Recently on eBay there surfaced three patch blankets. This is a tale of how not to sell your Boy Scout patches. Not the eBay portion but before they got to eBay or to us.

First some history. These blankets surfaced around 1962-1963 when collector Paul Myers took this photograph of west Chicago Scouter Paul Price:

Mr. Price was an Owassippe lodge Garrision chapter member inducted in 1949. After he took the picture Paul M. lost track of Mr. Price. Paul believes Mr. Price had a brother in Phoenix. Mr. Price was not married and had no children. Paul M. remembers that Mr. Price’s stock trading items were Garrison chapter activity patches and old lodge 470 shark’s tooth odd-shape.

We bought two of the blankets and collector/dealer Frank Kern of Washington state bought the other one. Together they brought about $10,000 with our expectation to pull our needs and re-sell the rest to break even.

I talked with one of the sellers. He was very forthcoming in how they got the blankets. They attended an estate auction in southern Illinois north of St. Louis. They weren’t real knowledgeable about specific prices of Boy Scout patches but knew there was some collecting interest. Although prepared to go higher they bought the three blankets for $150. There was virtually no competition. There was a local collector interested in some box lots of more modern Boy Scout patches but not the blankets.

Now, I don’t begrudge these guys getting these blankets for this price. What was stupid was the family who had these and then used a local estate sale agent to sell them. The estate seller clearly did not know what they were doing, didn’t research it (they rarely do) and left thousands of dollars on the table which these guys handily picked up. The gentleman I talked with mentioned, “The house was auctioned for $6,000 and just one of the blankets brought almost that much money.”

So if you have Boy Scout patches you’re wanting to sell but aren’t sure what you have, get educated. Get advice, from us or other dealers. We’ll give you the truth. Sometimes its that the Region 10 patch that you were offered $100 for in 1969 won’t bring $20 today but more likely that you’ve got more value than you realize. We field these kinds of calls and e-mails all the time. Digital pictures work very well and if we need more clarification we’ll let you know and then advise on ways to sell.