The Ted Williams Card Hidden for Decades
A Ted Williams rookie card was just rediscovered after more than 80 years
Never, they say, let your mom throw away your baseball cards. After all, you never know what they might be worth one day.
It seems as if little Billy Pappas of Manchester, N.H., took those words to heart 80 years ago. You can imagine the little boy, baseball cards spread around the floor of his family’s barn, quickly gathering his prized collection and stashing it into his hideaway. Every day, after school, he might have returned to that spot, spreading out the cards again to field an imaginary team. Maybe he showed his friends the hiding spot, and they brought their collections too. Maybe they organized complicated trades. Maybe they played imaginary games.
And then one day, little Billy grew up and started to play baseball himself—along with basketball and football too. He was so good at all three sports that he became a star in high school and then college. At the University of New Hampshire from 1952-1955, Billy Pappas lettered in basketball, baseball, and football, starring in all of them. He was an All-American quarterback while setting scoring records on the basketball court. When he graduated, he became a captain in the Air Force, and while he was overseas, he met a girl, fell in love. They moved back to New Hampshire, back to the house where he had grown up—the one with the barn in the back. Somewhere along the way, he had forgotten all about those baseball cards. And so, while Billy and his wife Toni built a life together, the cards sat in the hideaway gathering dust, watching the decades pass by.
With Toni in his arms, Billy danced. He loved jazz.
In March 2023, Billy passed away. He was 89 years old.
In the year since, Toni reached out to a friend, Ron Piecuch, who is a contractor. She wanted to do some work on the property—on the barn. Could he help out?
Piecuch got to work, and one afternoon this month, he called Toni with news. “I found something,” he told her.
Piecuch had been working on a wall in the barn when something caught his eye, hidden behind it. It was a baseball card. “All of a sudden, I look in there, about a foot down,” Piecuch told local news station WMUR. “There’s 51 more cards. I start pulling them out, pulling them out, pulling them out. We have 52 cards total.”
But they weren’t just any cards.
“We’re going through them, and we just recognize Ted Williams,” Piecuch said.
For all these years, Billy had stashed away a 1939 Ted Williams rookie card in superb condition. Similar cards sell for upwards of $40,000.
Piecuch asked Toni if she knew where the cards had originated. “Right away,” Toni said, “I thought, 'Oh my gosh, those were Billy's cards.’”
Talking with a reporter earlier this month, Toni sat on her couch and smiled. “I can reminisce and imagine my husband at 10 or 12 years old,” she said. “He was looking at all these cards, playing with them, trading them off with other kids, and probably dreaming that he’d be a great athlete someday.”
Piecuch is helping Toni get the cards appraised. Toni, though, is still not sure what she plans to do with her husband’s collection. As they say…it’s best to hold onto those things.
But, if she does decide to sell, she has a pretty good plan: the money will go an athletics scholarship in Billy’s name at the University of New Hampshire.
That way, another New Hampshire kid who grew up playing with baseball cards can one day realize their sports dreams too.
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