How did you get started in the hobby

[Bliggity]

When I was seven years old (1988) and started in little league, my parents bought me a Dave Righetti kid's glove and a pack of cards. I can't remember specifically what the pack was, but I'm pretty sure it was '88 Donruss. My dad was a Yankees fan, and pretty soon I was buying packs whenever possible to try to pull a Mattingly. My Dad would tell me stories (just like all the other dads of that era) about all the Mickey Mantle cards that his mother threw away when he went off to college...never did I think I would actually own one!

I collected through the junk wax era until I was about 13 or 14 years old, and then lost interest for a long time. About two years ago, I decided (well...my wife suggested) that I do something with the three 5000-ct boxes of cards that I hadn't looked at in two decades. I figured I'd keep the Mattinglys and maybe 30-40 of the most valuable other cards and get rid of the rest. I drove to a local card shop to pick up a couple packs of toploaders, and they had a box of unopened '83 Fleer on the counter. I figured what the hell, and bought a pack. Second card in the pack was the Ripken RC. Well, that might as well have been crack, because I haven't stopped thinking about cards since. For the next couple months, I wasted a lot of money as I tried to figure out what I really wanted to collect. In December 2014 I went to my first card show and bought my first prewar card (T205 Mathewson), and it's been all prewar since then. And I'm loving it.

All because I pulled the Ripken RC out of that one pack. Crazy. If I hadn't pulled that one card, I probably would have never bought another card again in my life.

[sreader3]

I started collecting Topps BB in 1971 when I was three. When my mom and dad traded-in their Ford LTD in 1976 for a Buick Electra and I did a “final check” under the back seat, I discovered a slightly bent but otherwise well-preserved Paul Blair #52. That’s how I knew when I started –- that and a few other completely trashed 1971 Topps 1st series cards that remained in my “collection.”

1977 was a watershed year. I spent all of my Little League snack bar tokens to buy Topps packs while watching all my buddies wolf-down “donuts” – fried Pillsbury rolls drenched in sugar and cinnamon (ok, ok, those "donuts" were really good!) . I completed about 90% of that set and kept the cards in decent condition (we would call it EX-MT) by storing them team-by-team in an old 24-count audio cassette holder. I remember particularly favoring the Blue Jays and Mariners cards given the exotic “inaugural season” status of those teams – although looking at the stats on the backs of those cards all their players seemed to suck.