Moving along to my next strange purchase, I come to a helmet that has always
baffled me. Shortly after lucking into my big purchase, I came across
another auction on EBay that seemed to slip under everybody's radar.
This would have been July 2001 and the lady that listed these helmets had
listed them rather strangely (sorry, I can't give away all of my good
secrets
for
finding helmets). The helmets did not sell and I missed bidding on
them before the auction ended. I did however get a second chance to
acquire them and ended up dropping $45 for the pair. The two helmets
that I purchased from a lady in Chicago can be seen at left.
The first helmet was
easily recognizable to me by now as a White Sox helmet, but the first thing
I noticed on the helmet was that it did not have any
holes in the top of it like my other helmets. It is even easier to see
this on the mystery helmet next to it. The thing that struck me as
strange was that nobody else had discovered these two helmets and at that
time the only other older White Sox helmet that I had seen listed on EBay
went for about $65 and it was damaged. After arriving at my door, I
looked for a company name on the inside of the helmets and to my surprise
there were no markings of any kind. The helmets do still shows signs
of where foam padding would have been, but that is it. I looked for
more information from the lady I purchased them off of but the only thing
she could give me was that they came out of a neighbors attic and that those
neighbors had lived there for about 50 years. The son who lived there
now was an eccentric hippie, had a very poor memory, and while wearing a gas
mask dug these out of his attic.
I sent an email with a photo of the mystery helmet to the Baseball Hall of Fame and they could not give me any information on the helmet colors or logo. I'm assuming that the mystery helmet may be a minor league helmet of some sort, and I'm almost positive it has nothing to do with the Chicago Cubs, but who knows?