This is one of the few remaining online sites where I don't feel like an oldtimer. My first pack was 1986 Donruss at a Holiday Inn card show around opening day of the '86 season.

Did you then just happen to be at the Holiday Inn? Because it would be strange to attend a card show if you'd not already been buying cards.

:confused:

No

Earliest memory is ripping packs of '51 Bowmans along side my like pals, all of us with with greasy dirty hands. No Mickey's but one kid got a Mays and we were all over him to see it. All of this took place under a Sycamore tree by the drug store where we had invested our hard earned allowances (child exploitation), which probably varied from .50 to 1$. Trading was the only way to go: There were no shows, breakers, magazines, e-commerce, dealers and, most of all, no grading companies.
Little did we know the next year the neighborhood would be rocked by those beautiful '52 Topps cards. Interest in the '52 Bowmans wained, and I remember the druggist offered his surplus at the end of the season for .01 a pack.
The next year came those beautiful '53 Bowman photographs to challenge Topps but they cost so much to produce it put Bowman into a declining spiral.











0)

You are definitely not an old timer on this site. I think Keith T (hey Keith) is leading the pack right now, as he started collecting in 1938!
That was the same year this movie came out!


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Love it!

Oldtimers on the Board
 

I started collecting with 1953 Topps Baseball with my older brothers buying me packs as I was too young (age 6 at the beginning of the MLB season) to go to the local Kingswood Drug Store outside Hartford, CT. I remember looking at the cards for hours and learning what teams were in the American and National Leagues by the color (red or black) at the bottom of the card. Still have my Mantle card. In 1954 I was allowed to go with my brothers to buy cards and we would open the packs the minute we left the store, with the colorful card backgrounds very attractive to a young collector. The drug store also sold the NY Journal American, and as a young lad interested in any image of MLB players, I would search the nearby bushes where the NY Journal American "cards" - actually pieces of paper - were discarded or fell from the newspaper. I have since sold many of those, but still have a few. I should have picked up more - for free! And those were the days before checklists, but my brothers and I would help each other with trades, not knowing exactly what cards may come out. And we traded with friends. I bought and collected until the 1960s set, then life had other priorities. I started up again in the late 1970s when our sons came of age to collect. Good times.