I'm Balticfox and here's my story!

[Balticfox]

When it comes to trading cards I’m a completist, a set builder of the sharpest, whitest, brightest cards I can find. I’m tough on corners and toning but I’m easy on centering. I’ll accept cards that are well off center so long as they are not miscut.

I collect them raw and unslabbed for three reasons. The first is that I’ve always collected cards raw ever since I was a little kid. Secondly, they’re too bulky to store or even handle when slabbed. Thirdly, my grading priorities are not the same as those of the grading companies. I’m very tough on toning which they seem to ignore, but I’m easy on centering while they penalize off-center cards heavily.

My collection of non-sports cards ranges from the late 1940’s to the mid 1970’s - but the sets I most treasure are typically from the 1957-1965 period which coincides with those cards I remember accumulating as a kid.

The first cards to which I was exposed were the 1957 Hit Stars:



My older sister had brought a few home. She was looking for Yul Brynner, a search doomed to frustration since there was no Yul Brynner card in the set.

I started first grade in September 1958 and remember admiring Topps Flags of the World, TV Westerns and Zorro cards in the schoolyard.

The first cards I ever owned though were four 1958-59 Topps Hockey cards which I gathered off the street one late February or early March day in 1959. The first three were Detroit Red Wings, but the last was a Chicago Blackhawk. When I saw that big Indian head on the red jersey, I knew that was my favourite team - even though I might have had trouble reading the team name at the time!



I then admired the 1959 Baseball cards in the schoolyard:



But the first cards I ever bought and collected were the 1959 CFL cards:



These first few cards to which I was exposed left a lifelong imprint upon me. I ended up collecting the CFL, Hockey and Baseball cards almost every year thereafter until I graduated from grade eight in 1965.

I was also well aware of the various non-sport sets such as You’ll Die Laughing, Funny Valentines, Wacky Plaks, Sports Cars, etc. that O-Pee-Chee was marketing in my corner of London, Ontario at the time but the first non-sport cards I collected in a big way were the 1962 Leaf Spook Stories:



The 1962 Topps Civil War News cards came next:



The summer of 1963 was when I went big time, however. One of my buddies Anthony proposed that we pool our efforts and collections and just collect any card we could get our hands on. This was initially to his benefit because the 1963 Baseball cards I had lying around dwarfed his meager stock. Nonetheless, over the ensuing two years Anthony and I amassed close to 4500 different cards. Needless to say, sheer numbers as opposed to condition was our defining priority.

We succeeded in gathering up most of the sports cards issued in our neck of the woods back to the 1960-61 Hockey cards. But any cards older than these were very tough to find and we only had a very few specimens from even sets as large as the 1960 Baseball. In fact, coming across any pre-1961 cards in the schoolyard was such an uncommon occurrence that it seemed to be an almost magical event. And even today I feel the same sense of wonder, the same sense of magic, perusing the pre-1961 cards that I have even if they number in the hundreds and fill a binder!

Among the cards we managed to acquire was a wild but very curious one called “Hairy Fiend” which we got in a generic pack while trick or treating on Halloween. We’d never encountered any of this set before and without the wrapper didn’t even know it was from a set called Mars Attacks. Nonetheless, it became our favourite card.

After I went off to boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine for grade nine in 1965, I just turned my half interest in the cards we’d accumulated over to Anthony who was a grade behind me. Bad mistake. By the late spring of 1966 he too lost interest in the cards which were approaching 6500 in number by then and gave them to Billy, the snot-nosed kid across the street. Anthony’s thinking was that Billy would carry the torch so to speak and continue to build on the collection. To Anthony’s horror and dismay though, Billy went and scrambled the cards in front of his eyes! That’s right, he tossed the contents of the whole box up into the air just to watch every other little kid on the street scramble to get as many as he could! Anthony still grouses about that to this very day some 58 years later.

I also collected the premium coins that were issued in jelly desserts and potato chips up until I graduated from grade school. The plastic Shirriff/Salada Hockey coins, the plastic Shirriff Baseball coins, the Jell-O/Hostess Aircraft Wheels, the Krun-Chee Fightin’ Warships and the 1963 Humpty Dumpty/Krun-Chee CFL coins were the ones that drew my most avid interest - and dimes.

But you know the memory of these cards never left me. I’d often think back to my collecting days and wish I still had my CFL and other cards even when I was in my late teens but I thought that there was no way I could ever reassemble what I’d had as a kid. I thought they were all lost forever and could only live on in my dreams. Then came an article in the Canadian Magazine supplement to the Saturday London Free Press in 1969 or so. It featured Angelo Savelli of Hamilton, who was described as the world’s biggest card collector with every card ever produced (much exaggerated of course). Angelo had evidently started buying sports cards in 1948 and never stopped. The article filled me with an incredible longing for the cards I’d once had, cards that I thought were now lost in the mists of time. Nostalgia/curiosity prompted me to buy a few packs of the 1971 CFL, 1971-72 NHL and 1972 CFL cards over the next couple of years or so. (I actually felt a bit sheepish and embarrassed buying little kids’ cards at the time!)

Flash forward a few years to 1979. I had finished university and had been working in Toronto for a couple of years. I'd discovered that the big city had four comic shops. Two of them carried old gum cards as well! The first sets I bought at the comic shops were the first two Funny Valentine ones, Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. (I was a super confident young man by then and I didn't give a tinker's damn what anybody else thought of me.) Shortly thereafter I discovered that the main comic shop in Hamilton also carried cards. When the proprietor pulled out NM (or so I thought at the time) sets of the 1959, 1960, 1963 and 1964 CFL cards, I could not reach for my wallet quickly enough! Prizes beyond belief! As was the Civil War News set he had and the You’ll Die Laughing set I picked up a few weeks later at a comic show.

When I bought the first edition of Christopher Benjamin’s Non-Sport Price Guide in the mid-1980’s, I realized that the “Hairy Fiend” card we’d had twenty years before belonged to the notorious Mars Attacks set.

I’ve steadily added to my card collections since that time. I now have a fabulous collection of non-sports, CFL and Hockey cards and I’ve even made decent inroads into Baseball cards from the 1954-1965 period as well. I’ve also amassed one of the best collections anywhere of those premium coins to which I referred earlier e.g. Shirriff Hockey and Baseball, Humpty Dumpty CFL, Fightin’ Warships, Space Orbit, Rocky & Bullwinkle, etc.

I file my cards these days in binders by subject category. Here are a few of these binders:























I used to feel an incredible sense of longing whenever I saw the type of old variety store at which I used to buy my cards and comics as a kid. No more though. My collection now of most cards is so far beyond what I dreamed of having as a kid that I’ve shed that sense of loss.

I also eventually met Angelo Savelli in the mid-1980’s at a small card show in Toronto where he had set up to sell cards and he became a friend of mine. It was at the big semi-annual Toronto Sport Card and Memorabilia Expo in 2005 or so where I saved one of his binders full of expensive hockey cards from the 1920’s and 1930’s from a thief. I noticed that a tall young fellow at the other end of Angie’s table had scooped up what appeared to be one of Angie’s binders and walked off briskly down the aisle. Angie himself was on the other side of the table and was in no position to give chase so I set off after the fellow myself. I caught him before he got to the door of the hall and said “Excuse me, but is that your binder?” Much to my surprise, the fellow just said no and shoved the binder into my hands. While I stood there gawking for a second or two, he swiftly made his exit through the door. Oh well. I’m not in the business of apprehending thieves anyway, but I’d managed the most important detail which was getting Angie’s binder back for him.

Since Angie sold almost all his cards other than the Hockey and CFL around the turn of the century and I’ve accumulated so many cards myself in the last 45 years, I no longer envy Angie for his cards. How the circle turns! (Sadly Angie himself passed away in March this year.)

But you know I still don’t have a NM “Hairy Fiend” card.