Oldtimers on this board?
 

I bought my first packs of bubble gum cards midway through 1959. How many of you other fellows here on this board have a card buying history that pre-dates my own?

My introduction to cards actually occurred in 1957 or early 1958 before I started first grade when my older sister bought a pack of Hit Stars and brought the cards home:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/albu...psff114f18.jpg

She was looking for Yul Brynner, a search doomed to frustration since there was no Yul Brynner card in the set.

I started first grade in September 1958 and remember admiring Topps Flags of the World, TV Westerns, Zorro and Funny Valentines cards in the schoolyard before I had deep enough pockets to actually buy any cards:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...461668eeaa.jpg

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...eb872b8f9a.jpg

The first cards I ever owned though were four Topps 1958-59 Hockey cards which I gathered off the street one late February or early March day in 1959. The first three were Detroit Red Wings, but the last was a Chicago Blackhawk. When I saw that big Indian head on the red uniform, I knew that was my favourite team - even though I might have had trouble reading the team name at the time!

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...9ca76b562a.jpg

I then admired the 1959 Baseball cards in the schoolyard:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...7c1e37036c.png

But the first cards I ever bought and collected were the Topps 1959 CFL cards:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...2f27841fae.jpg

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...1f07df340a.jpg

And that was it for me, game, set and match! I've been addicted to card collecting ever since (though I was able for the most part to put aside my addiction for a few years between 1965 and 1979).

How about you other fellows? What were the first cards you ever bought or collected?

:confused:

The first packs I bought myself were 1959 Topps Baseball. My folks had bought some packs for me in 1957 and 1958.

Never ventured much beyond sports cards. Even in collecting the Topps 48 Magic Photos and 55 and 56 Hocus Focus cards I stuck to the baseball subsets, except I did do the William Bendix as Babe Ruth card.

I have been sent unsolicited sets of Scream Queen and Dinosaur Attack cards as a "bonus" to other purchases :)

Used to ride my bike down to Safeway after school. Rip some wax and watch the kids with serious cash play pac man. 1987 Topps was pretty fly!

I began buying Topps baseball cards in 1955.

1954 for me. Green background Berra in my first pack.

You fellas are ancient. 1965 Topps for me, as a youngster. Rode my bike down a path through the woods to the 7-11. Which, I see from a map, is still there.

Nostalgia means literally pain from the past...
 

Walking down a hallway in my elementary school age seven, saw a pasteboard lying on the shiny waxed floor, picked up this guy, whom I had never heard of - imagine that - and wondered why some kid had so little regard for what seemed like a treasure of some sort. I was hooked immediately. That fall, my brother and I hung out on Friday nights in a corner store next to my old man's bowling alley and spent a couple of his quarters each on stale waxpacks in a big box near the front door - 1951 Topps Redbacks and CM All-Stars at two packs for a nickel. The following spring began buying 1952 Bowman waxpacks every lunch break at a Mom&Pop store a block from school.

Those 51 packs could have red or blue back panels and a mix of Team and All Star Cards....and candy versus gum I think. Both Topps and Bowman tried for contracts exclusive to packaging with gum or confections

I can see All Star cards in this pack between the panels

Peter - I am very similar to you. First packs I bought were in 1965. (Though I had 1959-1964 cards in my collection already.). Would ride my bicycle to the corner deli on North Ave. Always went into the phone booth there to pull down the coin return lever and check the coin return slot to try and get some extra spending money.

Mike

Was this in the same town/city?

:confused:

No

I did not realize there were 7Eleven's back in 1965. We would go to the local IGA. They also sold Crane's potato chips there, which had baseball team pinbacks inside.

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Local gas station store for me...1979 Topps and I was 9, pulled my hero at the time, Reggie Jackson, out of my first pack. I was hooked. Still have the card. Same store had some "old" 1978 packs, my mom bought them all and brought them home to my brother and I, so technically I also opened 78s. Those seemed ANCIENT to me at the time...great memories.


I do remember a buddy brought a beat up 1959 Topps card to school, first I had ever seen something so old. I was the lucky kid that was able to get the right trade and ended up owning it...may as well been a hundred years old.

i see that Crane Potato Chips were produced in Decatur, Illinois. Were the pinbacks you remember like these from 1961?

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...70b0967b2.jpeg

Or like these from 1968?

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...ee7a11643e.png

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...c07b5d6893.jpg

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...13006b5fa.webp

Do you still have the ones you got at the time? Do you still collect them now?

:confused:

Wow, those pictures bring back memories. We would fill up those cards with all the pins and mail them in to get a baseball. The pins from 1965 and 66 had metallic paint, they were shinier than the 68's. Crane changed the colors up a bit every year too. I wish I still had some of them but I don't.

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Most of you have me beat by a decade or more.

First collecting baseball thing- 67 or 68 Coke caps. Went to a party with my parents and the bottlecaps had pictures inside! Rounded up a few pockets full, but just before we went home mom made me toss them all. No way I was bringing home a bunch of dirty bottelcaps. (I was 4 or 5)

Next a pack of 69 Topps, opened it with dad in the car and he remarked how one of the guys was pretty good. Reggie Jackson. Still have that card.
Next pack was 71. Got a Danny Cater coin which was really cool to me. Still have that one too.

Didn't really start collecting cards until late 73.

Got my first cards in the spring edition of Dynamite Magazine through Scholastic - 1978 Topps Cecil Cooper, Tony Perez, Al Oliver and Darrell Porter. I was hooked from then on. A friend of mine said something like "you know you can packs of them in the store?" and it was all over.

Can still remember a few cards from my first pack - Rick Manning, Sparky Lyle RB, Luis Tiant, Jose Baez (had to ask my mom how pronounce that one) and George Hendrick.

Like these then?

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...f997935275.jpg

Here are some pinbacks issued by a competing brand, Guy's Potato Chips of Kansas, in 1964:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...45538df386.png

And in 1965:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...757265ab2e.png

In any event, those pinbacks all look very cool. I'm sure I would have been buying Crane's or Guy's Potato Chips to get them as a kid had those brands been available in my neck of the woods. And had I done so then, I'd still be collecting them these days!

:cool:

You should then show your mother your present day collection of the Baseball Coke caps and tell her what they're "worth" now!

;)

'66 and '67 topps were about my first collecting as a kid. Got them in packs at our little league park.
.

Same.

First pack was 1967 Topps at our little league concession stand, along with orange soda (in a bottle!). I even remember my first card in my first pack - NL home run leaders with Mays and Aaron.

Hooked ever since.

I'm like Leon and Larry. I think my first cards were around 1966. I remember buying the first Batman cards too. This was one of my favorites.

Topps Archives
 

Al - I think Dave Hornish did some impressive research a few years ago to pretty well establish that the Red Backs and CM All-Stars were packed together in the caramel candy packs, as well with the Team cards (probably the undated), while the Blue Backs and ML All-Stars were likely together in packs with the dated Team cards later on the 1951 season. But, those cello packs of yours - who knows? Can you see the All-Star cards well enough to tell if they are CM or ML?

1971 Topps Baseball. The kid across the street I used to hang with received a full box as a gift one time and I swore someday I would buy one myself when I grew up..

71 Topps baseball wax packs at a little old mom and pop shop were my first when I was 5 years old. Got $1 allowance every week and bought 10 wax packs every Friday. I also remember getting some of those 71 baseball cello pack cardboard boxes for a quarter at the Kresge store about 20 miles away when my mom would take me with her.

1971 Topps football. Bought them, pitched them, traded them, defaced them then in November of 1971 took them to the playground and threw them up in the air and watched the little kids run after them.

My mother bought me my first pack of baseball cards in the summer of 1957. I began collecting in 1958 and hit it hard from 1958-1963.

I remember getting the TV Westerns, Zorro, Topps Civil War, Wacky Plaks, etc.

Moved thread
 

Fun reading so this was moved from the postwar side. A large portion of our members fall into the 60s-70s-80s Topps eras....

At the bus stop in 1972 the big kids had new cards we all were checking out - so cool. Next year, 1973 I started getting packs, begged my mom every time we went to the store. I rode my bike to the local Toy City that had the 3 pack clear cellos I would go thru looking for the best players. Ahh, simple times.

My mother bought me my first cards in 1953, but I didn't really start collecting until 1955.
I spent a lot of allowances chasing those last four '55 Topps numbers.

I started collecting cards around 1938
 

in Rochester, MI, and although I was fanatic about the Detroit Tigers, the local convenience stores did not carry baseball, but did carry wartime sets of airplanes, naval ships. I had to do this on a nickle a week allowance or an occasional gratuity from a visiting relative. I hope I still have those cards.

My Detroit Tiger collecting activity was confined to cutting out pictures and box scores from the newspapers and scrapbooking. Things picked up in 1941 when I had an early morning Detroit Free Press paper route. And I mean early, I was through by 6:15 AM, rain, sleet or snow.

I too had a morning paper route delivering the Free Press, but it was the London Free Press just a few years later in 1964! The Detroit Free Press was the fascinating U.S. big city newspaper through which I looked on family visits to my uncle in Detroit.

;)

We had a fantastic store called Rich's Five and Dime on Ludlow Ave. in Cincinnati. Not only did we buy full boxes of 67, 68 and 69 Topps.... they had Topps' Player Posters of 1968 and Topps Team Posters of 1969. I've heard these referred to as "test issues" but perhaps they were more widespread.

Anyway, my brother and I were able to collect the complete sets of both, and we defaced our bedroom walls much to our mom's chagrin. :eek:

Better Days!

We had 7-Eleven and Stop-N-Go. I also bought my first packs in 1965. In 1967 I started collecting seriously trying to complete each set plus any odd ball sets that the stores carried, 1968 Player Posters, 1969 Stamps & Team Posters, Fleer World Series Cards, etc.

You bought full boxes! How old were you?

:confused:

My collecting journey started in the smoke-filled tobacco shops of lower Manhattan in 1910.

Still remember finding my first Hughie Jennings picture with his wide open mouth and hands flying all over the place shouting, "Eee-Yaaahhhh!" and I was done hooked.
Did a 23 skidoo to get home to my younger sister in time before she left for her 19-hour shift at the mill. At this point, she was only smoking six packs a day, not ten like me, but I figured six was better than nothing.

(Side note: You may not be aware of this, but in those days it was tough for the fairer sex to get their hands on smokes.)

So, we hatched a plan wherein if I went and got the ciggy packs for her each day, I would get to keep the pictures of the base ball men they held.

As he was downing a dirty bottle of bathtub gin, I was ready for my Pops to tell me to scram, but instead he slurred a hearty, "Attaboy!!!!!" as he belly laughed. I guess I should’ve known he’d be happy. If nothing else, that boozehound was a visionary.
Mother, of course, was less than enthusiastic about pasteboards becoming the cat’s pajamas, and she told us we were all wet!! I done proved her wrong, though, as our compact worked out great and my collection has been growing and increasing in value ever since!!!!

I remember vividly buying 1967 Topps Baseball Cards in the summer at a store in Old Lyme, CT at Sound View beach, I was 10 years old, I was so excited to get all the major stars.
John

A little local party store had me as a regular customer on my bike with my baseball glove on the handlebars starting in 1958. It was only one street over from my house.

It was 1961 for me. I was six and I came across my friend's older brother sorting through a bunch of cards he had. I was very much taken with them - I remember the 1961 Johnny Podres had a huge close up of his face, and the colors were really bright. My parents were immigrants and didn't know anything about baseball cards, but my father was a huge baseball fan, so he supported my desire to get these strange and wonderful things. He figured that a penny for a photo and stats of a ballplayer was a pretty good deal. The local candy store and newsstand in Queens, where I lived, was my regular haunt for the next few months (it was around this time that I also started buying comic books at ten cents a pop). Another friend's older brother also gave me a stack of about fifty 1960 cards, which introduced me to the idea that these things were different every year, and which probably changed my DN A to that of a collector.

My mother recalled getting movie star cards back in 1930's Germany, when she'd be sent to the store to buy cigarettes for her father.

At the end of the season, most of my friends were throwing their cards out, but my father told me that he hadn't paid for all the cards just to have them thrown out. He bought me a scrapbook and a bag of photo corners (remember those?), and I mounted all my cards. Which is why I still have them.

Alan

Your father was a wise man. He also knew the value of a penny!

;)

As my screen name implies, it was 1962 for me. I saw that bright green wrapper on a trip to the Glaser drug store (next to the A&P where the following year I searched through Jello boxes looking for Cardinals while my Mom did the weekly grocery shopping) and a lifelong passion was born. Just a few 5-cent packs of 6th series that year before they suddenly disappeared. 1963 saw a few more purchases but in 1964 all my friends collected cards and we had lots of front porch trading sessions. Cardinals were highly coveted. Mantle for Javier - sure. We continued buying packs for the next few years using cash from soda bottle returns pulled in a wagon to the A&P. The Glaser store charged five cents a pack but the nearby Ben Franklin Five and Dime gave you six packs for a quarter. In 1967 the sixth series was nowhere to be found so we just kept buying seventh series packs hoping the sixth would show up. Another Brooks Robinson? Oh well, into the Orioles stack. By 1968 many of us started umpiring, which paid really well. Now we could afford boxes of packs. A box of 24 packs cost $1.00 plus three cents tax. My friend John got an entire series out of one of those '68 boxes and I was so jealous. The fact that the Cardinals were successful during those early collecting years really added to the fun. I'll never forget the feeling of seeing that 1965 Cards Celebrate World Series card. As Tom Stanton wrote in The Road to Cooperstown, baseball's appeal is about holding on to a piece of your childhood. That's why I still collect today . . . with my grandkids.

My father had a pharmacy in Olean NY and tried to sell baseball cards. I would take entire boxes down in the basement of the store and open all the packs. Got a 1955 Mantle TV Bowman that was a treasure. I was 8. Somehow he never got mad..

I did at one point.
Western Ct probably had yankees or mets, I have a pretty good collection of Red Sox plus a few others.
Slowly working on having the set from all Boston area bottling plants.

Shes in a home now, and it's hard to tell just how much of anything she gets.

I remember turning 8 and getting into cards thanks to 86 Topps football, Jim McMahon card in particular, my favorite player at the time. Didn't really start collecting baseball until 88 Topps. Those set designs really bring back lots of fond memories.

posted this in similar thread back in 2017
 

1966 Mankato MN, Ben Franklin at the Tempo shopping center. Rode my bike the 2 1/2 blocks, pulled a Sandy Valdespino in the first pack, although it may not have been the first card.
I was thrilled to nab a Twin, coming off their World Series appearance, even if he wasn't exactly the straw that stirred the drink. This is my card, but obviously not the one pulled that day:
https://photos.imageevent.com/imover...rge/img832.jpg

On the other hand, this one was pulled around that same time, and I still have it:
https://photos.imageevent.com/imover...e/mymickey.jpg

I collected only two sets as a kid -- 1958 Topps football and 1961 Topps baseball. I threw out the football cards after completing the set but still have the baseball cards, which I bought with my allowance at a Peoples drug store in the Wards Corner neighborhood of my hometown of Norfolk, Va.

first cards
 

An older boy (he was eight) gave me Topps cards of Sam Jones and Jackie Robinson as they were "doubles." Hey, why would you want TWO.

He said you could buy them at Kresge's in downtown Pontiac (Michigan).

My father took me there and sure enough there was a box of Topps cards right next to the weird-ass orange drink machine that kept the juice swirling from the top down.

We bought two packs and as I remember it, most of the cards were either Cleveland or the Browns and for the life of me, I have no idea what the wrappers looked like.

I was so thrilled by the idea of the cards that I had no idea those were drawings.

Did that People's drug store have an old fashioned soda fountain or luncheonette counter?

:confused:

This post reminds me of the loss we suffered this year with the passing of Teddy Z.

Yes, good for cherry Cokes and french fries.

I'm a leading-edge boomer, so it was Topps cards of the late 1950s for me, but not in any methodical way or thinking of my cards as a "collection." We did trade them, put them in the spokes of our bikes, and flipped them against the wall. I just liked seeing pictures of and learning about the ballplayers I heard about on the radio or saw in the occasional game on TV, along with the stats, cartoon, trivia questions, etc. The gum wasn't bad, either, though not my favorite. I also had some pennants, pins, scorecards (we always kept score) and other things bought at the ballpark. I got into collecting memorabilia of my team in the late 1970s, then became a dealer in the 1990s. It's been a lot of fun.

well
 

my dad was in the navy with "uncle eddie" and "uncle arthur" of Shorin/Topps fame - close friends their whole lives. I think it was 1964(?) they sent me a 500 card vending box and the next year as well when I was at camp. Never thought about making a collection - they were much more valuable for flipping, leaners, and color games. Now wait for it - never owned another card until in 1992(?) I bought a set of Stadium Club unfinished cards that had made it's way out the back door of topps! An Alan Haeger undertaking :-).
I actually brought up a question about the set maybe a year or two later to one of the brothers (CRS) when they visited my father in the hospital (I went ostensibly to ask the question). No response. Ha! I still have it.
All I remember before that was funny valentines.....

I'm guessing they all did back in the day, also Drug Fairs and other chain and most mom-and-pop drug stores. And I remember them as uniformly wonderful, with great soups, grilled cheese sandwiches, open turkey platters, etc., to go with the soda fountain favorites like brown cows, sundaes, banana splits, etc. You couldn't beat the price for what you got. What memories! When CVS bought Peoples, I couldn't understand why you would want the name of your store to be "CVS" rather than "Peoples." That was probably my first clue as to what corporate conformity was all about. They didn't care what anyone thought about the name or about making every one of them exactly the same, in fact that was the goal. If they could wave a wand and make each of us consumers exactly the same, too, they would do it in a heartbeat.

1970Topps cards for me as I wanted cards for my 1969 Chicago Cubs. I was addicted for life.

Well a lot of them did anyway! :cool:

Does anyone know of any drug store soda fountains still in operation?

:confused:

Here's a town with two of them!
https://abyss.davidmlawrence.com/dru...oda-fountains/

As soon as I was 16 in 1969, I started working as a Jerk on the Fountain at the People's in Montgomery Mall Bethesda, MD. Minimum wage was $1.60, but working the Fountain got you in a tips pool that added 10 or 20 cents. I eventually moved to working more generally throughout the store. I was reminded of those days on Thursday as John Madden received special recognition/tribute. Behind the drug counter at that People's was where I watched the Immaculate Reception, along with the store's assistant manager, a huge Pittsburgh fan. "If it wasn't a catch before the huddle, how did it become a catch during the huddle?"

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In St Charles, Mo., you got your nickel packs from Standard Drug in 1969 (my first year, I was 8). Next to that was Hawthorne Hardware. The Mattingly's dime store was next to that, and they had cello packs. A&P was the last store in that strip. It was four blocks from our house. Mom would grocery shop and I'd buy cards at Standard, then wait on the curb opening my packs (with allowance, birthday and soda bottle return money) while shoving all the gum in my mouth at once.

Starting the next year, when I began mowing lawns, she let me ride my bike up there way buddy, Wayne. We'd buy some cards, meet the guys at Jaycee Park for a pickup game for a few hours, trade cards, then go home and sort them into our shoebox. A set builder from the get-go.

This has been an awesome thread.


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My earliest memory of card collecting was buying packs of 1962 Mars Attacks at the now long gone Garfield Market in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on the way to school. The cards featured violent events of a Martian invasion. For a seven year old, there was nothing like it. After getting a large portion of the set, I lost my entire collection, running around on the playground. The cards were only available for a short period, due to the violent nature of cards and subsequently pulled from store shelves.

In the early seventies, I discovered Baseball Digest and The Sporting News. I found a mail order company named Wholesale Cards that had most of the Mars Attacks cards. I was finally able to build a complete set through The Trader Speaks and found the final card at King’s Cards located in Berkeley in 1977. The original Mars Attacks is still my favorite card set of all time.

+1

Goodness, don't we all feel young. You're the only two in the 80s! But I'm the first to admit my first pack of cards was 1991 Topps at just 5 years old. I didn't know nothing about nothing! A couple years later I learned the name Ken Griffey Jr, and Lord have mercy, I owned a couple! And then I was hooked!

Going back to the present conversation, I believe my mother worked at a drugstore soda fountain: Newberrys. It was either in Walla Walla, or Spokane. I would need to look into that a bit more. Eventually she went to work at JCPenneys, and she met my father selling tires at the Penneys auto store. He set up a kegger just so that he could invite her.

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+1. The knowledge and memories that went with him are unimaginable.

1958 Zorro, Then 1959 Baseball
 

Got my first pack of cards, albeit non-sports, with the 1958 Zorro cards. Then in 1959 - at age 6 - purchased my first Topps baseball pack. My folks made such a fuss over the fact I got a Detroit Tiger (Red Wilson) that I became a collector for life. Set up at the Troy Hilton for my first show in 1973.

The Mars Attacks cards were not to my knowledge sold in Canada back when they were first released. I did though manage to score the "Hairy Fiend" card in a generic wrapper while trick or treating in 1963 or 1964:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...85a17a77a5.jpg (Not mine.)

It was the wildest card my buddies and I had ever seen but without the wrapper we didn’t even know it was part of a set called Mars Attacks. Nonetheless, it became our favourite card.

But since Mars Attacks cards had not been distributed in Canada, I just never saw any more for over two decades. It wasn't until I bought the first edition of Christopher Benjamin’s Non-Sport Price Guide in the mid-1980’s that I realized that the “Hairy Fiend” card we’d had twenty years ago belonged to the fabled Mars Attacks set.

With the notoriety within popular culture that the cards gained when the Mars Attacks movie hit screens nationwide in 1996, the cards have become demand scarce and thus egregiously expensive. As a result, I still have only these nine in my present day collection:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...ad2f858bca.jpg

:(

1982/83 is when I first started to collect, and I got up to speed with hobby knowledge by 1985.

The amount and types of pills in my daily day/night medication pill box says loud and clear I'm no longer young, but given most of the talk on this thread I don't think I'm part of the old timers club yet.

That's fine. I can wait.

I bought my first packs in 2016 if y'all want some perspective.

Update us , please :
 

.. how much did a nickel pack of 6 cards ( with bubblegum ) cost in 2016 ? It's okay , we're sitting down.

$2 + tax for 12 bubble gum-less cards, which increased to $3 + tax for 16 cards after a few years - which is one reason why I quit buying packs in 2019. (That and an increased focus on vintage.)

1986 for me, (yawn...) down at the Cashion's grocery and some I think at the 7-11 the town over.

But within a year I had found the shops, and was immediately hooked by everything "old cards" after convincing my mom to plunk down I think $15 for a sharp 1966 Topps Sandy Koufax. With each passing year, I became more interested in cards like that and less interested in the current wax.

At the age of 8 the 1952 Topps baseball cards came out and boy did I love those big cards. I bought the 5 cent packs and can still remember the chewing the pink gum. We would flip for cards, place them high up on a wall and let them spiral down - if your card landed on any other card on the floor you got to keep them all. But, the cards we didn't take chances with were for the team we rooted for. I wanted those Brooklyn Dodger players and would without thinking trade a Mantle for a Duke Snider, just as any Giant fan would do the same for one of Mays. I also bought the 1953's and 1954's, but it wasn't all baseball cards for me by a long shot.
I wanted to get as many Frank Buck Bring 'em Back Alive cards featuring wild animals from Africa as possible. The same goes for Look 'n See, Rails and Sails, Wings and later on Flags of All Nations and the President set. The artwork was in glorious color and on the card back one could learn about as much as an 8 year old brain could absorb.
These days I still enjoy collecting with my son, Scott and we are focusing mainly on the signed 1933 Goudey set (over 75% complete) and the signed 1952 Topps master set (over 92% complete and yes, I would trade a signed Snider for a Mantle now).
Also I thank Scott for gifting me that Look 'n See set I so enjoyed all those years ago.

Coincidentally in August I just bought a nice 66 card lot of the Topps Animals of the Zoo World cards including these:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...0_16-00-01.jpg

The wrapper I've already had for nearly twenty years:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...7417f4b275.png

I really like both the artwork and the animal selection in this set of 100 cards. While it doesn't quite make my dozen favourite Topps non-Sport card sets of all time, it easily makes my top twenty!

:cool:

:eek:

Sell out!

:(

The closest extant one I can find to my neck of the woods is the Saugatuck Drug Store in Saugatuck on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan just a few miles southwest of Grand Rapids, Michigan along I196:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...cdfb8a1abb.png

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...a76edd9d8b.png

:cool:

Still true :
 

.. " The camera adds ten pounds ".

store
 

Lol

To quote Chandler in Friends, "how many cameras were on you?"

We foxes are more than active enough to avoid such outcomes!

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...d68b010690.jpg

;)

I've been collecting since the 90's and approaching 30 years in the hobby. When I'm on Facebook or other places I have started to feel like one of the elder statesmen (if not by age since I started collecting pretty young) than at least years in the hobby.

It's good to be reminded that I am still wet behind the ears compared to many. Which I am glad about, since there is so much more to know and explore.

The local one in my previous location was in operation till 2023 - we left Corydon in 2021, but I go back occasionally as my PCP is still there. It was a pretty cool place.

https://www.wdrb.com/news/business/s...02d9a59f9.html

--
Mike

Bought first cards in 1952
 

I bought my first cards from Johnny's grocery store around the corner in 1952. My sister and I played games with the cards and at the time I could name the player when only about a quarter inch on top was showing. Unfortunately, the high numbers never came to our town. The candy distributor who distributed the cards lived next door to us and when I was 11 I began working in his warehouse (garage) stacking boxes. When I was 12 my parents allowed me to buy two store boxes of 1954 cards. I collected some in 1955 and 1956, but stopped until I started collecting again in 1980. I finally completed my 1952 (ex Mantle), 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956 sets.