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

[ZachS]

I was born in 1980 so I didn't start collecting until the late 80's/early 90's... I almost hope my mom did throw away my cards. I know there are a couple of boxes in a closet at my parent's house. Maybe one day they'll be worth something but I doubt it.

[I Only Smoke 4 the Cards]

Originally Posted by ZachS

I was born in 1980 so I didn't start collecting until the late 80's/early 90's... I almost hope my mom did throw away my cards. I know there are a couple of boxes in a closet at my parent's house. Maybe one day they'll be worth something but I doubt it.

I feel ya on this. I am in the same boat.

[Howe’s Hunter]

I started collecting in '72, and had complete sets built the old way (ten cards and a stick of gum) from '72-'74 (wish I had never thrown away all the dupes, but hey, who needed them when you were trying to build a set?)

Flash forward ten years and when I came home for Christmas that year (first year out of college), there were four like packages under the tree for me. My mom had bought the complete set of '84 Topps, and taken my three year collection to a teacher where she was the secretary who was a collector, who boxed them up properly, without all the rubber bands, etc. Told me she always enjoyed watching me collect when I was younger, but it was time to get those things out of her house. They were mine, take them and do what I wanted to with them, but if was time for her to have the closet space back.

I took them, saved them (for almost another 27 years), filled in the years I missed and finally parted with the collection in 2011. 39 year run of complete Topps sets that were sold to fund my Howe-stamped addiction.

Thanks, Mom.

[tachyonbb]

My mom kept all the 3 by 5 note cards I wrote as study aids for English, History, French and Greek but tossed about 1,000 baseball cards from the mid 50's to early 60's. Of course I had traded away all my Mickey Mantle cards and other Yankee cards as I was a Cardinals fan. One Mickey Mantle for a Ray Sadecki card anyone . So it goes.

[t206blogcom]

My parents kept all of my cards from the 80's and 90s. I WISH they had thrown them all out!

[Joe Hunter]

My mother saved everything my brother and I collected between 1959 and 1964 including cards, Post Panels, Scorecards, Hartlands and a few nodders. I don't think I would have ever gotten back into collecting as an adult had it not been for this. I have tried to do the same for my son with the GI Joe's, Transformers, and Lego's we bought him in the early 80's. Unfortunately, these items have appreciated much more than the cards we bought him as he was growing up!

[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.

[MyGuyTy]

Originally Posted by ZachS

I was born in 1980 so I didn't start collecting until the late 80's/early 90's... I almost hope my mom did throw away my cards. I know there are a couple of boxes in a closet at my parent's house. Maybe one day they'll be worth something but I doubt it.

In your same boat, lol. It was both a good time and a bad time to be getting into the hobby. Good time because it introduced our generation to this hobby as a whole which has lead to my vintage tastes today. However it was bad in a sense that so much money was wasted on the current players (at that time) which were obviously way over-produced and are now basically worth squat. Live and learn