ChiefsPlanet - Life This is the closest I may ever come to a "Pawn Stars moment"

So if you've ever seen the show, you know a large portion of it has to be scripted. I have no clue where they find the people who bring the shit they want to sell/pawn. Do they send out a call for people with weird stuff to get on TV, or do they "plant" the items on randoms? Even for a pawn shop as unique and unordinary as that one, 99.9% of the time people aren't entering pawn shops looking to sell their own copy of the Declaration of Independence that was hand-written by Thomas Jefferson himself.

I notice that any time somebody brings up something really cool, and Rick asks, "Where did you find this?" they often say, "Eh, I found it at a garage sale" or "I tripped over it when I was nosing around in my Grandpa's attic." Sometimes it's believable, like an old gramophone or something. Or a WWI uniform. Sure, I could buy that being a family heirloom getting passed down. Susan B. Anthony's private collection of vibrators and dildos? I'm calling bullshit on that. You did NOT just find that laying around.

Well, this isn't anything totally unusual or bizarre, but it's pretty damn cool. I'm currently in the process of helping my grandparents move into an assisted living place, so we've got a lot of odds and ends laying around in their basement and attic to go through. Today I was pulling out shoeboxes of pictures, old dishes, model trains. It's all really cool stuff in itself, but it's something you kind of expect in a house from somebody who's lived that long and still has that Great Depression mentality to save anything that could be of use one day.

But then I found a brown paper sack containing a baseball with a lot of signatures on it. I asked them about it, and they said, "Oh yeah, that must have been that baseball game we went to when the kids were really young." They lived most of their lives in Sioux Falls, so I assumed it was a Twins game, since I never heard of them going down to Kansas City for stuff like that. I guess they won it in some sort of "Hey, your ticket number was called! You win a team-autographed baseball" drawing. However, this was at the end of the day, and they were getting tired. They couldn't remember exactly what it was or how they won it. My dad didn't remember any of it, either, so he must have been very young.

After googling the rest of the names, I'm 99% sure this is from the 1962 Twins. I knew nothing about Twins baseball before the Kirby Puckett era other than Harmon Killebrew, and his signature is on there. Only one name doesn't match up (Dan Dobbek), but I guess he was around for the 1961 season, so maybe he was just in reserve all year?

Anyway, it definitely made my day. I'm pretty much the only one in the family who has an appreciation for sports memorabilia like this, but I still insisted they keep it. Apparently they forgot about the damn baseball decades ago, so they said it'd be better if I kept it and appreciated it. I'm also going to be doing some more research on that season. Hopefully I can pinpoint eventually the exact game they went to and who was on the team at the time that didn't get their signature on the ball.

And no, I'm not going to sell it. I'm not a Twins fan, but I always think it's kind of shitty when somebody goes in looking for easy cash for shit that's been in the family for generations, and then Rick does his usual, "I could give ya like $5 for it." This isn't exactly an heirloom or something that has personal meaning to my grandparents or parents, but I think it's pretty damn cool, and it's still something I'll have for years to come after they are both gone.

So I guess from now on I'll be less skeptical of the lady on Pawn Stars who found Katherine Hepburn's pubic hair trimmer in her grandma's medicine cabinet. That kind of stuff IS out there in weird places that you never expect it to be.