June 2024 Pickup thread

[jchcollins]

Huge "reacquisition piece" for my PC earlier this week, as back in the day when I was a kid - this was for a brief time one of the cornerstone cards out of anything I owned.

The year was probably 1988, and I was 11 years old. At the now long defunct (both the mall and shop) "Red Lantern" hobby shop at Cotswold Mall in Charlotte, NC - the most expensive thing in the showcase for quite some time was a '54 Bowman Mantle. It was creased, and in worse shape than this one. In one of those old school screw down cases with the kind of plastic thumbnail screws; I actually still have some of these, but they are so beat-up it's not worth putting a card in even for old time's sake...

I digress.

At some point I convinced Mom to let me take that card home. I don't even remember what the sticker price then would have been. $150, maybe 200 bucks? At any rate, it was FAR more expensive than even any reasonably spoiled 11-yo kid should have been expecting his mother to pay for a single baseball card in 1988. But God love her, she did it anyway just because she knew I was fascinated with it - even though I believe that one got her in trouble with my father, LOL.

What's funny about memory, is that even as important as this card was and became to me for the next few years - I have no memory of how I got rid of it. I did perhaps 2 years later acquire a new grail card - the '56 Topps Mantle - at a different shop, and sadly I remember this one becoming less important to me. At some point I traded it, probably to one of my elementary school classmates - though for the life of me I cannot remember for what now.

As the years have gone by, I have gained new appreciation for the subtle beauty in this one. Mantle is only 22 years old here - and though the '54 Bowman set won't take home any first place accolades for the time period in which it was issued - I think that it's an underrated set just the same. I love the soft colors and whatever photochromatic color work they did on this set - despite it being perhaps most notorious for NOT continuing the full color photography that Bowman introduced to such rave reviews the year before.

Welcome home Mick! And thanks again Mom, for the memory. This one I can assure you will not be going anywhere for a very long time. :-)




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