[Jeff_cvc]

I started collecting in the late '70's and early '80's. Probably collected from 4th grade through junior high.

I can remember my father telling me how he would collect cards in the fifties. He said they used to take their favorite cards and put them in the spokes of their bicycles. As you can imagine, growing up in New York, a lot of Koufax and Mantle cards ended up in his bicycle spikes, ughhhh!!! He also said that he kept a bunch in a shoe box, but when he came home from college his mother had thrown them all out.

I remembered these stories well and I protected my cards like a knight would protect his princess. Even though I stopped collecting in high school (my money was being spent on music, girls, and beer. Not necessarily in that order). BUT, when I left to college I dragged my boxes of cards with me. I lugged those boxes year after year, from dorm rooms to fraternity houses to apartments to my first home with my wife and to the home we are raising our kids in. Over all those years I kept the boxes sealed and protected. I never opened them once in all that time! It's really crazy when I look back at it. Well, about three years ago, my then 7 and 9 year old son found my box. I remember one of them running in to the kitchen holding a card and asking me what it was. Immediately my instinctual knight protector surfaced, "Don't touch those!" What I found when I went to survey the damage, were my boys chewing on 20 year old gum and gently laying the cards out. It was all at once a disgusting and beautiful scene (Don't ask me why I kept the gum!?!?). After calming down, I explained the importance of taking care of the cards and then we started to look through all of them. It was awesome. They were so curious about the players and the stories I told about all the great ones. Needless to say, this was the reintroduction in to collecting for me and sharing this hobby with my boys. Three years later we have all found our collecting niche. I now collect pre war, my oldest does mostly modern baseball with a little vintage thrown in and my youngest collects modern football with a few vintage also.

I apologize for the long story, but the thread brought back a momentous day for me and my boys. When we were looking through my old box, there was an album that I put my favorite cards in. We found 4 rookie Montana cards all in beautiful condition and a rookie Payton. I loved the Yankees as a boy, so I had pages of great Yankees, a second year Reggie in superb condition, which was one of the few cards I didn't pull from wax, but instead bought at a local card store. Anyhow, there were a lot of great cards, to many to mention and this story has probably bored you long enough. Sorry there is no climatic finish, it was just a snippet of my life that meant a lot to me.