One of the things that I always found rewarding from retail was helping people find something they really wanted, and had trouble finding before. It’s a feeling I’ve shared and there is always a lot of excitement in finally tracking down a personal holy grail of sorts. Well, I had not one of my best sales, but one of my most rewarding sales the other day. Mired in a few frustrating returns, and some bad sales I got a message from a guy saying that he was located in Monterey and was wondering where I had picked up the following t-shirt:

So first, about the shirt. I picked this guy up at a local thrift store, and after a small amount of research decided to take a shot. I have a had lot of luck with random autographs when I represent them as just that. I did some research in the store, finding out that there was some Ricky Graham gear up on Ebay, but no t-shirts and few autographed items, mostly photograph. Off to google, then I found out that Rick Graham was a very talented Motorcyle racer from Carmel. Ricky died in 1998 in a house fire in Spreckles after shaking a drinking problem and winning three national championships. Here’s an article about Ricky’s tragic passing: http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1998/Motorcyclist-Ricky-Graham-Dies/id-e4b624148fa88c9cb00292a70a87c5c5

It turns out the gentleman that messaged me, was a friend of the family. He was ecstatic, had already had the autograph authenticated by Ricky’s brother. He purchased the shirt immediately, and we started messaging back and forth, and he told me a little bit about Ricky and how he was excited to get this shirt back into the possession of his family. He even sent me a personal snap shot of Ricky:

This brief personal interaction really put me back into the right mind set of evaluating every buyer individually, and to not always think everyone in a predatory scam artist out to take every last $20. There are many, many out there but in the words of Depeche Mode, people are people. In the end I’m extremely happy that I got to be part of reuniting a community with a piece of their family history that has been lost for some 20 years. My all time favorite positive feedback: