I was not a big Wacky collector, but in late 80's I was in a thrift store with my wife. While waiting for her I went through the hobby section. Found a bag of stickers for $2 that interested me and I bought it on a whim. Turned out it had almost two complete sets of series 15, plus maybe another ten from 14 all like new. No checklists, but not complaining.
My most notable find was similar to this one. Sometime around spring 1992 I had been occasioning a mom-and-Pop type video rental store. He sold sportscards in the store as well, which is what I think drew me there to begin with. He had a wire display rack on a counter that you would normally see in a diner or candy store to hold snacks, but instead he would put miscellaneous card items on there, wrapped in Saran Wrap so you could only see the top and bottom card, but the prices were cheap, just a few bucks per brick. In hindsight I would have to guess he knew nothing about non-sport and this was just a quick way to get rid of whatever came his way. Anyway, that fateful day there were two bricks of Wackys, and the yield was astounding. At least one checklist card from every series 1-12, including a complete 12th puzzle set plus another 10 or so dupes. Near complete 9th and 10th sticker sets including Pupsi. Assorted stickers from 2nd through 4th and Wonder Bread stickers. Some had writing on the backs. A few of the checklists may have been marked also. But the 12th puzzle set and 9th & 10th near-sets all had clean backs.
What made this such a standout find was not just getting it for next to nothing, but for how many questions it answered for me. My discovery of a thriving Wacky universe was still 5 years away, and there was just such a dearth of information in the preceding years. At least I didn’t know where to look. My memories from the OS era were mostly not that vivid but it always haunted me that I lost nearly everything I ever acquired from the OS era, and I had always wondered why the Reissues seemed so different, why there were some titles I remembered, many others I’d never seen and couldn’t figure out why, and OS titles I remembered that were not in the Reissues. Puzzle backs on every card? Whaaaaaaat?... The Reissues were both a delight and confounding at the same time. Of course, once I absorbed the contents of those two packs, studied the checklist titles and figured out that there were major gaps in my exposure to OS, the hunger for more knowledge inevitably returned.
