What was your first set?

hcv123 · #1 08-03-2021, 06:24 PM

I didn't yet "collect sets", but had plenty of cards in 1973 - as many as would fit in my pockets to flip for colors or scale during recess. Other kids spent all their money at the corner coffee shop on candy - I spent most of mine on packs of cards - heck, you even got gum with them! I apparently had a bunch of cards from 1972 ( I was 5 years old) which I clearly remember trading a whole box of years later for some comic books at a comic book show - live and learn! I had TONS of cards from 1975 and remember a local discount variety store had 2-3 huge dump bins filled with rack packs - my sweet grandmother would generously buy me a bunch everytime we went food shopping at the super market next door. I really loved the radical change in design from the 1974 ards although for flipping purposes top or bottom color needed to be declared ahead of time. The first year I recall actively trying to collect a set was 1978 - I don't remember much else, but Billy Almon of the Padres was the final card I needed to finish it.

jayshum · #2 08-03-2021, 08:24 PM

The first set I collected was 1975 when I was 7. I don't remember anything about collecting it, but I know I still have the set.

cardsagain74 · #3 08-03-2021, 10:31 PM

The little helmets from those quarter machines (both baseball and football).

I just loved those as a little kid. Was around seven years old, and it was about the time that the Bengals changed to the stripes. Before long, I had them all but the new Bengals helmet (both were needed of course). Plus it looked really cool.

After thousands of dollars/the family fortune spent quarter by quarter and no Bengals stripes, my great aunt finally shared enough w/ my frustration to explain this horrible predicament and ask a toy store to open the damn thing up and pick a Bengal helmet I could see pasted against the glass front. They understood, naturally.

Didn't care if I broke the spirit of it. Was still the best quarter I've ever spent

Cliff Bowman · #4 08-03-2021, 11:33 PM

1977 Topps Baseball as a ten year old in the spring in Jacksonville FL, the summer in Waukegan IL, and in the fall in Lakehurst NJ. I still remember the US Navy commissary store in Mayport FL having baskets full of 1977 Topps Rack Packs by the check out registers.

Butch7999 · #5 08-04-2021, 01:06 AM

The three of us here, as young kids, all fell in love with baseball when we attended our first Buffalo Bison (IL)
games around 1960, and soon discovered the Diamond Herd on radio and major league games on TV.
The game became an obsession for us once Post cereals and Jell-O started printing something called
"baseball cards" on their boxes. Like Dewey, we'd been completely ignorant of the entire concept, and
except for the Post and Jell-O sets, we knew nothing of older sets, of Topps, of Fleer and so on -- and
with no other kids in our neighbourhood, nor any school classmates, the least bit interested in such stuff,
we remained woefully ignorant for years. We never completed any of the three editions of Post / Jell-O cards
(some of those cereals and Jell-O flavours were inedible) and we eventually, immersed in box scores
and transaction reports in the local newspaper sports pages, ruined almost every card we did have
by writing, in ballpoint pen, on each card, the team to which each player had been traded, dismally unaware
of new cards issued by other companies and by other means.
We didn't discover Topps until the late '60s, when the grumpy pharmacist at the drug store where we
bought our comix started setting out boxes of packs at the checkout counter. No other store we could
reach by bicycle carried baseball cards, and the pharmacist never ever ordered any fourth series
(another concept of which we were woefully ignorant), so we wasted our allowances gormlessly amassing
boxfuls of doubles and triples of every 1st, 2nd, and 3rd series card... But we did keep them pristine,
and we still have all those Post / Jell-O and late '60s-early-'70s Topps cards...

ALR-bishop · #6 08-04-2021, 07:44 AM

In the last issue of the SCD Standard Catalog with both pre and post 1980 listings, 2011 I think, Lemke listed quite a few panels of Topps cards from Dynamite Magazine from the 70s and 80s. Not sure why he listed the panels he did since there were many other panels not listed. I picked up most of the ones he listed and put the panels with my sets.

The first Topps set I completed was 1959, but also had cards from 1956, 1957 and 1958 as a kid

Vintagevault13 · #7 08-04-2021, 08:20 AM

1974 was the first year that I collected cards. Being in Georgia, I was a Braves fan and enjoyed watching Hank Aaron chase the Babe's record. The 1974 set did, however, lead me to select an unlikely favorite player: Reggie Jackson. Oakland was probably the farthest team from my home, but the 1974 A's cards intrigued me because the team seemed so different and cool. Most of the players had beards or mustaches and the WHITE SHOES were definitely unusual. Reggie's amazing 1974 card made him the coolest of them all in my 8-year-old mind. Combine this with the awesome Playoff and World Series cards in the set recapping the A's World Series triumph, and I became a hardcore Reggie fan. Still love looking at this set because of the memories that it invokes. What a great time to be a kid!

Exhibitman · #8 08-04-2021, 08:29 AM

The first set I actually built was a vintage one, 1954 Topps. My next door neighbors' father was a college professor and he used to ask his students for old cards for his kids, so they had this insane pipeline. They showed me 1954s for the first time and I was just hooked. First card I got in a trade with them was a Don Mueller. I really didn't start pulling the set together until I got to Los Angeles. Last three were the two Williams cards (one purchased from the consistently nasty Goody Goldfadden at ADCO) and Hank Aaron, which I got at a show. Most of the set I picked up in lots in auctions at the monthly West Coast Card Club meetings. I sold off that set in a fit of existential angst just after college, reassembled it again in my thirties in higher grade, sold it off when prices ran up on graded cards some years ago, then started on it again. Only HOFers I need now are Banks and Lasorda, but I am not a fan of commons so not likely to finish the set unless I stumble across a find.

Thread Tools
Show Printable Version Email this Page
Display Modes
Switch to Linear Mode Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode