What Was The Hobby Like Back In The Day?

[Exhibitman]

I got my first cards in 1970 when I was 5, then a lot more in 1971. I don’t really date my ‘serious’ collecting until about 1974-1975. With a brief detour in HS I have been at it ever since. So, some reflections on the OP question:

In the middle to late 1970s there was virtually no hobby, at least not as we think of it today. The publications were amateur labors of love that mostly consisted of a few articles and mail order ads. You literally had to know of the publications to even know to get them, because they were not retailed. My first ‘break’ in terms of card knowledge was seeing The Complete Book Of Baseball Cards by Steve Clark in a bookstore in 1975 and pestering my parents to buy it for me. I read it over and over, gleaning what I could from it and drooling over the images of T and R cards I dreamed of owning. I also found listings for hobby publications and organizations in there.

There were no price guides, so you pretty much winged it. A card might be worth a lot more from day to day depending on who it was who you dealt with. Also, no one gave a damn about condition. It was all about completion and amassing more, not what condition it was in.

You got cards from wherever you could. I lived in NYC the first few years I collected and my friends and I had free run of the streets after school and on weekends (at like 9-10-11 years old; very different times) so we ended up going to antique stores, old book stores, junk stores, mom and pop candy stores, drug stores, basically anywhere we thought we might find cards. When you found a “honey hole” (as the American Pickers guys would call it), you would try to keep it secret from your friends and clear it out as fast as your allowance would let you. Corner candy stores were also good places to go because they would put out old remnant wax packs for sale. I remember one store near my house that had a barrel of mixed wax dating back several years that I dove into frequently, and another one where I cleaned out a half box of 1971 Topps 2nd series football in February 1977.

People generally had no idea that cards were collected or had value--this was before the news stories on Mr. Mint and so forth--so when you told someone you were a collector, they’d often just hand you their grown kids’ old cards. I had neighbors whose father was a professor at a local college and he’d ask around campus for cards for them, so they had the greatest collection. My greatest ‘find’ ever was when I was 12 and newly arrived in Los Angeles. My parents took me to someone’s house. The hostess asked me what I liked to do, I said collect cards, and she handed me a 2’ square box filled to the brim with her kids’ old cards. Thousands and thousands of them. I had the greatest sorting party on the floor of my bedroom that evening, culminating in finding a 1955 Ted Williams.

Card shows were practically non-existent, though there were card clubs that were starting up and they started to have annual or bi-annual shows usually clustered around a holiday. My first show was the American Sports Card Collectors Association show the Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend 1976 at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC, thanks to discovering the ASCCA from either the Clark book or some publication I found through the Clark book. I finished my Topps run of Willie Mays cards there, with a loan against my allowance of $45 to enable me to buy the 1952-1953 cards. My mother nearly killed my father when she found out he’d allowed me to spend that much on two baseball cards; several years later I sold the 1953 Mays for $350. In Los Angeles I went to the shows in Anaheim that became the National. I bought my first T206--a Johnson ready to pitch--from Mike Berkus at one of those shows. Set me back $12. As a kid with limited funds my thing was the discount boxes. I still have a 1953 Musial I pulled out of one of them for a buck. I filled in most of a run of Mantle cards from those boxes. Not a 1952...

When we moved to LA in 1977, I ended up finding a card club, the West Coast Card Club, in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. This was when I was 12-15. We had monthly meetings at a church basement in Northridge. For ten bucks you could rent a 6’ table and sell. If I made $50 in a night I was thrilled. No one gave a crap about sales tax, business licenses, etc. It was just a silly thing we did. My parents would just shake their heads and let me loose for an evening at the church. Every meeting there was an auction. I remember paying $3.25 for a 1952 Bowman Mantle at one auction, about a buck a card for a group of signed 1953 Bowman cards in another.

There were a few hobby shops but they were odd places run by even odder people. The first one in LA was run by Goody Goldfadden. He was a pioneer and legend of the hobby but also a legendary jerk, especially to kids. I went to his store once and it was enough.

The collecting made you into a little businessman. When you found a good source of cards you’d use the extras to trade your friends for more cards. The usual ratio was one ‘old’ card for anywhere from 10-30 new cards. That was how you could quickly fill out your newer sets. Since there was a dearth of information on old cards, if you knew something you quickly learned to keep it secret and use it to your advantage in a deal. I once spotted a very rare regional card in another kid’s stash and got it as a ‘throw-in’ on a deal because he had no idea what it was. We were ruthless little sharks. On the other side of the coin, since there was so little easily gotten data, you would often think something was amazing when it really was pretty common. A trading buddy had a Callahan HOF Carl Hubbell and thought it was the greatest thing ever. It wasn’t.

Collecting also gave you invaluable experience interacting with adults. If you knew your cards you were treated with respect as a colleague, not as a dumbass kid. I remember ‘talking cards’ with a variety of guys as old as my grandfather, as an equal.