How long you collected as a kid ?...

[ls7plus]

I began collecting starting with baseball in '58 at age five, and pretty much continued part way through 1969. I can still remember the excitement that echoed through the neighborhood when spring came along each year and some kid was the first to spread the news that the new Topps cards were out! Usually, we each got on our bikes and rode down to the corner market and/or the local drugstore and bought as many packs as we could afford. I always pretty much stuck to baseball, as if I wasn't playing it, I was reading about it, or watching it, or playing Stratomatic baseball with buddies for long hours at a stretch (which was very, very conducive to learning about pre-war stars, as we ordered not only the new game cards each year, but the all-time greatest team series and finally Stratomatic's hall-of-famer AL and NL series. We'd have a draft of all of the greatest players of all time that we had cards for, and play countless 50-game seasons before starting all over again--Ah, the delight of a youth filled to the brim with baseball!

Got back into the hobby in 1990 when a fellow lawyer at my office would bring his baseball cards in occasionally. Others made fun of him, but I thought they were pretty cool, so I began collecting again, mostly buying all the wrong stuff at first (read here new cards printed by the hundreds of thousands, at a minimum!), until I gravitated to vintage, about equally split between '50's to '60's and pre-war, in the early to mid-nineties (with something of a detour to McGwire and Sosa, plus Frank Thomas--how I loved to watch him hit) during that time. My focus has been primarily pre-war for the last half-dozen years or so.

Good thread!

Larry