Eight year old me wouldn't believe it. Pre-war cards were this weird rumor. The local card shop didn't have any of them. No one I knew had ever even seen one. When I was about eight I decided to collect one card of every hall of famer, but at the time that meant trading with the kid down the street, because he got a Carl Yastrzemski card from his older brother. Hunting down anything more than a few years old was nearly impossible.
I got my first pre-war card two or three years later. My dad is into coins, and we went to see a guy he knew who had a store. In amongst all the coins there was a small stack of Goudeys. As I remember it there was a lancing beam of sunlight shining down on them, and a chorus of angels intoning "gloria in excelsis deo"; but I might be misremembering. Lord, I mowed a lot of lawns to afford the Joe Cronin that I bought that day.
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