The Card That Got You Hooked

[campyfan39]

1982 at the North Carolina state fairgrounds in Raleigh's weekly "flea market" with my mom getting supplies for her macrame side job when Dad and I saw a booth called "Paper Heroes." We went in and it was like a time machine for my Dad who was born in '49. All of his cards were tossed but that day he bought 4 cards (pictured below). He eventually bought an album and 9 pocket pages so he trimmed the Ford and Collins so they would fit (despite Mom's advice not to do so!)

The card that got me hooked was this '58 Mick. It was on the back wall where the "good cards" were for weeks. It was labeled at $25. I was only 10 but after about 2 months of regular visits I got up the nerve to ask the man if he would take $20. He said yes! On the way home I was reading the back and Dad, from the front seat, asked "Does it have a cartoon of Mickey swinging a bat with a crown on his head?" I said "Yes, how could you possibly know that?" He replied, "I had a stack of them."

This spurred us on a quest to "Buy Back Dad's Cards" which I even wrote a book about. Dad passed almost 20 years ago at the tender age of 53 but his memory lives on through these cards.
God Bless

[egri]

The 1949 Bowman Bobby Doerr was the one that did it for me. It was in 2006, so I was around 11 or so and saw it at my LCS. The shopkeeper agreed to put it on layaway until after about six weeks I had enough saved up to buy it. It cost $60, if memory serves me right. I had recently gotten Doerr's address from another collector, and while paying for the card mentioned sending it TTM, and even before I had finished the sentence he was shaking his head no. A few months later, it disappeared when we had company over. Several years later, when I was in college and starting to get back in to cards, I came across a lot of three 1949 Bowmans on eBay: Doerr, Al Dark, and Eddie Stanky, for less than I had paid for just Doerr in the first place. Buying vintage in those days for me was buying champagne on a beer budget, but I dug deep enough for the trio, and the day they arrived, I packed up Doerr and Dark and sent them TTM. They both came back signed, and for Dark, it was one of the last autographs he signed; he died a couple of weeks after it came back.