Beginnings, Personal Drummers and Adult Card Hobby Preferences...

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by Harliduck

That's a lot to unpack there John...

Yes, sorry. Unusually lengthy for me, and contains a lot of "thinking out loud", but part of that was on purpose so that it can be unpacked.

I'm much like you. I ate those cards up as a kid, but after I moved on to real vintage - rarely looked back. It just struck me as funny because I know for some collectors (a minority maybe, but still I've met them) those cards are even more special because it's a more direct memory to their childhood and that means more to them. Wondering if I'm missing out on something perhaps by being stuck so rigidly in my current paradigm.

[ALBB]

I never enjoyed the loads of " all time great sets" when they came out, never cared for the SSPC stuff of the late 70s either .

Alway looked as that stuff as " not real ", and my hobby money always went elsewhere

[laughlinfan]

I'm guessing somebody could do a whole psychology course (or more) on us collectors. Having been collecting for over 50 years, it is certainly a combination of many things for me. Have many items from when I was a kid that still make me smile with great memories of family members who helped me find stuff for sure. Growing up there was always the challenge and thrill of putting together a complete set of whatever I was chasing, but I was certainly less focused on completing sets as I got older. Nice items for players or teams I really liked will always catch my interest, certainly because of the happy memories they evoke. And to be honest, almost everything I collect or buy now my mind will say "That's cool!" - and having it be something that other people are looking for or would like is part of the equation for sure. I stopped collecting mainstream cards over 30 years ago when the glut came, and manufactured scarcities like 1 of x short printed cards do nothing for me. Finding unusual, scarce, or better yet one of a kind items like production art still gets my heart pumping! Funny thing is no one in my family collects, I never have friends over to look at stuff, but it still makes me happy to sit on a mountain of stuff from the past 55 years, and when I look at different items I have, my mind still says "That's cool!"

[Volod]

Very interesting and thought provoking thread. On the specific subject of "All Time Great"-type issues, my only encounter with such cards happened to be maybe the most poignant of all of my collecting memories. When I was nine years old, my father made time to take a road trip to Cooperstown, about fifty miles from our home. He took my brother and me along, perhaps only grudgingly when my mother requested it. After walking through the HOF, I can recall noticing a display of souvenir items for sale, one of which was the Callahan HOF set in a small box. Since my brother and I had been collecting Bowman cards for a year or more, I pointed the Callahans out to him and we both probably expressed great interest. This apparently caused my father to spring for the cost, likely just a few bucks at that time, but it is one of the fondest memories I have of stuff that my old man ever handed to me. Of course, like so much other childhood memorabilia that evaporated in the next few years, that rather obscure set of cards was lost and forgotten until about fifty years later when I stumbled upon it at a card show in Strongsville. Looking at the set later brought back a flood of memories, of my father, brother and my own early fascination with baseball and little pieces of pasteboard.

[JollyElm]

The 'All Time Greats' stuff just went into my brothers' and my junk piles (along with checklists and other non-specific-team oriented cards), and I've never forgiven Topps for using the exact same picture for both of Ty Cobb's entries in the 1973 set. C'mon Topps!!! That's lazy.

Later on, though, I became a bit fascinated with those 1973s as well as the ones from 1976. When our school had those days...were they called Scholastic Learning or something?...where mom gave you money to buy really cool books, I started grabbing ones about the All-Time Greats, and began reading up about ancient players like Pie Traynor (His name is Pie, really???) or Rogers Hornsby (Is his first name misspelled? Did I discover an error??). So those cards were a springboard to looking back over the history of the game.

Like Marty a couple of posts up, I absolutely love the sets Robert Laughlin created - virtually (or actually) all of which are of the look-back variety, with rarely a 'current' player being included. That stuff is WICKED COOL to me and I'm on a non-stop voyage in trying to upgrade my 1967 Laughlin World Series set.

No one within a country mile of me inside of my own family collects or appreciates baseball cards these days.

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by JollyElm

The[B] That stuff is WICKED COOL to me and I'm on a non-stop voyage in trying to upgrade my 1967 Laughlin World Series set.

No one within a country mile of me inside of my own family collects or appreciates baseball cards these days.

I think that Laughlin card where Mantle breaks the WS HR record in '64 is wicked cool too. It was issued when he was still an active player. I just can't bring myself to pay what they go for anymore.

Nobody in my family cares about cards either, Jolly. I feel you.

[laughlinfan]

OK, different collecting venue, but same vibe. This meme has different conversations, but this is generally how it goes when I talk to my wife about my latest cool find...

I have to say that I have little interest in many of the post career sets like you pictured in the first post, but there are some that the quality/aesthetics/character pull me right in. 1961 Golden Press. Rold Gold/Kelloggs 3D All Time Greats. Some of the Upper Deck Masterpiece cards of former players. I even like the TCMA stars of the 50s and 60s sets with the 53 Bowman-esque pure card fronts (one of which was in the first post). And, of course, the Laughlin sets. I don't mind one bit that many of the cards and Stand-ups he created were of retired players.

[deweyinthehall]

The first "cards" I ever had were those stickers and other inserts you could find in Wonder Bread packages in the early-to-mid-70s. Usually they had a Disney or Super Hero tie in, and they featured some funny license plate or college pennant parodies or some such. I only ever had a few, none saved, but as I got older and had more disposable income I did go back and acquire complete sets of perhaps 6 or 7 of these series (culminating in the Star Wars set from 1977).

The first pack of cards I ever opened was Topps Happy Days - again, never saved past the first month I had them but I went back and purchased complete sets of both series a few years ago.

With both the Wonder Bread and Happy Days sets, when I look through them today I can still recognize a handful of specific ones I know I had back in the day originally, and that gives me a really nice sense of nostaglia.

It wasn't until the spring of 1978 that I personally discovered baseball cards.
Remember the old Scholastic magazine, Dynamite? Each spring for a few years there, they'd include a small uncut panel of 6 of the new Topps cards. In the spring 1978 issue I received Tony Perez, Darrell Porter, Al Oliver and Cecil Cooper (two from a double print row, I know now, so only 4 different for me).

From that moment, and I can't explain why, I was hooked. I can still remember learning that you could get packs containing more of these at the store! How incredible was that?!? I can clearly recall that my first wax pack contained, among forgotten others, Jose Baez, Luis Tiant, Sparky Lyle RB, Rick Manning and George Hendrick.

I remember well seeing a couple 'old' 1977s one of my friends had - even though they opened the pack less than 12 months before, it still felt to my 10 year old brain that I was looking at some ancient relic. Then, when the spring of 1979 came around and I saw the first selection of 1979 cellos in a bin at McCrory's, I remember thinking "they come out with a new set EVERY year?!?"

I think most people learn about the game first and are then drawn to the cards - I had the cards and that is what drew me to the game. It was the cards that taught me new guys came along each year and that some players actually changed teams every so often.

From the outset, I always pursued the new Topps set each year, and I tried to get older cards from previous years - some of friends had small stacks of dog-eared '76s, '75s and 74s they gifted me. Then I discovered card shops, shows, and it was off to the races.

For me, I know that I am by nature a 'collector' - if I have one of something that is part of a series, I have a hard time not trying to acquire more. If I never discovered cards, I'd have a house full of vintage Star Wars, Legos, TV Guides or something else.