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Kevin CummingsMy introduction to baseball cards was when an older kid up the block gave me a couple of his beat up 1956 extras. I was hooked almost immediately.
My heaviest buying activity was between 1960 and 1963 and back then packs were only a nickel each if I recall properly! Getting a quarter could take you a long way.
We weren't rich by any stretch of the imagination (my father was a longshoreman and my mother was a teacher), so I'd feel guilty asking them for more money for something as frivolous as baseball cards. I scrounged around for ways to make some extra money to feed my habit. I sold the comics I had read and didn't want to keep to the local barber shop. I walked all over town looking for soda bottles to take to the candy store for the two cent return deposit (this was before recycling, of course).
I did all the flipping and sticking cards in the spokes of my bike, too, but we did a lot of trading. I grew up in a New Jersey suburb of New York City. Many of the fathers had grown up in New York City and had allegiances to the Yankees or Dodgers or Giants that they passed on to their kids. There were some very spirited negotiating sessions related to the trading of a Snider for a Mantle or a Mays for a Berra that would have made my father proud!