Show Your Oldest Card....
 

not oldest made, but the card you have had the longest..

and tell about it..

Had this for nearly 29 years...

1957
 

My dad bought me this card in '79.Carl signed it for me in his driveway in the same year.When I stopped collecting 25+ years ago,it is the only card I didn't sell.Every time I look at it,it reminds me of my dad,and being a kid.
Somedays I wish I still was a kid!!

Nice card and story.

Tried to quit and have sold off half my collection but I'm finding it very hard to completely stop collecting.

I'm guessing that card will remain with you until your last days. It would with me also.

If it were mine it would be with me for literally eternity. Hopefully it will be with 39Special that long too...

Leon,

You're right. If I had a card with that kind of sentimental value it literally would stay with me for eternity.

Here's my oldest card. I bought this Matty at a Gloria Rothstein show when I was about 10 or 11 in White Plains. I was there with my dad and I'm pretty sure it was the show where Joe Dimaggio and Ted Williams were signing. Joe got mad at something and Ted got sick, so both were only there for about half as long as they were supposed to be. I remember they were charging $150 each for anything and me and my dad thought that was crazy. My dad and I stood in the autograph room and watched them sign for a little while.

I bought this card for $100 raw and then years later it received a 3. But it's a 10 to me.

http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...jams/Matty.jpg

Top is my oldest true baseball card. I don't collect OJ's, so it's also my only one.

Bottom is one of my oldest non-card 'cards' - 2 from a set of 1869 Cabinets:

In 1986, while helping my dad tear down a wall in our 19th century home, we unearthed a plethora of stuff including an old curling iron, postcards, medicine bottles, and a Sweet Caporal pack which had this card in it. I remember that we didn't bother to open it until the early 1990s when dad read somewhere that there could be a card in the old tobacco packs. (Mind you, in 1986 I was 8 years old.) :) A couple years go I finally got it graded. Love this card and the memories!

Not only are these the oldest cards I own, but I have owned them longer than any other cards in my collection. My dad gave them to me in the early 1980s...not sure of an exact year, but he gave them to me in the hopes I would stop buying new cards by the case full and spend my money on vintage. It took me a long time to come around to that idea as I sold off every card I owned except for these three in 1989...Went off to college, forgot about collecting for about a decade and got back into collecting around the time I got married in 1998.


http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b3...ry001Small.jpg

I already told my wife to make sure I'm buried with it!!

Already derailed. Doesn't anybody really read the OP anymore?

The three cards I posted above ARE the cards I've owned the longest...probably about 30 years. I did buy cards in the 1970s when I was even younger, but I sold those off.

edited

removed because I posted illegally :)

Shown this a few times (Mantle), dad pulled from pack as a kid in '53, gave it to me as a birthday gift the day I was born...36 years ago.

http://i.imgur.com/w4bVW2p.jpg

Okay, the card that I have owned the longest is a '73 Munson. It was from the last year I bought baseball cards new. I gave away or sold all of those pos-war cards except the Munson - it was the nicest-condition semi-star card I had from those days, so I sent it to SGC for preservation. It came back an 84.

Pulled straight from the pack when I was 7 years old... And well loved!!

early cards
 

Attachment 95480Attachment 95481

Attachment 95482

Attachment 95483Attachment 95484

I bought a few 1975 Topps packs, but the first year I started to collect and sort the cards was 1977. Here are some still in the same sheets.

The 57 Solly Hemus was given to me by my Dad, sort of out of the blue one day in the late 70's. I did not know who the player was and did not understand until much later that Hemus had been a star for the local Buffaloes, the Cardinals minor league affiliate.

I ordered the Goudey from the a mail order ad in the late 70's and paid with my own cash. I think it was from Baseball Digest, not sure.

The oldest cards by cards are probably the OJ scripts.

My "oldest" card is my 68 Mantle that my dad bought me for my 8th birthday. He took me and my brothers to Portland OR for my birthday, took me to a local card shop and let me pick something out... I picked the Mantle, he paid $60 for it, it's probably still worth $60 today. It's priceless to me.

Apologies not necessary. To you and all. My bad. I just thought I saw a thread with great potential running away. Great cards, everyone.

-Little Leon ;)

So, since you pulled this from a pack in '68, do you remember how the creases were made? ;) Now THAT would add to the provenance. :)

I'm pretty sure my first cards were cut out the backs of Post Cereal boxes around 62-63. I still collect those, but not sure if any of those originals have survived. Really started collected in 1964 and I know I still have those. First series Topps #s 1-88. My first prewar war card was a Brown Hindu of Wilbur Goode I bought for maybe $1 in 1974 or 75. Still have that.

I definitely remember cutting the cards off the backs of the boxes. It was rare that we got any, because the cereal they came on was stuff we didn't normally like. Once I bought my first pack in 1965, I threw away all the old cut-outs. I think the thing that impressed me so much about wax packs was what good scissors they used.

...and to Paul S: you are only allowed to appoint yourself as a thread policeman, if you actually participate in the thread (I just made up that rule).

atx840

Great story and great great Mantle rookie card!!!

This is from the card shop I frequented as a kid in the early '80s, from when I was about 11 years old through maybe 15 or 16. Somehow, it managed to linger around in my possession for decades, tucked away with grade school report cards, etc.

A few years back, shortly before getting married, I revisited those things and got rid of the unimportant (read, from ex-girlfriends) souvenirs of my younger days. This was benign, though, and survived the purge.

http://i1288.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5f0f4184.jpg

Probably not what the OP was expecting; however, I have sold off my collection and rebuilt it from scratch many times. As such, this is the "card" I have owned the longest.

And it definitely brings me back. While writing this post, I remembered seeing a news article hanging in the window of this card shop during the first year or so I went there. It was about a '52 Mantle selling for (at least, I think...after all, childhood memories can be a bit fuzzy) $3,000 at a recent Christie's auction. Wow...three grand for a baseball card?!?

What a great hobby...and a great thread, in my opinion. Thanks for posting this, bcookie.

Best Regards,

Eric

Now to make you feel old, this is the card I've had in my collection the longest. I don't remember how i got it, but I clearly remember it being in my toybox with my He-Man and WWF action figures as a little kid.

http://i1290.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2cd1eb8a.jpg

I was six when it was released so I'm guessing I was good and got a pack of cards as a kid. I was a bigger fan of Garbage Pail Kids and Panini's baseball sticker books. I didn't really start collecting baseball cards until 1990 Topps.

I pulled this one out of a pack in 1965. Even though I was a Cub fan living in Chicago I wasn't a big fan of Ernie. I always wanted to open a pack and find Mays, Mantle or Koufax, so this card didn't mean that much to me back then.

When we moved to Phoenix four years later my mom threw away all my cards, and since I had "grown up" I didn't care. This card was spared because it had been stuck in a book, where my brother found it twenty years later. He sent it to me, and I have kept it as a reminder of my childhood ever since. :)

Attachment 95509

Whoa Chris, unbelievable Mantle card and an even better story behind it. Very nice!

Thanks guys, unfortunately the card is no longer mine :(

Two and a half years ago it was passed on to my son..:D

Perhaps I should have said "well loved AND well handled!" Cardinal fan here, and Gibby was one of my heroes. 1968 was a decent year for him, I guess! Also for me, since that's when I started collecting. And I still have EVERY card from my childhood, as well as every card I've ever purchased since. I'm not a very good seller! :)

Haha... nice. At first I was like, "HE SOLD IT???" :eek: , but then I was like :cool:

I'm a huge Cardinal fan as well. First game I ever attended was 1966. Gibby beat the Pirates 4-1. About a 5 hitter and Clemente had a couple of those I think. Awesome day. Gibson and Clemente were burned into my memory that day. They seemed like gods!

There was a long-running story that my grandmother babysat Sandy Koufax in Brooklyn when he was growing up. The ages work as my grandmother would have been in her mid-teens when Sandy was a kid, but there was nothing that could ever verify it; when I was younger it was just a childhood story (I am 36 now).

I remember being in a card store in the last 80's and my parent's buying me this. It was raw until a few years ago when I got back into the hobby.

First card(s)....from 66 years ago
 

I started collecting cards in 1947 when my parents bought Bond Bread (B-B). My sister and I carefully removed these B & W cards from the bread packages.

Little did I know back then, that I was getting Rookie cards of Jackie Robinson, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, and more. I still have the 44 BB players (don't know
what happened to the 4 Boxers in this set).


http://i529.photobucket.com/albums/d...1947musial.jpg
http://i529.photobucket.com/albums/d...47jdybtwjr.jpg


My favorite 1947 B-B card is the Johnny Lindell card....simply because he was my hero in the 1947 World Series....Yankees vs. Dodgers. Johnny batted .500
in 6 games (9 Hits, 5 Walks, and 7 RBI's). Defensively, in LF he made 2 unbelievable diving catches; and, with his strong arm threw out several Dodgers.

http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/t...pixlindell.jpg




Hey guys......I even have an original 1947 Bond Bread loaf wrapper.


http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/t...eadwrapper.jpg



TED Z

I pulled this card from one of the first few packs I ever opened. It's been in my collection since 1977 (36 years now), and I wrote a short story about this card which appeared on sportscollectorsdaily.com a little while back (my story is the third one, titled Mom Loves The Bird). Not only is this my oldest card, it's my most sentimental card as well.

http://imageshack.us/a/img683/3/theb...mchildhood.jpg

I started collecting in 1978 and still have some of my well-loved originals. I remember in around 1980 getting my first vintage - 54 Topps Jackie Robinson for $5 fm Wes' Hall of Fame in Paramount, CA. I got my first pre-war in 82 - T206 Stanage and Hinchman for $9 at a shop in Anaheim. Still have the Robinson and Stanage.

Erik

I believe this is my oldest (memory is spotty at best, it could have been a 1960 Spahn). I picked it up from my middle school science teacher (he was my favorite teacher bar none) nigh on 22 or 23 years ago. I thought it was so cool that there was a card that folded!

http://www.net54baseball.com/picture...pictureid=5816

Funny story about that science teacher. Rumor was that he got in trouble after I was out of middle school for splitting the lip of the principal (no one liked the guy and he wore a mustache that apparently covered the split). Whatever the real story was, he continued teaching after that for some years.

First Purchase
 

This card was my first purchase (outside of wax packs) at a garage sale in Town at the High School parking lot @ 1971 or 72, finding a Mantle, paying .02 cents, collecting baseball cards priceless