Mickey Mantle Rookie Card Stored In Velveeta Cheese Box For 50+ Years Heads To Auction

Forget safe deposit boxes. Get yourself a block of Velveeta cheese and then you've got yourself some of the finest processed cheese on the market, and the box can serve as an impenetrable fortress in which to store your 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card.

Oh wait, you don't have one of those?

Well, this dude Terry does, and it's all thanks to a Velveeta box that somehow spent decades in a crawlspace protecting the valuable baseball card.

"Well, we had this up in my attic when I was a kid. That's where we kept our comic books and our baseball cards," Terry said, He explained that when he went off to the Army, his family cleaned out the house. This involved tossing out all of his baseball cards and comics.

He thought all of them including that 1952 Mantle rookie card were lost for good.

"So I was talking to my brother a couple of years ago and I said, 'You threw out my Mickey Mantle rookie card.'"

That's a hell of an accusation, but it turns out his brother hadn't thrown away the valuable card. Sure enough, Terry's brother — who must have a sixth sense for detecting a baseball card's future value — held on to it.

Velveeta has more uses than just being thrown in recipes. (Photo Illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Terry's Mickey Mantle Rookie Card Spend Decades In A Velveeta Box

It turns out he had hung on to twelve cards including Dodger great Pee Wee Reese and this Mantle card.

"So anyway," Terry said. "It's been in a Velveeta cheese box for the last 50 years in a crawlspace under the house."

That doesn't seem like those would be ideal conditions for preserving a 70-year-old piece of paper. However, Terry says the lack of light helped the colors stay vibrant.

Terry's card is soon going to hit the auction block. A '52 Topps Mantle rookie card in mint or near-mint condition can easily go for 7 figures or more. Much more.

It sounds like Terry could have some serious money coming his way. That's all thanks to one hell of an assist from the folks at Velveeta.

Without them and their Fort Knox-like packaging, this would not be possible.

Follow on Twitter: @Matt_Reigle