Flea Market Finds #189: Fill A Bag

In regards to views and comments, Flea Market Finds are the bread and butter posts on this blog.  Unfortunately it's been nearly three months since I've written one of these posts.  A busy end of the school year schedule along with prioritizing care packages from fellow bloggers essentially pushed these posts the back burner.

Now these posts are starting to pile up in my draft folder, so it's time to start recapping some spring trips to the local flea market.

Today's post covers a trip to the Branham High School Flea Market back on Saturday, April 18th.

Although I took notes on purchases, I completely forgot to write anything down about the weather, the crowds, or the vendors.  Not sure if that's important to anyone, but I usually like to include that info to help keep my memory fresh.  Oh well.  Let's get to what I found...

Purchase #1:  Cheap Cards  $4

The first vendor on the first row is a regular I have purchased stuff from on multiple trips.  While I was flipping through his card boxes, he was telling me about his mom who is battling cancer.  Normally, I would have walked away without making a purchase.  However I wanted to leave the interaction on a positive note by purchasing something.  

2024 Heritage Baseball Flashbacks #BF-5

1992 Leaf Gold #57

The first two cards were 50¢ each, while the final three were dollar cards:

2020 Bowman Prospects #BP-108 (x2)

1994 Topps Black Gold Redemption Winner A #NNO

Expired redemption cards are one of those collections I don't really talk about... but I truly enjoy finding in the wild.

Purchase #2:  Start of a New Collection  $2

Maybe it's because there weren't a ton of vendors with cards.  Maybe it's because I have a sickness when it comes to stuff I treasured as a kid.  Whatever it was, I was drawn to this table of cassette tapes.  There were a few I owned when I was a kid, but something in my brain told me rebuilding this collection could be a slippery slope.

So I grabbed the one that stood out the most:

Go-Go's Beauty and the Beat (1981)

This was the Go-Go's debut album which was #1 for six straight weeks on the Billboard 200 in March and April of 1982.

Purchase #3:  Cards & Cassettes  $22

That slippery slope I just mentioned... just go real.  I owned a copy of this cassette tape as a kid:

The Police Synchronicity (1983)

Honestly there's a good chance my childhood copy is sitting in a box somewhere in my garage.  But after purchasing the Go-Go's tape, I figured I'd add this to my cassette tape collection rebuild.

The vendor also had a bunch of cards and other knickknacks scattered on a table.  That's where I found these two Junk Wax Era hall of famers:

1987 Fleer Update #U-68

1996-97 Collector's Choice A Cut Above: The Jordan Years #CA5

And this 22 card lot of vintage cowboy cards:

1951 Post Hopalong Cassidy

Hopalong Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero that was popular in films in the 1930's and 40's.  There was also a television show based on him that ran on NBC from 1949 to 1952.

The Google app on my phone helped me identify this set on the spot.  These cards were inserted into boxes of Post cereal back in 1951.

He packaged them up with the two cards and cassette tape for $22, which seemed like a solid deal.

Purchase #4:  Bag of Stuff  $10

The couple with this set up had a two tables filled with a variety of items you'd find at someone's garage sale.  Their deal was fill a Target bag with as many items as you wanted for $10.

The two Topps factory sets immediately stood out:

1991 Topps Baseball Set

1992 Topps Baseball Set

Both of these sets had already been opened, but at this price I couldn't pass them up.  I also grabbed these five items and tossed them into the bag:

At the left are two souvenir photo books which I thought were interesting.  They remind me of going to San Francisco with my parents when I was little.  These are the kind of items I'd bug them to buy me when we'd stop into souvenir stores.

The black thing is a Nintendo Switch case that I ended up giving away to one of my 8th graders.  Under that is a Mickey's Steamboats souvenir baseball.  And the final item I tossed into the bag was a package of Christmas cards that I'll use for future care packages.

As for the two factory sets, they weren't complete.  Both sets were missing a handful of Giants.  But I did end up pulling out the A's and Padres team sets.  Also pulled out some key stars (in case I end up building more Topps base card runs) and a few rookies like these:

1991 Topps #333

1992 Topps #156

I'm going to use the base cards for an annual art project I do with my students where they create trading cards of their favorite civil rights leaders.

Well that wraps up my first Flea Market Finds post in nearly three months.  I still have a few more trips I need to recap as well as a yard sale yield and a card show haul.  With only four weeks left in my summer break, I need to start hammering these out hopefully at a rate of one per week.  We'll see how things play out.

Until then...

Happy Tuesday and sayonara!

The Contest

The Contest is one of the funniest and most popular Seinfeld episodes of all-time.  And it's the perfect lead-in for today's Sunday Sort topic:  contests & Seinfeld.

Back in January, Dominic over at Don Cardwell Loves this Blog held a Super Bowl Pick 'Em contest over on his blog.  Going into the big game, it came down to me and Tom over at Batting Out of Order.  Both of us had picked our favorite teams.  He had the New England Patriots and I rolled with the Seattle Seahawks.  Their Super Bowl victory led me to winning this pack of cards:

2025 Donruss Football

Here's what I pulled:

As a Packer fan, the Jacobs was the highlight of the pack... although it'll be interesting to see if the allegations against him are true or not.  The Burden rookie card could be a decent pull too.  I remember he had a big game against the 49ers late in the season last year.  Although since he's a Chicago Bear, I won't be rooting for him very often.

Let's fast forward to last month.  That's when Gregory over at Nine Pockets held a giveaway for one of his custom cards using a duck race.  Tom's duck finished first.  My duck finished in fifth.  Luckily... Gregory opened up his giveaway to the five fastest ducks, which meant that I got to choose a free custom.

He had a lot of cool cards to choose from including a few Seinfeld related cards and an awesome Beastie Boys In Action custom.  I purchased a few of the Beastie Boys cards when he first released them, so it came down to choosing one of the Seinfeld cards.

Ultimately I decided on the one you saw at the top of my post:

2024 Nine Pockets Custom #3

As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, George Costanza is my favorite character.  So this card will be joining two other customs that Gregory created:

2019 Nine Pockets Custom #1

2023 Nine Pockets Custom #7

Thank you Dominic for hosting this year's Super Bowl Pick 'Em and for the pack of cards.  And thank you Gregory for the custom card giveaway!  Your customs are amazing!  Keep up the great work.

As for the Sunday sort, it's slowly coming along.  I'm over half way through the blogger care packages and eBay purchases.  And I have even started working on some Flea Market Find posts that have been sitting in my draft folder since April.   Please stay tuned.

Until then...

Happy Sunday and sayonara!

The Antique Store Road Trip

Last month, I packed my bags and drove up to Ashland, Oregon to see one of my best friends and her family.  It's become an annual vacation that involves a lot of eating, shopping, and catching up.

One day is dedicated to shopping in downtown Ashland where the girls enjoy looking for sticker books, plushies, and clothes.  This is usually pretty painful for me, but I have found a few shops on the strip that I'll hang out in to kill time.  Plus that's usually the day we grab pretzels at Skout Taphouse & Provisions:

If you're a fan of pretzels and you are in the area, I'd highly recommend this place.  It's one of our favorite places to grab lunch.

The following day we drove into Medford.  This is my favorite day, because it revolves around a bunch of antique stores that are much more appealing to me.  We went to four shops that were located within a two mile radius.  One of them had a solid variety of trading cards.

Main Antique Mall had two display cases dedicated to cards:

I've seen this card display in this store the past three to four years.  However this one was new to me:

The vendor has some cool sets for sale, including some 80's O-Pee-Chee baseball:

I was very interested in the 1982 and 1984 O-Pee-Chee sets, but $300 for the pair was too rich for my budget.  Unfortunately, I didn't make any purchases that day.

However, I did purchase some cards at Timeless Treasures Hub on the day I arrived.

The first day we were in Ashland, I arrived early and had a few hours to kill,  I knew that we would eventually go to Medford to check out the four antique stores mentioned above, but one was located a little out of the way.  I decided to check it out on my own.

The shop is owned by a couple and has everything from furniture to LP's.  Plus there were three display cases with sports cards.  I ended up talking to the husband about cards for close to thirty minutes before spending another thirty minutes walking around their store.

In the end, I walked away with these two cards:

1996 Fleer Ultra Series 2 Diamond Dust Mail-In Offer

Sometimes you find good deals.  Other times you don't.  This card is an example of the latter.  I thought it was a redemption card for one of these Cal Ripken Jr. game-used infield dirt cards:

1996 Fleer Ultra Diamond Dust #NNO

However after reading the card this morning, I realized it's actually just an advertisement card Fleer inserted into 1996 Fleer Ultra Series 2 packs.  They weren't inserted into every pack, but they're not rare by any means.  The box break I watched on YouTube had six or seven of these mail-in cards.  In other words, I paid $5 for a card that's worth 5¢.

At least it'll go well with the actual Diamond Dust card I purchased years ago, which by the way is an under-appreciated piece of history.  Back in 1996, Upper Deck won the hearts of collectors when they produced the first game-used jersey cards of baseball players.  This might not be a piece of Ripken's jersey, but it is the first game-used dirt card ever produced.

The other card I purchased was this sticker auto for my Green Bay Packers PC:

2015 Donruss Signature Series #216

My parents were Green Bay Packers fans back in the late 50's and into the 60's.  Forrest Gregg was one of the hall of famers who played on that team.  I paid $20 for this card, but prefer to think that I paid $25 and received the Ripken mail-in card for free.

There's one more card related item from this trip, but before I get to it... I wanted to share the final purchase I made in Ashland.  On the final full day there, we went back to downtown Ashland.  The girls wanted to go back to a few stores, while I wanted to check out Shattered Music which was closed earlier in the week.

Recently, I've been looking to rebuild my cassette tape collection and wanted to see if they had any from my childhood.  They did, but their prices were a little steep.  But I did find a few LP's for my collection:

The Police: Ghost in the Machine  (1981)

The Police: Reggatta de Blanc  (1979)

Blondie: Autoamerican  (1980)

The GoGo's: Talk Show  (1984)

Bruce Hornsby and the Range: The Way It Is  (1986)

The sticker price added up to $43, but he gave me a three dollar discount.  I probably wouldn't have bought these had I come across them at a flea market.  However I like to support small businesses whenever I can.

Was going to comment on each of these albums, but this post is already way too long.  Let's just wrap things up with a present from one of my nieces:

Fairfield Baseball Jumbo Box

She saw this at either Walgreens or CVS and asked her mom to buy it for me.  Here's a scan of the back of the box:

And a peek at the contents:

It came with a stack of cards that were packaged loosely in the box and a pack of 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier baseball.  The pack is headed into my rainy day pack stash.  And here are the highlights from the box:

The oldest card was the 1983 Topps Dennis Lamp, while the newest were singles from 2025 Topps flagship.  A few made it into my A's box, but everything else will be taken into my classroom in a few weeks to be used as examples for a project I do with my students.

Well that wraps up another Ashland, Oregon road trip.  A special thanks to Tito for talking your mom into buying this box for me.

As for the rest of you, thank you for being patient and taking the time to check out this extremely long post.

Happy Thursday and sayonara!