My mom never threw out anything -- I had a kind of rough growing up -- my dad died when I was very young, and I think she knew how much my card collection and my coin collection meant to me in those times.
She was, however, responsible for the loss of my first '50 Bowman set. For some reason she decided I ought to put them in a scrap book. Worse, she decided I ought to GLUE them in a scrapbook with that amber-colored mucilage favored by librarians and other vandals. Now the '50 Bowman cards had no identifier on the front, so it occurred to me only after having spent an evening sticking the things to brightly colored sheets that I didn't know who most of them were. A few, like Ted Williams, I remembered, so I very neatly wrote "Ted W." The others got (some future professor!) "don't no." Hey! I was eight!
I made a set of plywood covers and woodburned, on the front, "Bob's Baseball Cards." I'm happy to report that they were lost in some move or other over the years. I've since replaced them all, of course, even Dick Kryhoski and Johnny Groth and Neil Berry and Dino Restelli. They're not even in plastic, but sit loose in display drawers of a collector's chest I made. In keeping with the circumstance of their original loss, most are in vg-ex at best.
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