Enjoyed reading your memoir, Rob. I think, in our culture, your experience may not be common. Got a chuckle out of the fact that your elders actually saved the old cards. I enlisted at 17 back in the 60's, and took pains to find a hiding spot in an old chest in my family's garage that had probably not been touched in decades. Secreting my card and comic collection there and pushing it into a corner under piles of other stuff, I was confident that no one would ever find it, let alone disturb it for the next three months. Right - about a month later, sitting on my footlocker in my basic training barracks, I read a letter from my mother that ended with her casual aside, "by the way, your father cleaned out the garage last week and found an old chest with some of your stuff in it. I didn't think you were still interested in it, so we put it in with the yard sale things." I wanted to scream, but I think I just stared at a wall for an hour or so. There went several major sets from 1951 to 1955 in near mint condition, along with hundreds of pristine comics lost. I can laugh about it now, but at the time....
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