In the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, people gravitated to new things to occupy their suddenly lonely time. They baked banana bread, started home-based businesses and got back into card collecting.
But for one 29-year-old California woman, estate sales became her thing. She made a hobby out of finding interesting things and often flipping them for profit.
The woman, who requested anonymity to maintain her privacy, experienced success when she flipped a sealed box of Playboy chocolates from the 1960s that she said she bought for $32 and sold for $600.
Having studied in fine arts, she seemed to have gravitated to things such as old designs on food packaging from the '50s and '60s.
She was browsing a liquidation company's app last year, when a lot of six sealed cereal packages from Kellogg’s, Post and General Mills, caught her eye.
After buying the lot for $75, she couldn’t help but wonder how, the packages were so pristine despite being 65 years old. When she picked them up in Atherton, California, she was told the boxes were stored with other food in a nuclear bunker that had been built back in that era.
Then came the research.
“I found out that cereal was valuable,” she told cllct.
You could say that again.
She said she sold five of the boxes for a combined $3,000, and the final box was the motherlode.
When observing the Post box she realized there were baseball cards on the boxes. And not just any cards. It was the 1961 Post mini-boxes, and there in the corner was none other than Mickey Mantle.
In 1961, Post made the greatest run of cards a food company has ever had. They hired Mantle for a TV commercial and promised 200 different stars on the set that came on the back of the boxes.
PSA has graded more than 400,000 cards from the 1961 Topps set, but fewer than 15,000 cards from the 1961 Post set.
Of the 449 Mantle Post cards PSA has graded, there is one 9 and no 10s. PSA has also graded 20 panels. None of them have Mantle in it.
Upon doing her research, the woman found REA, which has sold many Post cards, including Mantle, and consigned them to the current auction.
REA has never sold an unopened package from 1961. In fact, the last time unopened Post-10 mini boxes sold on eBay was in 2015 ($2,550).
With nine days left in the auction, the pristine sealed package, which has 10 mini boxes of Post cereal, is at $4,920, including buyer’s premium.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.