DALLAS, TX.- Gary Dean Simpson got into baseball card collecting like most other kids: "I was enamored of baseball, I was going to be a baseball player, and it was a bond with my dad." This was in the 1970s, when Gary Dean was just entering his teenage years — prime time for a wannabe baller with a passion for gathering colorful cardboard keepsakes featuring hardball heroes, especially in small-town Mineral Wells, Texas, where the kid spent blazing-hot, bone-dry summers with his MaMa and PaPa, farmers by profession and antique traders by passion.

By the time he turned 14, Simpson turned to the buying and selling of cards, taking out ads in Sports Collectors Digest and The Trader Speaks. He became a treasure hunter, accompanying his grandfather to antique stores in search of old cards to buy and sell. But it was one trip in particular that changed his life ... and the card-collecting hobby.

"We went out to look at some clocks at an antique shop in Mineral Wells," Simpson recalls. "My PaPa knew the owner, who had given him a call and said, 'I know your grandson Gary Dean loves these cards. Well, I got a chest in from St. Louis that you might want to have a look at, because I haven't seen these cards. I don't know anything about them.'"

Inside that chest, collected in an old family photo album, were seven sepia-toned, blank-backed 3-inch-by-4-inch cards featuring game-action photos of deadball players identified only by last name and the teams for which they played. The only other words on the cards identified their maker:

Plow's Candy Collection.

Simpson had never seen them before. As it turned out, few ever had: In his Sports Collectors Bible, the second edition of which was published in January 1977, Bert Randolph Sugar listed 34 known players included in that particular set of cards — and Simpson had two in his hand not on that list. Which made him wonder: Who made these cards? And how many of them were printed?

Years later, after the Texas-based engineer turned back to card collecting, those two questions threw him down a rabbit hole from which he has yet to escape.

In time, the Plow's Candy Collection — dated 1912, though sold in 1913 as premiums with chocolate made by the namesake company founded in Chicago in 1885 — would come to be known as The Miracle Set. That's because there are only some 175 so-called E300 cards known to exist today, according to the grading services. And, though the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards lists 69 cards in the Plow's Candy Collection, even now it remains unclear how many cards constitute a complete set.

This much is certain: Simpson is selling two of his Plow's Candy Collection cards in Heritage Auctions' Feb. 26-27 Winter Platinum Night® Sports Auction: a Honus Wagner graded PSA Near Mint 7 and a Ty Cobb bearing the same grade. That these cards exist at all is astonishing. But Simpson's cards are truly breathtaking, in that his Wagner card is the only one known to have survived more than a century later, while the Cobb offering is the best example of the eight ever handled by PSA.

When asked why he would part with such extraordinary rarities, Simpson is quite clear: He hopes the sale of these cards will help make people aware of the long-gone candy company, and its namesake Edward Plows, with which Simpson long ago became obsessed, as he will happily admit. That card find in 1977 led Simpson to write a book (2019's self-published The Hunt for Plow's Candy Collection), which he has turned into a screenplay and adapted into a graphic novel.

Which is but his first bite of the bonbon.

"I think we all love to find that moment where we go: Wow," Simpson says. "And I've had my wow. I've been working on this all my life."




When people ask why he's selling the cards now, Simpson says, he tells them, "I have all this in my head. I've written a book, I've written a screenplay. I know Edward Plows. I've lived it, and I would like to share it in a bigger way. And how does that bigger ambition start? With a conversation."

Simpson, who eventually enlisted researchers in Chicago and St. Louis, can talk for hours about Edward Plows, a native of New York who moved to Chicago in the early 1870s, fell in with the city's elite and "ventured into the circuit of private clubs and the baseball park — the first generation of the rich and famous," Simpson writes in his book. He was a mercurial, mysterious and "bombastic" figure, Simpson says, disappearing for long stretches of time (due to "marital affairs and financial shenanigans," Simpson says) yet still present enough to create candy parlors more like palaces for Chicago socialites.

By 1904 Plows was sponsoring the World's Fair in St. Louis, where he opened a candy factory and store in 1890. But Edward Plows only lived until 1906, dying at the age of 51 due to illness. The business fell to his wife, Sallie, who oversaw operations in Chicago and St. Louis (by then, home of the flagship) and helped the company turn a modest profit until bankruptcy came for the chocolatier in 1912.

But as Simpson writes, a new president, W.R. Burnet, and an infusion of cash helped revive the company. The factory was expanded and updated, while the company turned to baseball cards to bolster flagging sales. That now-impossibly rare series of cards features players from teams popular throughout the Midwest: the Cubs and White Sox in Chicago, the Browns and Cardinals of St. Louis and so on.

Cornelius "Con" P. Curran, namesake of a well-known printing company in St. Louis, was enlisted to produce the cards, as he had a longstanding relationship with the hometown Sporting News. Simpson eventually discovered that the cards were made using photographs taken by the Chicago Examiner's Francis P. Burke, whose portraits of deadball stars make up David Phillips' essential and long-out-of-print 1975 bookThat Old Ball Game: Rare Photographs from Baseball's Glorious Past.

Simpson tracked down Phillips, who still had Burke's glass plates. Phillips offered to make some images from the ancient negatives, which included the very Honus Wagner image used on the Plow's Candy Collection card in the February auction.

"Those who see the card today say, 'Wow, that may be one of the most beautiful Honus Wagner cards I've seen,'" Simpson says. "That's because it's captured action. It's sepia, golden from the standpoint of details."

Simpson even discovered how much the cards cost to make: 52 cents, or $14.95 in today's dollars. The box of chocolates that accompanied each one cost only a nickel. At that price, one would think more cards would have survived. But Simpson estimates that there are maybe 200 out there, among them the 175 that have been graded and added to census reports.

"And why?" Simpson says. "Well, say you're a wealthy family and you get this wonderful box of chocolates and a card. Now, what are the odds that you care about the card?"

Probably not very good, he is told.

"And that's what makes this a miracle," he says. "If you were one of those few who liked it, you said, 'Well, where am I going to keep this?' You would put it in a book, or, if you're a real baseball fan, you had a photo album that you stuck it in. And that's how [these few survived], because you had to protect it."

And now, for the first time, two of the survivors come to market, each featuring a Hall of Famer, each the very best of the very best of the Plow's Candy Collection to see the light of day. All because Gary Dean Simpson wants people to know the story he will spend the rest of his days telling to anyone willing to listen.

The tale of Plow's Candy, he says, has "a legacy that's richer than a tradable card. And I can tell you one thing: You can have a card that no one else has. And that is pretty cool, because I did it."