So What’s Your Story?

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Posted By: Matt Goebel

In many ways my story echoes many of the others I’ve heard. I bought my first pack of baseball cards at age 8 in 1972 and found Wilbur Wood of the White Sox staring up at me – I was hooked. I was going full force in 1973, the last year Topps cards were issued in series, and had nearly put together a complete set, but my favorites were the Tigers and A’s (I used to carry Norm Cash and Bert Campaneris around in my back pocket). We moved from Michigan to Colorado that Fall and it was a difficult transition for me. I missed my old friends and became somewhat shy, which seemingly made making new friends take forever – probably a whole month or two. Resultingly, I spent many hours in my room sorting, studying and absorbing my baseball card collection, and I realized that this was heaven. Soon I had inherited some neighborhood collections as the older boys lost interest in cards, I also continued to buy all the packs I could afford, and over the next several years I amassed an impressive quantity of cards. I remember walking (running) to Walgreens every spring when the new cards finally came out, then repeatedly sorting and classifying my collection in many different ways, and watching the NBC game of the week with my cards arranged in front of me mirroring what was actually going on in the game (the voices of Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek still make me feel nostalgic). I had also developed the debilitating lifelong affliction of being a Red Sox fan at this point and I worshipped the ground Jim Rice walked on. My first mail order complete Topps set came from the aforementioned Renata Galasso in 1979 and was amazing, although I did miss opening packs. Within a couple years I started to lose interest and then went off to college, but my collecting hiatus was short lived as I resumed in the mid-1980’s, fortunately never disposing of my collection in the mean time. My last year in college I put an ad in the local paper offering to buy any old baseball cards and managed to acquire a couple collections of 1960’s cards, but ashamedly got caught up in the Topps/Fleer/Donruss rookie craze and blew most of my money on that crap. Soon I saw the light and changed my focus to 1950’s and 1960’s Topps and Bowman cards. Through several Denver area dealers and numerous SCD mail order transactions I built a nice mid-grade collection of star cards and started to move back in time. First it was the 1941 Playballs (which coincided with my first National in Chicago in 1990 or 1991), then it was Goudeys, Cracker Jacks, T-cards and ended with a couple Allen & Ginters. I was ostensibly a HOF type collector, but my collection lacked any real focus. My collecting world changed forever in 1995 when I read a VCBC article on Cuban cards, in particular the Billikens. I had always been interested in the old Negro Leagues, probably originally playing off my dad’s involvement with the civil rights movement and then feeding from my penchant for the underdog and/or tragic stories. My senior thesis in high school was on the Negro Leagues and the only resource material at the time was Robert Peterson’s “Only the Ball was White”. When I found out that there existed cards of Oscar Charleston and Pop Lloyd that was all I could think about. Through a fortuitous series of chance meetings, phone calls, and letters over the next few years coupled with a ravenous hunger to learn more about the subject I managed to worm my into the clandestine world of Cuban baseball cards and soon I was the proud owner of my first actual Billiken cigarette card – Habana outfielder and Negro League star Clint Thomas - it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen! I have been fortunate to meet up with others who share this obsession and it has created some great friendships. I have also been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and had the money (at the expense of most of my American collection) to participate in several large deals. This particular niche of the hobby is constantly unfolding before my eyes as new info keeps popping up, and interest continues to build. That’s my story so far, hopefully there will be many more chapters to write.