I also enjoy reading about these cards even though it doesn't fit my collecting budget. I started collecting in the late 60s and I still have most of those cards from my youth.
Why only most of them? Some of the older kids from the neighborhood found out that you could send cards away to get autographed by sending them to players through the Baseball Hall of Fame. I got a bunch of autographs that way, but I probably had almost as many cards never come back. It probably wasn't a good idea to test this process by sending five Mantles (53-58) at once. Those VG cards never came back.
I never bothered to find out if all of the autographs were real. The story going around our neighborhood was that Ted Williams had (a) a stamp or (b) a sister that signed the cards. One friend got his cards back 2 1/2 years after sending them.
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