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Interestingly, my ten year old son and I just minutes ago got off a long call with a seventy-nine year old gentleman who pulled our 1952 Topps Mantle from its pack, way back in the Summer of '52, using money earned from his paper route. He bought the pack at a tobacco shop in Illinois.
My son and I were hanging on every word the original owner said, learning exactly where our Mantle card came from and how things were then, what his life was like, how into baseball he was, etc.
How many times do we collectors look at a card in our hands and wonder to ourselves about its journey through time to us? My son and I discussed how rare and special it is to trace a card's lineage like that. The discussion even ranged to the advent of TPG grading, and how the owner and his own son drove the card up to PSA some years ago for grading (I can also add both its owners find the arbitrary grading rules irksome LOL!).
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What a great story, Matt! Out of curiosity, how were you able to get in touch with the original owner?
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When I was a kid, my parents didn't teach me about Ruth or DiMaggio or Mantle or any of the others, and yet I still came to revere their cards— my cousins got me into collecting, and from there I just found the old greats. So one doesn't even necessarily need a parent to find their way to the classics.
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Likewise. A friend came over one day in 1986 and randomly brought a box of baseball cards, which I had never known existed. I asked my mom to buy me a few packs, and I was hooked. I remember having a hardcover book with a color photo and a page or two of info on all of the Hall of Famers, and I probably started liking older cards through that. A couple of older cousins had some early/mid '70s cards and would give me some every now and then. I learned about the players and the cards at the same time - I would look at my Becketts and know the key cards from each year, and learn about players that way.