Childhood memories

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Posted By: Lee Behrens

Scott bfought up an interesting topic in another thread, childhood memories of buying cards.

From the earlist I can remember we leave a couple blocks from a small grocery store. Whenever we had a little extra money I would goto tthe store and buy some candy and cards. Me and my brother wanted to get Jerry Koosman cards, our mother went to high scholl with him so that was cool, (As it turned out Having a Koosman rookie card was a good thing to have, can you say Ryan rookie!!!!).
I remember when a neighbor got hit by a garbage truck we brought him baseball cards to feel better. The first time I ever bought a box of cards it was hockey ( I collected all 4 sports to try to make sets)I think it cost about $6. i had to open it in the basement and throw the wrapper into a window well under the addition.

The biggest thing missing from the nice cards is the smell . i can still smell the bubble gum from opening a pack of Topps cards, it didn't matter that the gum wasn't that good. When I ran a card store from 88 to 92 I once opened a pack of 78 Topps and ate the gum, it tasted like cardboard and disintegraded in my mouth, but I lived to tell the story.

I mentioned earlier that I tried to collect sets, duplicates sucked no matter who they were, I would easily trade stars away for one card I needed. Kind of an innocent age of collecting.

Just some memories,

Lee

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Posted By: runscott

I started big - a rack pack of '65 Topps. First football pack was a '67 Philly Gum and included a Dan Reeves rookie card. My town was so small that we never got high# Topps series, and the following year we always got fooled at least once by Drug Store owners trying to get rid of last year's inventory.

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Posted By: BRIAN

GREAT TOPIC! MY DAD USED TO TAKE ME TO THE MAJIK MARKET TO BUT 1976 CELLOS AFTER SCHOOL. AS A DIEHARD YANKEE FAN I CAN STILL REMEMBER BUYING PACKS WITH THURMON MUNSON, ROY WHITE, AND MY FAVORITE PLAYER GRAIG NETTLES ON TOP. EVEN THOUGH I PRIMARILY COLLECT VINTAGE CARDS I STILL GET A THRILL OUT OF OPENING PACKS FROM 1976, AND ROUTINLY BUY CELLOS AND RACKS OFF EBAY.
I AM NEW TO THIS FORUM, BUT NOT TO COLLECTING. I'VE BEEN COLLECTING TOBACCO CARDS FOR 25 OF MY 33 YEARS, AND AM CURRENTLY TRYING TO COMPLETE A NICE SET OF T206 HOFERS AND SOUTHERN LEAGUERS. I DON'T KNOW ANYONE WHO CONTRIBUTES HERE, BUT FRANK WARD, BUT LOOK FORWARD TO MEETING OTHER VINTAGE JUNKIES.
BE WELL

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Posted By: Mike Williams

were spent playing flip! That's right...flip! You'd either go home loaded with dinged up cards or you'd go home begging Mom and Dad for a buck or two so you could play again tomorrow! I also used to like to do the spoke thing with the bicycle....GREAT TIMES! Pitty kids don't even know what flip is these days!

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Posted By: John Wojak

that flipping was the best! In fourth, fifth and sixth grade ('71-'73) we used to flip cards every lunch hour on the playground. When you lost and ran out of cards, you just bought some of your lost cards back from your friends for a penny a card, didn't matter who it was. Imagine - a penny a card for '71 Topps cards, mint out the pack, stars and all. Where is that time machine when you need it?

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Posted By: jay behrens

We did a pretty good job of keeping that little store open on our own. The first box I remember buying was a 1972 baseball box that cost a whole $3.60 and they wanted to charge tax on which meant I would not have been able to afford it. They finally relented and sold it to me for $3.60 after I told them I would just buy a couple of packs at a time, walk out the store and come back in since they didn't charge tax if you only bought a few packs. This also explains I why I have so many 72s. I still have most of the 72s and 71s from when I was a kid.

I am also lucky enough to have been able to open up some Sports Kings, 33 Goudeys and whole lot Honet Long Cuts that had t205s in them. Woudl have been nice if I was the owner of the stuff, but just being able to open them was a blast.

I have to agree, I miss the smell of gum when you open a pack.

Jay

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

till I was grown up. My best friend was a boy (till I was 10), but he collected comic books and listened to baseball games. In 1945. he talked me out of being a Cubs fan (that was the last time the Cubs were in the Series...) I remember him showing me the first Captain Marvel (I didn't collect comic books either). I collected rocks, and as soon as I was able to pry my mother's Leica out of her hands (she NEVER learned from experience), I took photographs, in school, at night, inside, always of people. I still love black-and-white photography.

Dunno when I first saw baseball cards, but my son got me hooked when he was 9 (1979). By the time he lost interest at 13, he had to tell his father to tell me; he was afraid to tell me himself.

He got some great letters from old guys: "Dear George: You write a nice letter. Be good to your parents, say your prayers daily, and the Lord will blass you. Jocko Conlon." (he always signed his age under his name). When he wrote Snyder he thought Pee Wee should be in the Hall of Fame, Snyder signed a '52 Topps and dropped it in an envelope to him."Thank you for remembering my playing days of so long ago." (Lindstrom or Covaleski). Even FAMOUS old guys like to be "remembered" by a ten-year-old boy.

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Posted By: warshawlaw

My first pack in 1971. Every Friday night my family went out for dinner and we usually ended up at the mall in Mahopac NY, where my Dad would buy me a pack or two at the candy store. I still have a few of those dog-eared 1971's.

My first full boxes were two boxes of the 1975 baseball set that I got for my 10th birthday. The following two years, a favorite uncle sent me a Topps "care" package (he did some legal work for them) with all kinds of sugary crap and a couple of vending boxes of baseball. I'd sell off the candy and buy more cards. Alas, he died in 1977 and I not only miss him, I got no more cards.

By the late 1970's I was dealing at monthly card club meetings in LA and people were sending me entire collections. An aunt in DC sent me a shoebox full of 1972 high numbers, some friends with college age sons gave me a gigantic moving box full of thousands of late 50's and early 60's cards, etc. If only I'd stayed with it past 1980 (I discovered girls and cars and wasted several years), I'd be wealthy today.

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Posted By: Lee Behrens

My brother and I both collected cards. They all got mixed together. When it came time to decide who's cards were who's of course he calaimed all the more expensive sets and left me with the lesser sets. He did bail out about 1977So he had no claim to cards after that.

One of the other great memories was the DX Gas Station football stamps. They would let us have only one per day, needless to say we were there almost every day, it had a very attractive book to put the stamps in, which I still have.

My brother is 2 years older, bigger, faster, and use to beat the crap out of me often , I had no chance.
I did get a higher bowling average when I was a Junior in high school, and now he is a no factor .

Lee

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Posted By: W.M.

I was 12yrs. old when I discovered Baseball and Baseball cards. I use to buy 1974 topps cards at little league games when we lived in VA Beach Virginia. My favorite cards were the Hank Aaron cards. To this day my 1974 topps cards are my favorite.

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Posted By: nolemmings (Todd)

I started collecting in '66, at age 7. The kids on the block were hoarding the local Twins cards fresh off their WS appearance-- my first Twin was Sandy Valdespino. Anyway, we were only kind of dabbling at that age-- I doubt any of us had more than a 100 cards.
I hit the big leagues in '68, when my next door neighbor and I pooled funds to buy them by the box from the neighborhood Ben Franklin store, a two-block bike ride. He housed the NL and I got the AL--we split the subsets. We did this again in '69, for some reason I recall Del Unser of the Senators getting off to a hot start and everybody hunting for his rookie card. Neighbor and I gave up the co-op idea at the end of 1969. By then I was too rabid about the whole deal and was doing the coins out of the sofa cushion trick. The addiction took off frfom there.

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Posted By: runscott

I saw Sandy Valdespino play as an Astro when I was a kid. I also bought cards at the Ben Franklin, in a small town in Louisiana where my grandparents lived. We also saw the twins a few times - the Astros used to play a 3-game series with them at the Dome, during pre-season. The highlight though was a pre-season game against the Orioles, my second-favorite team. Poor Frank Robinson - a very good manager stuck in Montreal. Maybe he can pull them out of their history-long funk.

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Posted By: jay behrens

I kept the 71s and 72s, he got everything else, 70s and everything 73 and after and all the non-baseball cards, so it's not as bad as he makes it out to be.

The only reason he has better bowling average than me is that I took 20 years off. If I lived in a bowling alley I could be a really good bowler too

Jay

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Posted By: Kevin Cummings

My 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!

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Posted By: John

always fooled every year scott? you must be from georgia

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Posted By: darthshoeless

I remember in 1975 at the age of 4 looking at the bottom of Twinkee boxes for any Cubs players. I still have them, cut from the boxes myself. Most of the cards are a diamond shape, though. Probably should have let my mom cut them out.

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

I was 5 in 1940, and 15 in 1950. Not too many cards around during those years. Dick was a year older.

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Posted By: David

You're the same age as my dad, Dale 'Haven't Reached My Peak Yet' Rudd.

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

on the board. Wish it made me the smartest. Or the richest. Unfortunately, just the oldest.

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Posted By: tbob

I remember buying both 1 cent and 5 cent packs of 1958 Topps cards at Wyberg's drug store on Hennepin Street in Minneapolis as a young kid and wondering why some of the cards had the team and player's names in yellow instead of white. We would often go ahead and buy 30 penny packs to get the 30 pieces of great pink powdery slab gum along with the cards as opposed to buying 6 nickel packs and getting 48 cards but only 6 pieces of gum. We would scour the neighborhood for bottles and cash them in to get the pennies, nickels and dimes to buy cards.
I remember also a kid named Tommy Dragonmueller (no kidding) who had some 1957 cards neatly arranged in shoeboxes by team and we were amazed, we had never seen those cards before.

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Posted By: Bob

I didn't buy baseball cards so much as a kid- when I did, I never seemed to get any of the big players I wanted at the time (grew up in CT in the 60s, so we're talking Yaz, Rico Petrocelli and the rest). What did I buy? Primarily comic books, but for cards: Dark Shadows cards, Beatles cards, Monkees cards, Planet of the Apes cards. I don't have any of them now, but as a grown up (well, that might be presumptuous of me), I'm loving how I can get on E-bay and buy those elusive Yaz cards now.