What are your favorite card/hobby stores from your youth?

[Yoda]

Dawson's Pharmacy in Schenectady, NY. Just outside was a magnificent old Sycamore tree. The year I started my collecting Mr. Dawson had festooned his front window with the new '51 Bowmans and various advertising pieces. I immediately spent my whole .25c allowance on five packs, and with the gang retired to the Sycamore to open our packs and reveal their treasures with dirty, greasy fingers. Frantic trading started immediately.
You can imagine the excitement the next year when the brand new '52 Topps hit like a bombshell. Yikes. I think Mr. Dawson was far more busy selling baseball cards than filling prescriptions.
Dawson's is long gone, as is the Sycamore, replaced by a deteriorating mini mall. Progress, I suppose.
Ah, nostalgia.

[wolf441]

Growing up outside of Boston in the early 1980's, I remember my mom taking me to a card shop in Kenmore Square. There was also a shop in Buzzard's Bay, MA called Park Nostalgia that we used to frequent during summer vacations. I also remember tagging along on grocery shopping trips to the A&P in hopes of snagging Topps Baseball rack packs.

[jingram058]

I've told this story over and over on this forum. My first experience with baseball cards started with 5 cents a pack Topps while visiting my Delta Air Lines stewardess sister in Dallas, Texas in 1967. I collected the entire set, according to the checklists, ultimately. Same for 1968, 1969, 1970. Almost every day my mom would send me to a little store next to The Castaways Bar 2 blocks down Barron Road from our house in Memphis to buy her a pack cigarettes (the cigarettes didn't kill her, diabetes did, decades later, and they thought nothing of selling a kid cigarettes as they knew they were for mom), and I could keep the change to buy packs of cards. Thousands of baseball cards, full sets. I even had one of those plastic green lockers organized by team and by league for one of those years. The others were in shoe boxes, but also organized. Many, many duplicates. Also, I acquired almost but not all of the 1962 Topps set, given to me by an older friend going off to college prep school. Then, I graduated to other interests, and the cards went under my bed. Finally, I moved out to my own apartment, and then into the Navy. Years, decades go by. Cards become valuable. My buddy Louis finds a stash of his old cards while helping his parents clean out the attic of the house he grew up in. Sells them for hundreds of dollars. I rush home and ask my mom if my cards are still under the bed of my old room. "Oh, I gave those away years ago. You said you didn't want them and do whatever when I asked you over and over!"