[jingram058]

I have told this tale a few times around here, but here it comes again. I had a converted ham radio room for my bedroom, just big enough for a twin bed. I started collecting baseball cards in 1967, during a trip to Dallas, Texas where my sister Linda was living at the time. I built complete (by the checklists) sets of 1967-68 Topps, and quite a few 1969-70-71 also, along with over 500 1962 Topps that one of the older kids gave me. I kept my collection under my bed. When we all went our separate ways, the card collection stayed under the bed, with Hardy Boys books and comic books on the book shelves my dad built. Some models that survived my destructiveness, antique bottles I dug up, and some steam machinery souvenirs from Sheahan and Parkway Pumping Stations (waterworks). When I moved out, that stuff stayed. Finally my mother sold the house and moved into a mobile home, and she took the bed and my stuff and put it into one of the spare bedrooms in the mobile home. She asked me over and over, did I want any of it? I told her over and over to just get rid of it. Some time in the early 1980s, my best friend Louis found a box of old baseball cards in the house where he grew up that he thought was long since gone. He took them to the flea market they used to hold at the fairgrounds, to a guy who bought and sold baseball cards. He gave Louis several hundred dollars for his cards; Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, etc. We both thought it was amazing. On the way over to the flea market, he gave me a 1963 Topps "Dodgers Big Three" card (I still have it, as the first card in my re-collection). I immediately got hold of mother, asking if she still had my baseball cards. "Oh, I gave all that stuff to the Goodwill. You said you didn't want it." So, yes, you could accurately say, I threw my cards away!