The Case of the 1933 Goudey Curley Ogden
September 3rd, 2009 by slangon
This is the first step toward finally posting about all the trades/eBay buys/other acquisitions that I’ve made in the past few weeks.
During the past year or so, I’ve been building a little stock pile of these 1933 Goudeys, picking them up cheap off of eBay. I think I have about 8 or 9 of them now. Although this one is probably the worst of all the ones I own, it was also the cheapest, at $1.50. All of the ones I have are dinged, creased, written on and generally well-loved. Since all my other original Goudey’s are somehow un-perfect, I find it interesting to vary the extent / means of disfigurement. Aside from collecting original Goudey’s, I’m collecting different ways to mess up cards.
I can’t quite figure out how or why this particular desecration happened, but I would kill to know the story behind it. I actually own a handful of old vintage cards that are all beat up. I started to get them in less than perfect conditions just because other-wise I would never be able to own a 1966 Willie Mays or a 1958 Topps or a 1948 Bowman.
After a while I started to appreciate the uniqueness of these damaged cards. It’s always fun to me to try and come up with some kind of back story as to how the card ended up the way it did. I really am at a loss to come up with an explanation for this one. I mean, it very clearly was intentionally cut. I know I’ve heard of old cards having coupons attached to them, but looking at other examples of this card on the interwebs, that’s not the case.
As you can see here, this is what the missing part should look like. I don’t see anything there that would explain why someone would cut off the corner. Do you?
The only other possible explanation I can come up with, and this is admittedly quite a stretch, is that whoever owned it cut it to fit in some sort of weird storage device. But what the hell kind of storage device would fit a 2 3/8″ x 2 7/8″ card, minus the top right corner? And what the hell kind of maniac would rather cut the top right corner off of his baseball card than to just find some other means of storing it?
What deepens the mystery a bit is this. By the way, that is not the seller that I bought old Warren from. So is there some serial slicer out there with a grudge against 1933 Goudey’s?
Aside from the mystery of the missing corner, I learned some interesting things about Warren “Curley” Ogden:
He was “one of the leading pitchers of the International League”, but his record was 10-13.
He once played on a semi-pro team managed by Frank “Home Run” Baker, former Philadelphia A’s Star under Connie Mack.
He was born in Ogden, Pa.
Well… the things you can learn from the back of a baseball card. See, isn’t buying beat to shit cards so much more fun than getting pristine ones?
Leave a Reply