From my Substack post "Analog Days":
To paraphrase Terence Mann in
Field Of Dreams:
“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But collecting has marked the time. These items, they are a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.”
Personally, I find that modern life is so frantic, so immediate, so consuming, and so impermanent that I long for something more. I want to reach that constant that baseball represented to Terence Mann (and yes, I am aware that he is a fictional character, but don’t let the facts obscure the point).
I am a child of the 1970s. Young enough to have had electronic entertainment (we got cable tv! One channel!! Mattel Electronic Football, anyone?) but old enough to remember when we weren’t all carrying supercomputers in our pockets and our parents had no way of contacting us during those lazy summer days we spent running around our neighborhoods playing street football (car!) or chasing the ice cream truck. I call it the “Analog Days.”
Back in the Analog Days, we had to make a real effort to be connected to one another, to remember who we were and where we came from. Long distance calls were expensive and rare in the Analog Days; when the phone rang late at night everyone’s first thought was “death in the family” (RIP Richard Lewis). Air travel was not the commonplace, Greyhound-In-The-Sky, experience that it is today, so we communicated in analog: we wrote letters, mailed postcards, took and shared pictures, recorded and swapped cassette tapes. And we kept them. Treasured them. That is the collector mentality in a nutshell: memory through objects. History in hand.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the technology today that connects us all. I paged through my photo albums a lot after we moved to Los Angeles and left New York in 1977. I was 11 years old and longing for the connections that I would otherwise have lost. And I looked at the cards I had collected with friends in primary school. It was all I had left of the life back there, because my contacts with friends and family were so stretched and tenuous. Tech makes it so much better. Facetime brings my daughter to me across a continent and the miracle of web publishing brings my missives to you like the dead rats your cat drops on the doorstep to show you he cares; think of these dispatches as dead rats from me to you. I also love that I can write and be read by selling my books through an on-demand publisher. Unlike my father, I’m not just some guy writing books that no one will read because he can’t find a publisher. I can publish and sell books and blog and have hundreds of subscribers in a year’s time. But I also remember when there wasn’t a 24/7/365 livestream, when your life wasn’t an avatar, and when tangible things you held in your two hands were the only mementos of the world. And so I collect.
The mere fact that these things we collect are tangible sets us apart from the non-collectors. My wife often asks me why I want to keep an item when I could sell it for a profit. The non-collectors like her will never get the appeal these things have for us collectors; it is almost mystical. These things were made with great ingenuity and effort and care. They were meant to be enjoyed in the physical world. Some were meant to be cherished as heirlooms. Many were not, which makes their continued existence 100 or more years later all the more wonderful. I recently came across a pair of ornate, die-cut, pop-out valentines from the 1890s. How does something so delicate and temporary and beautiful make it into my hands intact? Why would generations of someones save a scrap of paper through two world wars, two pandemics, depressions, natural disasters, and so on just so I could look at it 130 years later?
My father wasn’t a collector, but he was nevertheless a product of the Analog Days. He had a childhood scrapbook that he carried with him through decades of life, different homes, a marriage and children, and across multiple cities a continent apart. Years ago, he found the moldering book in the garage and gave me a signed note from Sid Luckman, the great HOF quarterback, that his older brother’s father-in-law got for him at the Columbia Club in New York when he met Luckman in 1946. The scrapbook was falling apart yet he kept it. When he passed away, I found it in his home office and salvaged the items, which was one good use for the tons of paper ephemera storage supplies I have. Photos into pages, paper items into mylar sleeves, all to be organized into card binders, properly stored and preserved. Beautiful.
Pondering these questions is one of the things that gives me respect and, yes, love for old cardboard. I often think about the journey that items at estate sales and antique shows have taken, especially when I see materials from someone's military service, a ribbon or medal from an athletic event, a program or memento of a big night out, or an official photo from some Important Event, all painstakingly preserved in someone’s scrapbook. It being valuable to them makes the items all the more valuable to me. Interestingly, not everyone reacts well to the concept of these items being collected. Some people find it depressing to see things like a soldier’s military company photo for sale at a flea market. I don’t. Quite the opposite. To me, it feels reassuring. Even though someone’s children or grandchildren just did not care about and would just as soon throw away the items, there are strangers who do care about these artifacts and will preserve them. That snapshot from Great Uncle Leo's time in Japan during WWII means nothing to his family but someone will purchase it and enjoy it and research the subject and remember and honor the man that way, and that's what I find redeeming about the process: we collectors are the Memory Alpha for these people, both the subjects of the items and the people who cared for the items, just as other collectors will be for us after we are gone. Little Howie McCormick is long gone but his back-stamped T206 collection lives on through the collectors who have his old cards and actively trade and discuss them on card chat boards.
Now, excuse me while I go watch
Field Of Dreams again.
05-30-2025, 10:18 PM
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