The three of us here, as young kids, all fell in love with baseball when we attended our first Buffalo Bison (IL)
games around 1960, and soon discovered the Diamond Herd on radio and major league games on TV.
The game became an obsession for us once Post cereals and Jell-O started printing something called
"baseball cards" on their boxes. Like Dewey, we'd been completely ignorant of the entire concept, and
except for the Post and Jell-O sets, we knew nothing of older sets, of Topps, of Fleer and so on -- and
with no other kids in our neighbourhood, nor any school classmates, the least bit interested in such stuff,
we remained woefully ignorant for years. We never completed any of the three editions of Post / Jell-O cards
(some of those cereals and Jell-O flavours were inedible) and we eventually, immersed in box scores
and transaction reports in the local newspaper sports pages, ruined almost every card we did have
by writing, in ballpoint pen, on each card, the team to which each player had been traded, dismally unaware
of new cards issued by other companies and by other means.
We didn't discover Topps until the late '60s, when the grumpy pharmacist at the drug store where we
bought our comix started setting out boxes of packs at the checkout counter. No other store we could
reach by bicycle carried baseball cards, and the pharmacist never ever ordered any fourth series
(another concept of which we were woefully ignorant), so we wasted our allowances gormlessly amassing
boxfuls of doubles and triples of every 1st, 2nd, and 3rd series card... But we did keep them pristine,
and we still have all those Post / Jell-O and late '60s-early-'70s Topps cards...
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