Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories

Wednesday 07-28-2010 10:24am PT

Incredible story coming down the pike today! A trove of old glass negatives bought at a garage sale in Fresno ten years ago for $45 have been authenticated as the great lost negatives of Ansel Adams and are worth at least 200 million dollars!



A team of experts has determined that the glass negatives were indeed created by Ansel Adams and thought to have been destroyed in a fire in 1937.



Wow! 200 million! And he bargained the guy down from $50 bucks to $45, is that amazing? The guy who bought the negatives, Rick Nosigian, was a construction worker who bought them because he liked pictures of Yosemite. Little did he know that he had stumbled onto a fortune of lost artwork. Those guys on Antique Roadshow would freak! That's like the Holy Grail of garage sale items. It doesn't get any better than this!

Has anything like that ever happened to you? When Ry was just a little boy, maybe six or seven years old, we went to a garage sale and I saw a complete set of 1963 Topps Baseball Cards for sale for $20. I asked my ex-wife and she gave me 10 reasons why that was a bad idea. She went on and on about it. I gave up and we drove away. A few moments later I thought, "Wait a minute. That's gotta be worth more than $20." So I went back. Against the wishes of my ex-wife I purchased the set of 1963 Topps Baseball Cards. For $20!



I just checked the price of a set 1963 Topps cards- guess what it was? $5,000! I'd say that qualifies as a bargain! I gave the set to Ry to have hold and I think he's still got 'em. He may have been tempted to sell individual cards like Pete Rose's Rookie card, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantel, and Stan Musial for hundreds of dollars each. That set had more hall-of-famers than I thought! Absolutely amazing! God bless garage sales!

Only one other time in my life did I stumble onto an incredible bargain, was when the band was on tour in the Midwest during the 80's and we came upon a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. We stopped for lunch. The local theater was going out of business and the guy had everything out on the sidewalk for sale- beautiful old glass display cases, old movie projectors, and memorabilia. I asked if he had any old movie posters. "Yeah, I got a whole room full of them- $20 a piece!" I spent several thousand dollars buying originals of some of the classic movie posters of the 1950's and 60's. The "one-sheet" for Creature From The Black Lagoon alone was worth almost $500.



I lost them all over the years. What a fool I was...