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Posted By: Geoff Litwack

My dad was born in 1929 in Springfield, Mass., and by 1940, when he stuck them away, he had accrued a collection of thousands of baseball Goudeys, Sport Kings, Horrors of War, etc., etc. Then - wait for it - his mother gave them to a young cousin and the young cousin threw them in a fire.

My mother's story is almost worse. Her father worked as a forman in a toy factory above Topps, in New York, in the 50s. At Christmas, he would bring home boxes and boxes of cards - she and her sister were uninterested, and the cards were eventually swallowed up by history.

So: sob stories on both sides. The good news is, my mother's father kept a ball signed to him by the 1937 Yankees, and I can't think of much I passed on that I wish I'd snagged. There was a rather nice T207 Chance at the last Hollywood Park show I didn't have money for, I guess.