When I got back into card collecting in the early '80's - my second childhood - I began with the sets I could recall as a kid, which were almost all baseball from the early '50's. The only football still faintly hanging on in my memory was a set I really loved at first sight as a 6/7/8-year-old, and the one thing I could recall about it thirty years on was that the front side had a large pennant with the player's name in it. Card shows were the only place to see vintage cards back then, and I stumbled upon a dealer who dealt almost exclusively in football and allowed me to flip through his albums until I found the 1952 Bowman sets and slipped back through time in gazing at those beautiful near-mint cards. Luckily, even the large cards were still reasonably priced at that time, so I spent the next few months putting together the set in near mint, and it wasn't until about five years later that I became aware of the so-called short prints and scarcities in the set. Still get a lot of enjoyment out of looking at the set many years later.
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