“The attic is where all the good stuff is.” That is what James Micioni, known to his family as Uncle Jimmy, used to tell his nieces and nephews. They did not fully understand what he meant until after he died in March at age 97, when they finally climbed up into that northern New Jersey attic and found what he had been quietly building for most of a century. The footage, originally aired by CBS This Morning Saturday, was reposted to Instagram by the collectibles account @toppscardelite under the headline “Family discovers trove of baseball memorabilia in uncle’s attic.”

Micioni, a World War II veteran, “never driven, he never got married,” as one relative puts it in the segment, and spent decades as a dedicated, private collector. His nieces and nephews, Jeannie Micioni Griffith and Peter Micioni among them, describe growing up hearing about the attic as something closer to family legend than fact. “We thought it was a special collection,” one of them says.

The headline items are six Babe Ruth baseball cards from the 1930s, each in pristine condition and each personally autographed by Ruth himself. They sit at the top of a collection that stretches back nearly 90 years and includes signed cards from Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, and Jackie Robinson, along with scrapbook clippings, a 1942 Yankees scorebook, ticket stubs, and programs. “Every box was a treasure,” one family member says, laughing. It took the family days just to sort through everything, “carload after carload, and weekend after weekend.”

Micioni got most of the autographs the patient, old-fashioned way: by writing letters to players and asking. He kept those letters, too, alongside the signed cards they produced, giving the collection a documented paper trail that collectors and appraisers prize almost as much as the autographs themselves. “This is probably one of the most amazing and iconic collections to ever be discovered,” one memorabilia expert says in the segment.

Micioni’s attic is an extreme version of a situation plenty of families eventually face: a relative’s collection, built quietly over decades, that nobody outside the household ever got a full look at. Memorabilia appraisers generally recommend photographing everything in place before anything gets moved, since original packaging, scorebooks, and the letters players sent back can be worth nearly as much as the autographed cards themselves once a collection is professionally evaluated. A single vintage Babe Ruth autograph can be difficult to authenticate on sight, which is why serious collections like this one typically go through a third-party grading service before any sale, a process that can take weeks but protects both the family and a future buyer from a costly mistake.

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