A Waterford sports memorabilia shop with some collectibles dating back to the mid-20^th century was badly damaged in a fire, earlier this week.

The intense fire ripped through a three-story brick building on Broad Street. As NewsChannel 13 has reported, six people above the store were sent to the hospital. One person died.

Walking through what’s left of Bill’s Card Shaq on Friday morning, Bill Hodges was heartbroken sifting through the charred remains.

With help from friends, Hodges began going through every display case, every drawer, every store shelf hoping some of his merchandise may have been spared. He hoped some of it avoided smoke or water damage that decimated the place.

“There was at least $20,000 cards. There was $5 cards. It was a lot,” said Hodges. “We had some high-end stuff, we had coins, gold, silver. We probably had six figures. So it’s tough to see all that just go away. We’re trying to save anything we can,” he said.
Hodges said he’ll have to itemize everything in the shop for insurance purposes, which is basically a repository of priceless memorabilia that includes hundreds of thousands of baseball cards, football cards, autographed historic photographs, jerseys, and other badly saturated sports world collectibles.

At the same time, he’s also able to keep things of importance in perspective.
“You can always replace the stuff. I’ve said that many times. You can’t replace your life. The person that died, you know, what were they thinking when basically they only had a couple of seconds left,” Hodges said.
At this point, Hodges said he’s not sure when or even if the shop will reopen, but they will come up with a game plan at some point, he said.