Honus Wagner Card Owner, Ross Greene

An Honus Wagner card is up for auction right now. Here is an article about the owner of the card and why he is selling. Here are some tidbits from the larger article:

Greene, a 76-year-old married father of three and grandfather of eight, said that he tried to be pragmatic about letting go of a treasure.

“I don’t think they collect baseball cards in heaven,” said Greene, a financial services consultant. “So you’ve got to part with things at some point in time. I thought this was a good time.”

The Wagner card is part of a collection of more than 100,000 cards and memorabilia that Greene, is auctioning off. He plans to use the proceeds to provide for his retirement, help fund the education of his grandchildren and to support a variety of Christian ministries.

 . . . . . .

Greene believes he amassed a collection of perhaps 2,500 cards, stored in a shoebox. But about 30 years later, he went back home to retrieve them, only to learn his parents had tossed them out. He suspects they might be worth between $500,000 and $1 million today.

Dismayed, Greene bought a friend’s old collection of about 3,000 cards for $500. In the early ’90s, when the card market began to pick up and he realized that the value of his friend’s collection had increased several times from his purchase price, he began to buy other collections to put together sets from the ’50s and ’60s.

“I’m a fastidious, anal guy, so I had everything listed and in boxes and in books and in order and by collectible value and what have you,” Greene said.

. . . . . . .

In 1996, Greene saw an ad in a collecting magazine publicizing the auction of the rare Wagner card.

Greene called into the phone auction, which he said had reached $37,000. He made one bid, which was surpassed. At the time, the Greenes were building a house and their daughter, Meredith, was about to get married. He called his wife, Lynne.

“It was the worst time in the world to think about doing what I was doing,” he said. “So I figured it was in a situation where I needed to ask permission rather than to try to get forgiveness later on.”
She gave her blessing, and what he determined would be his final bid, $48,500, proved successful.

The "my parents threw away a fortune in my old collection" line is kind of like the fisherman's story of "the one that got away." But he certainly seems to have pursued with passion the card collecting hobby. Hope his investment pays off! And kudos to his wife for playing along!