Oldtimers on this board?

[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: