Northwest Herald / NWHerald.com • Saturday, March 12, 2016
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Thar’s cards in them thar homes! Geesh, am I jealous! I just heard about a family that was cleaning out their great-grandfather’s home when they found seven uber-rare Ty Cobb baseball cards. The cards had been sitting in a crumpled paper bag for more than a century. Imagine: Ty Cobb x 7! This is the baseball card-collecting equivalent of discovering King Tut’s tomb and then going inside and finding papyrus pharaoh cards of Ramses II. The cool ones where he is riding in his chariot holding a spear. The reason that I am so green-eyed is because I have been searching my entire life for such an epic sports card discovery in the attics of the homes I have lived in. Sure, I found some stuff, but it was nothing earth shattering like the Magnificent Seven Cobbs. But there were some close encounters. For example, I remember when we were first married in 1969 and were renting a little carriage house in Crystal Lake. I discovered the well-hidden entrance to the attic quite by accident and quickly scrambled up to explore it. Creeping into the cramped and pitch-black loft, my trusty rusty flashlight and I desperately searched for anything out of the ordinary. And there it was, a dusty shape lying on the floor in a corner. I scooted over and picked it up. It was an old cigar box. The kind some guy would keep his old baseball cards in. And then he stashed it in the attic. And then, many years later, he died before he told anyone about it. And his house was passed on to his children. And they rented it out. And they didn’t know about the attic. And the new tenant found the cigar box. And he stood there, in the attic, with a flashlight shining onto the box. And he opened it. And he saw six faces staring back at him. Men’s faces. From long ago. And their names were ... “Dutch Masters.” Yep, a picture of the famous cigar guys on the inside lid of the empty box. No Babe Ruth, unless he had long, curly hair and was wearing a three musketeers hat.
My next brush with epic historical sports artifacts was in another house. It was formerly an 1885 schoolhouse converted to a home in 1906. Inside, it had an unusually large cold air return in the entryway. Removing its heavy grill, I quickly realized that the fieldstone shaft was big enough for me to squeeze into. I fabricated a makeshift ladder that carried me down one story to the basement level. Upon descending, I filled a five-gallon bucket with the rubble I found at the bottom and my kids used a rope to pull it up. After about an hour, drenched in sweat, covered with dust and squeezed by claustrophobia, I clambered back to the surface, dragged up through the opening by my wife with that “This is not what I envisioned when I married him” expression on her face. After lying on the floor, gasping for breath like a carp out of water, I pulled myself together and started sifting through the debris. Dust filtered into the air as I carefully examined every handful of potential treasure. But, alas, no Ruth or Cobb or Mantle. Nope, just five gallons of dust and broken dreams. Now we are in another home. It’s a lot newer. This one’s from 1912. And it has a huge attic. Maybe there’s a Honus Wagner waiting for me in a bag under a floorboard. Then again, at this juncture in my life, I’d settle for a Pretzels Getzien or a Nick “Tomato Face” Cullop.
• Michael Penkava is a retired teacher who taught for 35 years at West Elementary School in Crystal Lake. He’d also settle for a Charlie “Swamp Baby” Wilson or a Bris “The Human Eyeball” Lord. He can be reached at mikepenkava@comcast.net.
TODAY’S TALKER Guinness: Israel Holocaust survivor, 112, world’s oldest man
JERUSALEM – Guinness World Records said a 112-year-old Israeli who lived through both World Wars and survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz is the world’s oldest man. Guinness awarded Israel Kristal a certificate Friday at his home in Haifa. It quoted Kristal as saying that he doesn’t “know the secret for long life.” Kristal said: “I believe that everything is deter-
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mined from above and we shall never know the reasons why.” Kristal was born in Poland in 1903. His first wife and two children were killed in the Holocaust. He moved to Israel in 1950 with his second wife and son and “continued to grow both his family and his successful confectionery business.” Susannah Mushatt Jones an American, 115, is both the world’s oldest living person and the oldest living woman.
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the number of charities set to benefit from money raised by the McHenry County Human Race 5K this year
ON THE COVER United Way of Greater McHenry County Executive Director Steve Otten, dressed as Superman, and McHenry County Community Foundation Executive Director Robin Doeden, dressed as Wonder Woman, run through the Centegra Health Bridge Fitness Center in Crystal Lake to promote the Human Race scheduled for April 24 at McHenry County College. See story page 3.
Photo illustration by H. Rick Bamman – hbamman@shawmedia.com
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