What are your favorite card/hobby stores from your youth?

[ValKehl]

Originally Posted by NiceDocter

Im another guy who visited House of Cards in Wheaton, MD at their original store.... initially owned and run by John Scott (still a principal owner) and Nick Schoff ( had been running shows in Northern VA not sure if he still is) . Bill Huggins ( I believe actually a relative of Miller Huggins) took over for a while and now Huggins and Scott have a storefront and auction house in Silver Spring MD. I bought a lot of stuff on and off from them in the early 1980s.... and did a private deal with Nick for an uncut sheet of 1952 Bowman high numbers framed ( which I still own) for $800 which was big bucks back in those days. When I picked the sheet up at his apartment he showed me an uncut sheet of 1933 George Miller cards with the rare Ivey Andrews (sp?) ... I think he was asking $10,000 at the time which was way out of my league. Wonder what ever happened to that sheet???? By the way John was very kind to me back in those early days and I still remember and appreciate it! Hope to pass some of that on to others as I go along.

Rocky, Nick Schoff is still running shows in Northern VA. And, Bill Huggins told me many years ago that his is a distant relative of Miller Huggins.

As as kid growing up in the west end of Alexandria, VA, my 3 collecting buddies and I bought our Topps cards (1955-1960) at a 7-11 and a drug store we could walk and/or ride our bikes to. There wasn't a LCS in our area that we knew of. We traded cards, and we played games with our cards (flipping, "sail touch," and "knock down") and card games (blackjack & poker) to win each other's cards.

In the mid-to-late 1980's when I resurrected my childhood collection that, fortunately, Mom didn't toss out many years earlier after I left home, I went to my first card show and discovered the existence of pre-War baseball cards. Soon thereafter, I obtained my first pre-War card, a T207 Recruit of WaJo, in a trade for some 1960 Topps with Bill Huggins at his card shop in Wheaton, MD. Not too long thereafter, my collecting focus became almost entirely pre-War cards.