When I was an 11-year-old 7th grader, I started a Baseball Card Collecting Club in my Middle School. Got the vice principal to announce it over the PA and everything. Got at least a dozen kids to join. We had a meeting in one of the classrooms after school once a week, trading cards back and forth, playing flippsies or knockdowns with the cards we didn't care about.
We instituted a dues policy and collected enough money to buy a couple of unopened boxes of new releases through an advertiser in SCD that we would split up between ourselves in an end of the school year meeting. This was around Spring of 1982 and Fleer and Donruss were still cool novelties to us.
When they finally came in my "friend" who helped me start the club decided he wanted to keep all the cards for himself. He gave everybody their money back and told them the cards got lost in the mail or they were out of stock or some such nonsense, throwing me under the bus in the process.
Everybody rightly lost interest and it was disbanded shortly after. It was a sad day for me.
Not a happy story I guess, but one I think about a lot concerning my involvement in various aspects of the "hobby" over the years. It was a mistake for me to not stand up to my "friend", and a lesson I hopefully learned from at a young age to carry over into my later life.
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