I was born in Southern California in 1953 and the sweet spot for my collecting was 1963-1967 Topps baseball cards and 1962 Topps Civil War News. I remember the Philadelphia football cards from that era too. That's me in 1966 my last year in Little League (United California Bank Tigers) holding an Ed Mathews bat.
We played baseball in the street from sunup to sundown. All the other kids on our street collected cards too, and we were always trading. We never flipped cards, and I don't remember bringing cards to school either. I had a paper route delivering the Los Angeles Hearld Examiner so I had money, and I usually bought my cards at the Little League field which was just around the corner. I'd take my packs up in the grandstands to watch the game and I remember loving the gum. The wax wrapper went on the ground under the seats. I sorted my cards by teams and never even once thought about completing a set. After a while we would always get the same cards at the snack bar as I suppose they were working through a box. Once we heard that this liquor store across town had a different batch of players (I knew nothing about different series of cards) so I rode my blue Schwinn sting-ray across town and was happy to get some different players. I remember once the Kreminliff brothers Dad bought them a whole box!
During 7th or 8th grade cards didn't seem so important, and I sold them to one of the neighborhood kids Joey Feller for enough money to buy lunch at Fosters Freeze. My mother was a collector too (matchbook covers) and I know if I wouldn't have sold them she would never have thrown them out.
My mom died in 2004 and while we were cleaning out the house, I made a sweep of the attic to see if I could find any of my cards. These cards had slipped between the floorboards of the attic in between the floor joists. I guess I needed some pictures of ball players for some project and the 1962 Post Cereal cards were the victims lol. Also a bent and water stained 1967 Topps Vic Roznovsky second series card which proudly holds it's place in my set.
Larry
