Posted By:
rick hastingsJohn-
I am going to start this story and hope it doesn't take too long, but it really is a good story.
fantastic subject. The best ever. I really enjoy reading stories of "favorite cards", "reasons for collecting".etc.
Until recently I was biginning to think that I was one of very few who really just collected for the fun of it, not the profit of it.I have since changed my belief on that due mainly to this forum. I have actually just recently sold my very first card from my collection, but it was only after some serious apprehension. It is not easy to say goodbye to a Thorpe card you have had for twenty something years. But I only sold it because I really felt that the card actually made someone very happy to own it, not just to move it for profit. This is the kind of stuff that hobbies were intended for. Whether it is collecting small flat pieces of cardboard with pictures on them, or round pieces of cardboard that used to have toilet paper on them. It only takes one collector of anything to start a hobbie, but it takes two or many more to continue it. I think this subject of how peple got started collecting would make an enjoyable book to read someday.
My story really starts with my dad and the love for baseball that he had bred in me. I'm from St.Louis and have been fortunate to learn the history of the game first hand from stories told by my dad and grandfather of the Browns and Cardinals. They were both huge fans of the game. At 80 years old, my dad is in heaven when he can watch three or four games a day on TV. My first piece of memorabilia given to me was by my grandfather via my dad. 1930 Cardinal Team ball. Gro. Alexander, Pop Hayes, Chick Hafey, Pepper Martin, etc. Dad handed it over to me when I was 9 years old in 1963.I was his second son, and I now know that he skipped my older brother on this because he had a feeling that the ball would wind up being chewed up by a dog in James Earl Jones's backyard or worse. But he showed a faith in me that I will never forget.
In 1938 a couple years before my dad went off to the Pacific in WWII my dad who lived by Fairgrounds park in St.Louis (which was blocks away from old Sportsman's Park) would spend his afternoons following ballplayers from the hotel to the park. Hounding them for autographs. I often wonder how many days of school he just skipped to collect autographs and use his "knot Hole" pass to go to games. This is where the second priceless piece he gave me comes from.
I have a 1938 Who's Who in Baseball that has hundreds and hundreds of signatures across the faces of the players.
It is in order of how they finished in '37. The first page is Joe Dimaggio, Bill Dickey, etc.( as a matter of fact, this is the year that Lou Gehrig was diagnosed with ALS and he is one of the few Yankees unsigned. This book is loaded with HOF's. Hell, Honus Wagner was a coach with the Pirates, he signed it. It is truly an unbelievable piece of history.With a national and american league team in town there are signatures from a few players on every team. Ted Williams, Casey Stengle, Lefty Grove,etc etc
Did you know that Babe Ruth was a coach with the Dodgers that year? I have his autograph on a index card from that he personally gave to my dad. I'll spare you the story of how he got that for another time, if anyone cares to listen.
Fastforward to 1983 and after years of accumulating interesting little pieces of Baseball History, I am offered by an acquaintance a box of baseball cards smaller than any I had ever seen before.This person had gotten them from his uncle when he died. The only problem I had was I had just gotten married, and coming home with a box of cards and then having her find out I spent a few hundred dollars on them was not a smart way to start off a marraige. "Oh hell with it" she'll get over it one of these days. As a matter of fact, a couple of years later she followed me to a card show and helped me pickout and I quote her a "Higgins" (Huggins) and a "Stinker" (Tinker.
God love her, she tryed. In that box were T205, T206, T207's several misc E series,hundreds of them about 20 M101-5's(in alphabetical order)starting one card behind Ruth (damn the luck) and ending with Vaughn, T200 team cards Only missing 2, and a pile of T202's that had been seperated into end panels and black and whites. Of course none of these are mint mind you, but some very nice cards.
I have a few Cobb,s Young, Johnson, many HOF's from that era, plus (had) the recently departed Thorpe. I was hooked.
As far as leaving a card show with money. I remember forgetting it was going to cost me $5 to leave the parking garage and having to go back in a show and give a card back, just to get home.
If this little story gives one person the enjoyment that I have recieved from some of the other stories I have read then I am glad to have written it. If it is too long and boring I am sorry., but that is "my story"
rick