Player Collectors and how you do it (Clemente and Koufax for me)

[MCoxon]

Ron - thanks for posting the scorecard; really cool to see so many HOFs on one scorecard! Also, I have a copy of the 1966 East Hills Clemente - I love it, there's something so quirky about the random retail outlet card. The Clemente master set is in my future, I'm just trying to keep it at bay for a while, for financial sanity!

[Exhibitman]

My close friend/card rival when I was a kid, a guy named Michael, and I competed to find troves of vintage cards around Manhattan. He collected Clemente, I collected Mays, who I started to idolize at age 8 when he returned to NY to play for the Mets. My uncle took me to Shea once to see the great man and I got to see Lou Brock play too. With the help of the ASCCA show in 1976 I put together a run of every Topps Mays card. I remember turning down a 1951 Bowman at the show saying "I don't collect those."

I soured on Mays later in life, once I met the man at a show. I was very excited to meet him, of course, boyhood idol and all, so I carefully rehearsed what I was going to say when I was finally in the presence of the great man. I said my piece, Mays didn't even acknowledge me, just rolled my baseball across the table to the handler like he was shooing a cockroach from his dinner plate. I was so disappointed in that non-interaction that I sold off my entire Mays collection, 1952-1973, including the autographed ball [which I'd had Mantle and Snider sign too]. For years I refused to own a Mays card. I've made peace with the Say Nothing Kid since then--you gotta have Mays in a baseball card collection--but the idolization was dead the moment I left his presence.

Jump ahead to recent times. I've decided to start up with baseball again, collecting for the pure fun of it. But where to start? The answer was obvious: Hank Aaron. I remember Aaron's quest for the record in the early 1970s. I was too young and too innocent to understand the social and racial ugliness that existed around the edges of the quest; all I knew was that Henry Aaron ["OH! Henry!" as the candy commercial said] was the greatest baseball player around, especially after 1973 when Mays was gone. I was so thrilled to pull an Aaron card from a pack, something I did in 1971-72-73-74-75-76, and had so much fun chasing down the record-holding cards in 1973 and the Hank Aaron Special series in 1974. My respect for the man and his accomplishments has done nothing but grow over the years, especially after I read his autobiography and realized what he had to endure in 1973-74 when he neared 714. And best of all, when I got to meet him, Mr. Aaron was every bit the kind gentleman I'd expected him to be.

If you were a Jewish kid in the 1970s and a big baseball fan, you had almost nothing: Ken Holtzman, Ron Blomberg and Steve Stone, plus some real scrubs like Richie Scheinblum or Norm Miller. So you looked back to the glory days for inspiration. Sandy Koufax and Al Rosen. There they were on the 1975 Topps MVP cards, Rosen for 1953 and Koufax for 1963. Now that's what I am talking about! So, naturally, I ended up collecting Koufax and Rosen.

That's the who I collect. As for the how, I am lukewarm on mainstream cards. Nice, but so commonplace that I feel no urgency to get them. I tend to specialize in offbeat, oddball cards. So, I look for cards and related ephemera. Nothing better than that as far as I am concerned.