Authenticated by PSA DNA with Autograph Grade 9. With his career - nay, his life - in abject disarray, Shoeless Joe retreated to his native soil. The gaveled pronouncement from Landis' bench in 1920 remanded Jackson to a station of humble obscurity from which he never again ascended. The famous slugger took residence in West Greenville, South Carolina where he proprietored a liquor store to the end of his life. Cheering throngs and adulating media were irretrievably afar now as Joe idled in the provinces where he was roundly admired, but pitied, by the locals.
Among those "locals" was a certain Eddie Taft who, at some point in the 1940s, saw fit to introduce his young daughter, Sarah, to the once nationally renowned Joe Jackson. With her little album in hand, Sarah petitioned the great baseball celebrity's autograph. And despite his tarnished reputation, Jackson duly accommodated. It's a pencil signing and it is the sole writing on that provided album leaf.
It's imperative here that we emphasize the import of a Joe Jackson autograph. During his career - when he was the darling of the national pastime - he undoubtedly consented to many requests. And the attrition of those signings have taken their normal course through the ages...to the point of virtual extinction. Then, upon his abrupt "retirement," Joe disappeared from the grand stage of universal applause, and presently even his localized friends and acquaintances in South Carolina prudently suppressed their pangs to ask for his autograph. Most of Jackson's post-1920 signatures are just that - signatures - routinely tendered in the course of mundane need, and not as souvenirs. Experience in our memorabilia industry has taught us, however, that Joe Jackson signatures are indeed rare...but Joe Jackson autographs are "rare"...with an exponent.
Perhaps at the prompting of her father, little Sarah Taft only wanted to be acknowledged - not by Joe-the-notorious, but instead by Joe the beloved icon of yore who dwelt now in their native midst. In a genuinely sentimental spirit, Sarah scribed her identity on the cover and, for posterity, father Eddie signed a separate page - that's it...with the Joe Jackson autograph, there are no other writings in the 4-3/8" x 6" album.
And on a final note, this album, and its treasure within, has changed ownership a couple of times since its origin in the '40s. The matured Sarah (née Taft) sold the piece into the hobby about a decade ago. The first subsequent, private buyer at that time took care to contact her, to solicit and to verify her first-hand account of the remarkable encounter. LOA from PSA DNA.