Who had a positive impact on your collection ?

[kailes2872]

I have told this story before, so please forgive any repetition. I immediately had a name that came to mind. Melanie Lain was the most influential person for my collecting for several reasons.

I had collected a couple of packs in '78 and '79 - both in baseball and football. However, '80 was the year that I had a break through. I was 8 years old and in second grade. Melanie was a senior in high school and our teacher's aid. One day, I brought a box of cards for some variation of show and tell. Melanie came up and looked at my cards. She told me that she collected as well and asked me if I wanted to trade.

As an 8 year old, I had two thoughts - 1) No one was coming near my cards and 2.) Eww a girl? She has baseball cards?

I agreed to consider it, however, I had my reservations. Melanie went to the same church and lived close, so the next week, she came by with a shoe box. She told me that she didn't want to take my cards but went through her collection to give me some. It was '70-'75 with the majority in '72 & '73 but there were stars in every year. Aaron from all the years, Mays up until he retired, Clemente, Gibson, Kaline, rookies of Brett and Yount, Killebrew, Frank and Brooks Robinson - she just gave me all. She decided to go through her basketball and football collection and gave me a lot of 71-72's and 72-73's - Chamberlain, West, Baylor, Alcindor, Robertson, Unites, Staubach, Namath - they were all there pack fresh.

This was an awesome day. I immediately went to a friend's house and gave him some of them - I figured that I had 3 Willie Mays' in there, so he could have one of them. Same with Aaron, etc.

From there, it was disaster. A card show was coming to town. I heard that baseball cards were worth money so I wanted to go. Melanie went with me. In the first 5 minutes at the show, I proceeded to sell the box. The guy at the front of the show picked through the best cards and offered me $8. I then took the rest and they guy offered me $5. I needed $14 for an '80 Topps set. I had to borrow $1 from my mom.

I collected through high school, but it was 80's junk wax and a bunch of topps, fleer and donruss sets from those years. In my sophmore year of college in the fall of '91, I decided to sell everything. I posted them in the trader. A guy came and looked at them. I didn't want to hover. He looked at my albums that had some of my stars - some stuff I had gathered over the years like a '68 Seaver. He stole 15-20 cards out of my binder and told me that he wasn't interested. I then looked through them later and realized that he had taken those better cards. I ended up selling the collection for $250 and put it towards a used big screen TV so that I could be the BMOC (in my mind at least) in the college dorm.

Fast forward to 2012. I took my boys to Cooperstown and they had both the Ken Kendrick collection and a baseball card room. While in the baseball card room, I showed the boys all of those '70-'75's that I used to have and it bummed me out like it was 1980 all over again. Later that weekend, after we got back home, I was on ebay looking at those cards and lamenting selling them all for $13. My wife, tired of my whining, says with exasperation - "If you want those cards, just go buy them." By the end of that day, I bought complete sets for '80-'85. Within the next week, I had bought complete sets back to '76. Over the next two weeks, it was '73-'75. I then found someone who was selling '66 and '72. I found someone on Craigslist who had near sets of '71 and '68. The race was on.

5 years later, I have '54-current in Topps, '50, 53 (Color & B&W), '54, and '55 Bowman plus 60-63 Fleer, '52 Red Man and some other test issues. My wife reminds me on occasion that her invitation was to buy the '70-'75 shoe box back - not every card ever made.

Through it all, I think of Melanie Lain. Not only did she give me the cards with no strings attached, she went to the card show and watched me sell them - never stepping in to say - "that was not the idea when I gave them to you. If you are going to sell them, just give them back." She was friendly and positive the entire way.

Given the 1-2 sentence responses to most of these, I have probably emoted way too much, but it does make me go back and think about how I acquired this collecting illness and why I remain borderline obsessive with it even today.

[jb217676]

Jeff Prize-ner, guru of postcards!

[Joe_G.]

My focus quickly migrated from available wax at local grocery store (84 Topps) to older cards as I attended local card shows. The older the better although it was tough to find anything in the Upper Peninsula of MI. My ability to collect older cards improved once I subscribed to SCD which opened the door to impressive dealers and collectors alike.

I ordered Lew Lipsets encyclopedias and quickly narrowed my Detroit interest to Old Judges. By the late 1980s I had contacted Bob Richardson and we wrote each other many times. It was always a special treat to receive a letter as it would typically include xerox copies of cards I had dreamed about. I managed to obtain Detroit Old Judges of Rowe, Thompson, and Twitchell from Bob before graduating HS and temporarily leaving the hobby. I returned to the hobby in 2003 and immediately wrote Bob to see how similar/different his interests and the hobby were. He was still collecting and we traded far more material as it was easier for me to find cards on his wantlist thanks to eBay.

Bob was single most influential collector, always willing to take the time to answer questions and help a fellow collector out regardless of age, knowledge, etc.