Tales from the Closet - Part 1: Hidden Autos!

When I moved up to Alaska 15 years ago, I really didn't know what I was going to do with my life.  I might have been up here for only a few months and eventually make my way back down to Wisconsin.  Turns out I fell in love with Alaska and decided to stay like so many people do.  So before I left to come up here for the first time I boxed up all my old comics and trading cards and put them in a closet beneath the staircase in my parents house and when they sold that house and moved, I moved everything to the new closet underneath the stairs and that's where the bulk of my childhood collections still sit.  While the wife and I were down visiting my folks I ended up taking a little time to dig through the boxes and boxes of stuff and pulled out a bunch of stuff to mail up and to bring back with me.  These are the tales of what I brought back!!!!!!

While not everything I jammed into flat rate boxes and a spare suitcase is worth all that much there is a lot of memories associated with most of the stuff I chose to bring back up with me.

First up we have some long hidden autographs.  Years ago when my father retired from the army and the family moved back to Wisconsin I lived in the sleepy northern Wisconsin town of Tomahawk.  One weekend Cal Eldred and Jaime Navarro were doing a free autograph session at the mall in Wausau about 30 miles south.  So my brother and I dug through our card collection to try and find all the cards we could for those two.

When we got there the line was long, but not too bad.  You could get one thing signed by each player. Well after our first trip through the line my brother and I still had a bunch of cards to get signed so we got back in line, over and over again.  Eventually I think Cal just signed the rest of my cards.  I knew these were in the closet somewhere, but for the life of me I couldn't remember who signed them until I found them.

I've already gotten Jaime through the mail, but have yet to find a good address for Cal.  As you can see I had quite a few more Eldred cards than Navarro and both have great sig's.

Nothing like finding nine autographed cards in a random box in your closet.