Chris Togneri, a writer for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, was recently doing some work on his 1890 house. While tearing out an old attic, he found a bunch of items, including the framed display of old century-old baseball cards you see above.
The cards are from the T206 series, which was produced from 1909 to 1911 — the same series that included the famous Honus Wagner card that's generally considered the most valuable baseball card of all time. Unfortunately for Togneri, the cards he found in the attic didn't include a Wagner, although they did feature several other Hall of Fame players. You can read more and see additional photos here.
My favorite part of that article is this passage:
[B]ecause of [the house's] age, it provides countless little treasures. ... While tearing water-stained walls out of the attic, I found old Pittsburgh Press clippings. While digging around in the backyard, I found a tombstone. (It did not come with a body, thankfully. After contacting the family, we were told that Barbara Tremel [the name on the tombstone] was buried in Reserve Township. They could not explain the duplicate tombstone, but were glad to take it off our hands.)
Wow! The baseball cards are cool, but a duplicate tombstone — that's much more PermaRec-ish! Indeed, what is a tombstone if not, literally, a permanent record? I wish Togneri had written more about that instead of relegating it to a parenthetical mention. (Update: For more on the tombstone, scroll down to Taha Jamil's comment below.)
(My thanks to Brian Justman for bringing this one to my attention.)
The circular ones are Colgan's Chips.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.oldcardboard.com/e/e2/e254-270/e254-270.asp?cardsetID=770
Hey Paul, the current owner of the tombstone made a comment in the original article, and I asked a couple follow up questions to which he replied
ReplyDelete"(Barbara Tremel) lived across the street. A cousin lived in that house. This was her original tombstone and is in German. My great grandparents are buried together in Most Holy Name cemetery located in Reserve Township. They have matching tombstones in English. I want to put the tombstone in my back yard and set it up like a real grave. Just a conversation piece of course."