and then grab a few that weren't all that beat up. Looking back on it now I wish I had gotten a few dollars more worth of the beaters and I also regret not picking up a player from each team. I got no cards of the Cubs, Cardinals, Tigers, A's, Senators or Yankees. I don't think there were any quarter Yankees in the pile though. At the very least I should have picked up all the Cardinals, Cubs and Tigers just to trade off to bloggers. Oh well, what's done is done.

I'm going to show off all my horribly abused Bowmans over the next couple of weeks (or months if I get lazy). I'll post them by team to make things easy for me. I betcha can't guess from which team I got the most Bowmans!