This cartoon from today's Wash. Post ...

[ParisianJohn]

Just like most kids, my mother threw away many, many items that my older brother and sister and I had begged her never to trash. We lost our Apple II computer, 1960s and 1980s GI Joe's, old comic books, ColecoVision, first generation Star Wars and TransFormers, old Barbie's, etc. We had unboxed and played with all of them, so the value wouldn't be as high today, but they were really cool things that I wish we had kept or given to someone else. However, the baseball cards were spared.

My father was not so lucky with his collection. When he went to college in 1951 his mother chucked his cards. My father talked about this for decades as he spent a lot of time putting that collection together, with a special attention to Yankees players as he was born and raised in New York. Perhaps that put a bug in my mother's ear and saved my collection.

I imagine today many parents are checking eBay before anything heads to the trash can.