Why do you collect?

[Johnphotoman]

In the late 1960s like most kids I brought baseball cards because of the gum. I was not into collecting them. I remember we would put them on our bicycle wheels in the spokes with a clothespin. But mostly I played a game of pitch, it was like pitching pennies. You know the gambling game in which pennies are tossed against a wall, the winner being the person whose penny lands closest to the wall or topped the other penny. Pitching baseball cards was the same game.

While I did not collect baseball cards I did collect baseball photos. When I got married in 1976 my wife had some baseball photos she had discovered in 1968 many from the 1940s. This is the reason I started collecting cards.

You see I started looking into the photos we had collected. Going to baseball card shows to try and find more on the photos I had. It was in the late 1970s when I started going to card shows. At this one show I showed some of the photos to some old-timers. I recall them saying something like the photos match some baseball cards they had collected as kinds. I started looking for cards that matched the photos we had.

The first cards I collected matched one of the original photos I had. My journey began with these sets of baseball cards. Below are my first cards I collected to keep.
John