buying vintage... "the Speedo Wars"

It was about this same time last year when I was closing one of my most successful campaigns on Ebay…my wife and I like to refer to this period as “The Speedo Wars”…to make a long story short, a couple of years ago at one of my regular junk holes (an Old Hardware/Sporting Goods Store) where I had been buying “off the shelf” Nikes and Addidas, mostly 70’s and 80’s, good stuff by the way…after I had pretty much liquidated the shoe supply, I began looking in other areas of the store…not much really…the old store owner, tried hard to put me onto something new, but nothing seemed promising, especially NOT those old Speedo Swimsuits from the 1970s…I made prolly 3-4 more trips to the store over the next year or two hoping something new may have been uncovered…nada…again, the old store owner, not remembering that he had tried to sell me these before, again showed me the old Speedos …I sorta felt like I needed to make a buy to stay on good terms with the old man but at $4.00 each for about 20 or 30 Speedos, just wasn’t a smart purchase (I’d be better off to buy him lunch to stay on good terms)…Instead, I bought one single Speedo and it killed me to know that I was wasting $4.00…I told him “what the heck” and give it a try…so I did my research, took some snaps and put the listing up…after only 3 days on the Auction, my Speedo (pic #1, NOS circa 1972) had more than 20 bids and over 300 watchers…we were cracking-up!...needless to say that even before the sale ended, I was back on my way to buy the rest of those Vintage Speedos…we were shocked and amazed at “Hammer-Time”!...funny how some of our most successful sales on Ebay were just a “lucky try”…don’t get me wrong, I’ve shot just as many blanks on hunches before, but, the success stories are always more enjoyable…haha, ask me sometime about the 1950s Jockstrap find!...