The First Big Purchase

     For the next couple of  years I found various helmets on eBay and none of them were anything to get too excited about.  I also had a good friend who went to a lot of garage sales and would bring me various items from time to time free of charge.  Early on I didn't really know what was actually out there until I lucked into some helmets one day.  I consider this lucky break one of my best purchases.  While browsing on eBay I came across an auction for 12 souvenir batting helmets.  The helmets were stacked on the ledge of a backyard deck and the picture quality was just terrible.  I couldn't even make out any of the helmet logos, but I noticed that the colors of some of the helmets were really strange.  One helmet was bright green and another had a white top and red bill.  The auction went for a full six days and nobody had placed a bid.  The original starting price was $9.99, so I decided to write to the guy after the auction was over and I offered him $60 for the entire lot to see if he was interested.  He agreed to the sell and I thought I had just paid $60 for a bunch of junk helmets, but that all changed when the package came in the mail.  

     In the words of late, great Harry Carey, "Holy Cow", I had hit the jackpot and could not believe what I had found!  The first helmet that came out of the box was the old Reds helmet and after that came the Indians helmet.  I honestly didn't even know which teams these logos belonged to because I had never really researched the older helmets.  By time I got to the Sox helmet and the Athletics helmet I could hardly contain myself.  It was not too long after that when I tracked down Marc Okkonen's book, Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century, and discovered what I had truly lucked upon.  There is no doubt that this is when my interest in really being a serious collector of these helmets started.  So, how about a story behind my story of who owned these helmets?