BOISE, Idaho — This baseball card collection is off the wall.
An Idaho woman renovating a home for her son discovered approximately 1,600 baseball cards glued to a bedroom wall, hidden behind asphalt roof shingles, KTVB-TV reported.
Melissa Brodt, of Boise, said she did not know what to expect when she began peeling away the dark green shingles off the wall of the home she bought in December from the estate of the original owners, CNN reported.
Certainly not baseball cards. It looked like a wall that a kid collecting cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s would be proud to show off. Baseball cards from Topps, Fleer, Score, Donruss and Upper Deck were lined up in relatively neat rows.
“I was surprised, shocked, confused,” Brodt, a Realtor and entrepreneur in Boise, told KTVB. “I wasn’t sure what I was looking at until we continued to pull down the shingles.”
Most of the cards are from the “junk wax” era of baseball cards, which spanned the years from 1987 to 1994. Those were the years when the boom in collectibles resulted in the production of millions of baseball cards. The oldest appeared to be a 1981 Donruss, while most were from the 1987 to 1990 range.
That means the cards’ value is not much. Factor in the glue on the card backs, add in the reality that they have been pasted on a wall for more than three decades, and the lure of this collection is simply its novelty. Instead of being stored in a shoebox or in binders, the cards were a kid’s version of wallpaper.
There were plenty of familiar stars from the late 1980s on the wall.
“We’re not really baseball fans so I didn’t really know what I was looking at, but lots of friends said, ‘Oh, I know that guy,’” Brodt told CNN.
The collection belonged to Chris Nelson, of Boise, KTVB reported.
Nelson lived in the home, and by the time he was 12 he had quite a collection of cards -- between 10,000 and 15,000 -- according to the television station.
Unlike many children, Nelson, now 44, did not have a mother that threw his cards out.
“We just had all these cards and my mom was like, ‘Well, why don’t we do this?’ and I was game,” Nelson told KTVB. “So we spent a weekend gluing baseball cards to the wall.”
It is definitely a fashion statement for a kid collecting baseball cards, but Nelson is not alone.
Several years ago, Dustin Samms, of Charleston, West Virginia, decorated the ceiling of his basement with 1,848 cards, Sports Collectors Daily reported in 2015. The cards were placed on 24 different tiles, with a straight pin through the center of each card, the website reported.
Like Nelson, the cards Samms chose were from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Nelson told CNN that he was “absolutely obsessed” with baseball. He said the wallpapering project with his parents took a weekend to complete.
“We got some pretty strong adhesive and each of us got a stack of cards and a brush, and we would just paint the glue on the back and tack them up on the wall,” Nelson told the news outlet. “It was a nice little family activity.”
Plus, Nelson’s friends thought the wall was “super cool,” he told CNN.
The cards were the focal point of Nelson’s room for about five years, he told KTVB.
They were the focal point of his room for about five years.
When Nelson grew up, his family decided to cover the wall with shingles.
“I think at that point my parents figured it was the easiest way to cover them up,” Nelson told KTVB.
For now, the fate of the wall is uncertain. Brodt said her son tried to remove a few cards, but the glue was still strong after all these years and the cards tore away from their cardboard backing, CNN reported.
“I would love for somebody to come in and take it if they think it’s useful,” Brodt told the news outlet.”We don’t have any interest in keeping it because it doesn’t really go with mid-century modern decor and we’re not really baseball fans.”