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Posted By: FatBoy

had a paper route when i was 10 or so. never had any money to spend on anything other then candy up to that point (thank goodness this was before i needed any green for entertaining the fairer sex). anyway..since saving for college didn't need to start till i was 16 or so , i spent all my spare money on baseball cards and candy (i was a big orioles fan back then, brooks and frank robinson, boog powell, paul blair, davey johnson, mark belanger sp?, dave mcnally, tom phoebus etc etc. i remember listening to a particular game on radio back then in my bedroom (maybe the 66 championship season?) where frank hit grand slams in consecutive at bats. my brother (1 year younger then me) and i used to sit around with the neighbor kids trading cards...i used to trade my mantles and aarons away for orioles...didn't care if i had em already or not, wanted as many as i could get.

lets fast forward to 12 years old. this was my first year of hunting. grew up around hunting and guns (father, and both grandfathers...we had a mountain cabin in central pa). that fall, my dad, me, an elder friend of his and his dog buster went to the cabin for the first day of the squirrel season. all i talked about back then was baseball.

every opportunity we had to get a neighborhood baseball game together, we did. didn't care if it was 4 against 4. if we didn't have quite enough to field 2 teams, we used to play stick ball against a barn wall. broom stick and tennis balls, used tape on the barn wall to create a square strike zone...we threw as hard as we could and it was up to the pitcher to call the balls and strikes.

ok..back to the story. this elderly gentleman quickly found out i was an avid baseball fan during this weekend. he told me he had something for me that was his father's and he would bring it along when we came up for deer season to give me. well....those 2 months felt like an eternity. when i was presented the cigar box (yes it was ) and opened it up, i told myself i had never seen cards like these and asked what they were. he told me his father collected them back in the early 1900s and they came in packs of cigarettes then. well....they piqued my interest like you couldn't believe, they were so much different then any baseball card i was used to (although i recognized a couple of the names being familiar with the HOF). got 49 t206s in that bunch...among them 2 cobbs, a johnson and a young.

spent the next 20 or so years scouring flea markets etc for more of the same kinds of cards, kept a manual checklist. can't tell you how many n172s i passed up during those hunts for peanuts because i thought they were ugly cards (no color), geesh (and i used to run into a lot of em, actresses too LOL, i always asked for tobacco cards, lord knows what else i passed up, but those n172s i remember cause i thought they were so drab looking.

i got up to 477 cards in that set before giving up on it around 15 years ago to concentrate on smaller sets i thought i had a realistic chance of completing, but thess 49 cards are what got me started on the vintage stuff. i had always kept those original 49 cards separated from the others and for a while i even had them in a frame hanging in my office (used corner holders even back then, didn't wanna damage them in any way...i mean they survived this long intact, right?) till i realized the office lighting was fading them. i really saw the damage light could do after i took them out of those corner holders btw.

i'm 49 now.