Oldtimers on this board?

[Yoda]

This post reminds me of the loss we suffered this year with the passing of Teddy Z.

[Hankphenom]

I'm a leading-edge boomer, so it was Topps cards of the late 1950s for me, but not in any methodical way or thinking of my cards as a "collection." We did trade them, put them in the spokes of our bikes, and flipped them against the wall. I just liked seeing pictures of and learning about the ballplayers I heard about on the radio or saw in the occasional game on TV, along with the stats, cartoon, trivia questions, etc. The gum wasn't bad, either, though not my favorite. I also had some pennants, pins, scorecards (we always kept score) and other things bought at the ballpark. I got into collecting memorabilia of my team in the late 1970s, then became a dealer in the 1990s. It's been a lot of fun.

[kmac32]

1970Topps cards for me as I wanted cards for my 1969 Chicago Cubs. I was addicted for life.

[RayW]

My earliest memory of card collecting was buying packs of 1962 Mars Attacks at the now long gone Garfield Market in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on the way to school. The cards featured violent events of a Martian invasion. For a seven year old, there was nothing like it. After getting a large portion of the set, I lost my entire collection, running around on the playground. The cards were only available for a short period, due to the violent nature of cards and subsequently pulled from store shelves.

In the early seventies, I discovered Baseball Digest and The Sporting News. I found a mail order company named Wholesale Cards that had most of the Mars Attacks cards. I was finally able to build a complete set through The Trader Speaks and found the final card at King’s Cards located in Berkeley in 1977. The original Mars Attacks is still my favorite card set of all time.

[Balticfox]

Originally Posted by RayW

My earliest memory of card collecting was buying packs of 1962 Mars Attacks at the now long gone Garfield Market in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood on the way to school. The cards featured violent events of a Martian invasion. For a seven year old, there was nothing like it. After getting a large portion of the set, I lost my entire collection, running around on the playground. The cards were only available for a short period, due to the violent nature of cards and subsequently pulled from store shelves.

In the early seventies, I discovered Baseball Digest and The Sporting News. I found a mail order company named Wholesale Cards that had most of the Mars Attacks cards. I was finally able to build a complete set through The Trader Speaks and found the final card at King’s Cards located in Berkeley in 1977. The original Mars Attacks is still my favorite card set of all time.

The Mars Attacks cards were not to my knowledge sold in Canada back when they were first released. I did though manage to score the "Hairy Fiend" card in a generic wrapper while trick or treating in 1963 or 1964:

(Not mine.)

It was the wildest card my buddies and I had ever seen but without the wrapper we didn’t even know it was part of a set called Mars Attacks. Nonetheless, it became our favourite card.

But since Mars Attacks cards had not been distributed in Canada, I just never saw any more for over two decades. It wasn't until I bought the first edition of Christopher Benjamin’s Non-Sport Price Guide in the mid-1980’s that I realized that the “Hairy Fiend” card we’d had twenty years ago belonged to the fabled Mars Attacks set.

With the notoriety within popular culture that the cards gained when the Mars Attacks movie hit screens nationwide in 1996, the cards have become demand scarce and thus egregiously expensive. As a result, I still have only these nine in my present day collection:

[Casey2296]

Originally Posted by Yoda

This post reminds me of the loss we suffered this year with the passing of Teddy Z.

+1

[Hankphenom]

Originally Posted by Yoda

This post reminds me of the loss we suffered this year with the passing of Teddy Z.

+1. The knowledge and memories that went with him are unimaginable.

[nickedson]

Got my first pack of cards, albeit non-sports, with the 1958 Zorro cards. Then in 1959 - at age 6 - purchased my first Topps baseball pack. My folks made such a fuss over the fact I got a Detroit Tiger (Red Wilson) that I became a collector for life. Set up at the Troy Hilton for my first show in 1973.

[50sBaseball]

I started collecting with 1953 Topps Baseball with my older brothers buying me packs as I was too young (age 6 at the beginning of the MLB season) to go to the local Kingswood Drug Store outside Hartford, CT. I remember looking at the cards for hours and learning what teams were in the American and National Leagues by the color (red or black) at the bottom of the card. Still have my Mantle card. In 1954 I was allowed to go with my brothers to buy cards and we would open the packs the minute we left the store, with the colorful card backgrounds very attractive to a young collector. The drug store also sold the NY Journal American, and as a young lad interested in any image of MLB players, I would search the nearby bushes where the NY Journal American "cards" - actually pieces of paper - were discarded or fell from the newspaper. I have since sold many of those, but still have a few. I should have picked up more - for free! And those were the days before checklists, but my brothers and I would help each other with trades, not knowing exactly what cards may come out. And we traded with friends. I bought and collected until the 1960s set, then life had other priorities. I started up again in the late 1970s when our sons came of age to collect. Good times.