My earliest memory of card collecting was buying packs of 1962 Mars Attacks at the now long gone Garfield Market in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on the way to school. The cards featured violent events of a Martian invasion. For a seven year old, there was nothing like it. After getting a large portion of the set, I lost my entire collection, running around on the playground. The cards were only available for a short period, due to the violent nature of cards and subsequently pulled from store shelves.
In the early seventies, I discovered Baseball Digest and The Sporting News. I found a mail order company named Wholesale Cards that had most of the Mars Attacks cards. I was finally able to build a complete set through The Trader Speaks and found the final card at King’s Cards located in Berkeley in 1977. The original Mars Attacks is still my favorite card set of all time.
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