I always try to get the story from people when I purchase a helmet off of
them, but in 95% of the cases there is no story to go along with the helmet.
My theory on that is that most of these helmets are valuable (not in terms
of dollars) to the people who own them and those
people are not the ones selling these helmets on EBay. The other rare
helmets that show up have been picked up at flea markets, garage sales, or
just in passing and their is no personal value to those individuals.
Anyway, getting back to some purchases, I would say my next steal would have
been the Senators helmet at right. Like I said earlier, I can't give
away all of my secrets (I'm talking about the types of searches I do on EBay
when I speak of secrets.) but this little beauty popped up one day on EBay
back in 2004 if I remember right. It was obvious that there weren't a
lot people looking at it because when it came down to the final day of the
auction it was still going for about $15.00. I watched it, placed my
bid, and walked away with it for a little under $50. That has always
shocked me because this is the only helmet like this one on EBay that I have
ever seen. Of course, I believe that there are more like
this
out there, but again, it's the only one I've seen. For its age, the
helmet is kind of cheaply made. Most helmets that I pull from the 60's
are made of fairly strong plastic, but this one is really kind of thin and
flimsy, nonetheless, it is still a great find.
Another helmet that I discovered I only paid $9.99 for and I think it is still one of the rarer helmets that I own. That helmet would be the Cardinals helmet pictured at left. The sticker is really bizarre. I know that the Cardinals use to wear a blue helmet that had a red STL with a white outline in the sixties and it is similar to the one they wear today, but I can only find one picture of a Cardinals player wearing a cap that comes close to this helmet. It's so weird that I can only give a time frame of the early to mid-60's for this helmet. The closest I have come to identifying it is with the photo of Curt Flood below and I believe it was taken in '64, but don't quote me on that.
This picture was of the blue cap they wore in the 60's. It was a color photo, but I took the color out and this is what I got.
A cap that proves the helmet above? The color of this cap has to be red when looking at the photo to the right.