Old Red Sox Card - Rube Walberg

As employee of the month at work I received some Visa gift cards as part of the prize.  I had saved them and planned to spend them on the Minneapolis trip, but actually only spent a small part of them.  So upon returning, they were burning a hole in my pocket!  I had to do something about that.  So over the past couple of days I've been doing just that.  I've made card purchases on eBay, Beckett.com, and at a LCS.  Hopefully, I will receive them in the coming days and share my findings with all of you!

 

The first package arrived yesterday.  There were only two cards in this one.  The first is a 1936 National Chicle Fine Pen Premiums (R313) of Rube Walberg.  My collection had been mostly limited to the Wide Pen Premiums of Goudey that year, so I still didn't have Rube.  It's in really decent shape for 82 years old, and the price was right.

I don't know much about Mr. Walberg so I had to look him up.  He played for the Red Sox for four years at the very end of his career.  He both started and pitched in relief.  His best days were with the Philadelphia A's, and he pitched in each of their World Series from 1929-1931.  When he came to Boston in 1934 he was 37 years old and pretty average.  An interesting thing about Rube Walberg is that he had four managers during his 15 year major league career, and all four are in the Hall of Fame.

Since I had already paid for shipping, I perused through the seller's other cards for sale and found this 1966 Topps Willie Stargell.  It was only $2 which I thought was a great price for it.  Other than Red Sox, I don't have too many cards that old, but I couldn't pass up on Pops.

So here's the rest of the story about those gift cards.  As the employee of the month recipient, one day at a company-wide meeting I stood with the CEO in front of the company having a bunch of nice things said about me, and receiving my prizes.  Just under three weeks later I was sitting in that same CEO's office having him tell me they were going to proceed without my services.  About one-tenth of the office was let go that day.  It just goes to show that nothing is certain, and anything can happen.  Now it's a couple months later and I'm in another good spot.  This was my first week on a new job, working remotely for a company in Dallas, and still in software development.  And my new boss lives in Boston and is a huge Red Sox fan!  He told me if he'd known that about me earlier we could have just skipped the interviews.