I worked for The Sports Trader. Do you remember it? He printed a small monthly publication that we mailed out all over the country. It had ads buying and selling and trading cards.
He also had a booklet he sold called "5,000 addresses of Major League Baseball Players" and people could write the players in the winter time and almost all of them would reply with autographs. I got tons of autographs on 3 x 5 cards, HOF cards, and sometimes they'd even send their own color picture back. A friend of mine got a reply from Mickey Mantle with a signed color 8 X 10 picture. Max Carey was good to sign HOF cards we'd send him, and surprisingly Ted Williams was also. I ever got a picture back from Mrs. Babe Ruth!
Another stroke of good fortune was that my cousin, who is nine years older, had lost interest in cards and developed interest in cars and girls. One day he gave me his entire baseball card collection which was about 5,000 cards from 57-58-59. I remember a few TV Bowman's I think they were called from '53. No '52 Topps, and I don't remember anything past maybe 1960. I remember he had a lot of those old Fleer HOF cards with the old timers. Other than that the collection was almost exclusively the 57's, 58's and '59 Topps cards.
The unfortunate thing was the collection had been cherry picked. My cousin let a friend pick out all the stars he wanted in trade for a miniature pool table that no one has seen now in decades. It probably wasn't worth $20. So, the collection was not chock full of Mantle's, Mays's, and the other main stars of the day. There were some, but not as many as you'd expect.
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