[mrmopar]

I suppose an early neighborhood friend who got me interested in cards would be the #1 influencer. He and his brother moved into my neighborhood around 1977-78. They both had card collections and I am pretty sure it was them that got me spending my allowance on cards in general. In those days, I tried just about anything that came in a wax pack. I don't think either continued to collect must past those early days, but I am not sure. By the time I moved away in 1982, I was completely hooked on cards.

Most of my early buying was from retail stores. The Lynnwood Center store on Bainbridge Island, WA, where I formed my early collecting interests, was where I would buy most of my new packs of cards, candy and even some of those RC Cola baseball cans.

I didn't much venture into card shops early on, but somehow discovered the mail order catalogs of TCMA and Renata Galasso, probably from those Baseball Magazines they used to publish in the 70s/80s. I began to receive those catalogs and spent a lot of time looking through them, imagining what I would buy, sadly I never bought too much. I remember buying a bunch of those TCMA all time sets and those HOF postcards. I did start buying the 3 main brands of complete sets in 1981, I believe mostly from Renata's company. I continued that each year until leaving for the Navy in 1987. I remember a few others that I bought from through the mail, like Paul Marchant and Stan Martucci.

Besides a rare trip into Seattle to the Pike Place Market and a few neat old shops that sold cards, an early card store that I eagerly visited as often as my parents would take me, was Pacific Trading Cards in Edmonds, WA, owned by Michael Cramer. I don't remember if I interacted with Cramer himself or not. This would have been the early to mid 80s. I suppose he was probably there some of the time. They had catalogs I used to get and every once in a while, they would mail some neat postcards advertising a sale or a signing. I met Bob Feller at one such signing as a teen. His shop is what shaped my mind as to what a card shop was like. Like anything, I wish I had had more opportunity to visit (His shop was on the way to my sisters house, who we only visited a few times per year) and that I would have bought more stuff, like those X's out 1984 Topps football boxes he was blowing out for $5 each (but I was mostly a baseball collector, so I only grabbed a couple)!

Lastly, I had all but quit collecting cards while I was in the Navy. About a year before I was due to separate, a shipmate of mine and I got to talking about cards for some reason and he ended up showing me what he had been buying. I had stopped mostly around 1988-89 and it was now 1993. The cards he had were nothing like what I had collected before. They were shiny and used foils and such. They were much fancier. I ended up going to one of the stores with him and got myself hooked back into it immediately, buying boxes or cards from the years I had missed. I got back home in late 93 and started buying cards, hitting local shops and attending local shows with most of my free time.

In 1997, I was nearing the end of my college time and discovered the world of online card dealing. Beckett, message boards and then in early 1998, eBay. I have never looked back since.