How long you collected as a kid ?...

[39special]

I started collecting in 1978 age 11.I would save my allowance, and went
to a local candy store and would buy a box of Topps,usually every couple
of months.Buy 1980 or 81 card stores started popping up in my area,
and my allowance went toward buying older cards.By 1983 girls and cars
became my priority,and I stopped collecting.In 2005 I got back in to
collecting.I'm still in to girls and cars but I collecting cards makes me feel
like I'm a kid again.

[ls7plus]

I began collecting starting with baseball in '58 at age five, and pretty much continued part way through 1969. I can still remember the excitement that echoed through the neighborhood when spring came along each year and some kid was the first to spread the news that the new Topps cards were out! Usually, we each got on our bikes and rode down to the corner market and/or the local drugstore and bought as many packs as we could afford. I always pretty much stuck to baseball, as if I wasn't playing it, I was reading about it, or watching it, or playing Stratomatic baseball with buddies for long hours at a stretch (which was very, very conducive to learning about pre-war stars, as we ordered not only the new game cards each year, but the all-time greatest team series and finally Stratomatic's hall-of-famer AL and NL series. We'd have a draft of all of the greatest players of all time that we had cards for, and play countless 50-game seasons before starting all over again--Ah, the delight of a youth filled to the brim with baseball!

Got back into the hobby in 1990 when a fellow lawyer at my office would bring his baseball cards in occasionally. Others made fun of him, but I thought they were pretty cool, so I began collecting again, mostly buying all the wrong stuff at first (read here new cards printed by the hundreds of thousands, at a minimum!), until I gravitated to vintage, about equally split between '50's to '60's and pre-war, in the early to mid-nineties (with something of a detour to McGwire and Sosa, plus Frank Thomas--how I loved to watch him hit) during that time. My focus has been primarily pre-war for the last half-dozen years or so.

Good thread!

Larry

[hangman62]

Bob,
Come on.. Very much into baseball cards at age 3 ?..AGE 3 ??

[almostdone]

I knew of baseball as a game, of course, but never knew anything of cards when I was very young untill the summer of 1978. I was 6 years old at the time and my older brother was injured badly in an accident that put him in the hospital for over a week. The associate pastor at our church bought him a full box of 1978 Topps cards that he opened and looked through while in recovery. Our family didn't have any money to buy other cards after that for a while so my brother and I knew everyone of those cards back and forth. That was the year Topps put a game on the back and we played it constantly. I learned to flip, sort and count with those cards but more important I learned to love these small cardboard treasures of my boyhood heroes.
After that I picked up a pack here and there until high school then got a complete set of Topps every year. In 1990 I stated to follow a young player in Seattle named Griffey and that's when I went nuts on cards until about 1995. Like most I realized there was not value to keep and couldn't keep up with it. So I abandoned it until about 2001 when a friend introduced me to Ebay and vintage cards. Form then on its been a passion and a hobby.
But every time I see any card from 1978 I can tell you wats on the back. Good thread!!
Drew

[John V]

I still have a number of my cards from "The Wonder Years". 1961, 1962, 1963 and a couple from 1964. I didn't save any of the gum.

[Exhibitman]

Age 6 (1971) started me out. I was passionately into it until 1980 (age 15). I purchased some packs in 1981, mostly as an afterthought, and more or less dropped out until about 1987 or 1988, when I was in law school. I started attending shows [remember those?] regularly at that point and have been full bore at it ever since.

[ls7plus]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Age 6 (1971) started me out. I was passionately into it until 1980 (age 15). I purchased some packs in 1981, mostly as an afterthought, and more or less dropped out until about 1987 or 1988, when I was in law school. I started attending shows [remember those?] regularly at that point and have been full bore at it ever since.

You've come a heckuva long way since then, Adam, with the expertise you've acquired! Thanks for all the times you've shared it.

Sincerely,

Larry

[scgaynor]

1978-1980 - Several Packs a Year
1981-1989 - Hardcore!
1990-1991 - A couple boxes a year
1991-1993 - Not much at all, I was 18-20, it was all about girls and cars
1993-1997 - Some Pre-1948 cards, almost strictly memorabilia
1997-Now - Full time dealer, no more collecting, you can't eat baseball cards or put them into your gas tank.

Scott

[uffda51]

First bought packs in 1959 (age 8) after mom brought home a shoe box full of 1956 Topps baseball and 1955 Topps All-America football from a rummage sale. Heavy in 1960-1962. Less so in 63, then big in 1964. Nothing after that until 1981 when Fleer-Donruss challenged Topps.

[DaveW]

I first started buying packs in 1966. A friend and I would ride our bikes over to the local drug store and buy them. This continued until he moved away in 1970. So my peak years were from age 9 to 13. I didn't see the cards again until the 1980s when my parents moved and my Mom made me take them (at least she didn't throw them away!). It wasn't until 2001 when I discovered EBay and decided to finish a few of those sets that I got back into it and the rest is history.

[Brian Van Horn]

1972 (age 6) to 1984.

[53Browns]

I was 12 years old in 1980 when I started. Coincidentally, in 1981 when Donruss and Fleer brought out sets to compete with Topps, that was when the hobby literally exploded! Hobby shops and shows everywhere! It was awesome! I collected actively and passionately until 1984ish. Then resumed as an adult to find that the beloved cards of my childhood were so mass produced they didnt seem likely to hold their values.

[Big Ben]

Interesting thread!

I started collecting in 1972 with Football cards and collected Football and Baseball through 1980. --Then returned to the hobby in college around 1983 through the early 1990's. -- My collection was dormant with the exception of a few trades and sales here and there until 2008 when I reorganized everything and got interested in vintage baseball cards.

[barrysloate]

I bought my first pack late in the summer of 1958, when I was six years old (I know I've told this story before). The one card I distinctly remember getting was the Ted Williams All-Star. I didn't know what All-Star meant but I did think all the stars against the red background looked cool. I continued buying packs in 1959, peaked in 1960, and continued sporadically from 1961-63. Then in 1964 the Beatles came and my money was spent on LP's and 45's.

But here's a childhood memory I have that I think others might find pretty interesting. Around 1960 I was at my friend Lenny's house and I was looking at his older brother's shoebox of childhood baseball cards. And I remember with absolute certainty they were 1952 Topps. And here's the part that I couldn't explain then and understand today: the cards were in numerical order, and the run was nearly complete up to about #300. And then inexplicably there were only a smattering of cards throughout the numbers above #300. My eight year old mind wondered why he was missing so many of those cards when he had nearly all the others. It was my introduction to the 52 high numbers and how scarce they were, but at the time I couldn't explain it.

[Gradedcardman]

Started in 1972 at age 5 with basketball and baseball. Added football in 1975. Collected hot and heavy until age 33 in 1999(marriage). Started back in 2006(post marriage). Going strong again the last five years.

[SteveMitchell]

I discovered baseball cards in the spring of 1957 after acquiring a few Topps Davy Crockett cards sometime a year or two earlier. (No memory of where or exactly when; perhaps they were gifts.) The first card set I would complete was the 80-card green back Davy Crockett set; the first baseball set, the 1963 Topps.

Spent about every available cent from 1957 to 1964 on baseball (and a few other) cards except for my Chuck Schilling model glove (1963) which set me back nearly $20 - or a full year of baseball card buying in those days. (Starting in 1960 or '61, I virtually completed the each Topps set while accumulating more than 1,000 duplicates each time.)

My last "kid collection" [insert asterisk here] buy was in the late summer of 1964 when I bought lots of the 1964 Topps Giant Size cards. I did not buy even a single pack in 1965 or for a few years thereafter.

The asterisk: Despite not buying the current cards from neighborhood stores starting in 1965, I did make a couple of purchases via mail order: a 1955 Bowman set (from Barry S. Newman) and 1954 Topps baseball set (Frank Nagy). Both sets were in tip-top condition and, if memory serves correctly, the '55 Bowman cost $12 and Frank let me have a deal on the '54 at something less than $10. (Each was acquired in either 1965 or '66.)

Thanks for the great trip down memory lane.

[spec]

Though I never post, I read this board regularly and can't remember a thread I've enjoyed so thoroughly. OK if I join in?
I discovered baseball cards later than most of you (age 10) because my dad was in the Navy and we usually lived on base (Guantanamo, Parris Island, etc.) where there were no little stores with candy counters. But in 1957 we lived off base (NAS Pensacola) in what is now the Warrington section of the city. I had discovered the Topps Flags of the World set that winter, amassing a near set, so, come spring, it was natural to buy a couple of 1-cent packs of the new baseball series. Luis Aparicio and Johnny Temple (I can't recall which I opened first) and so began a lifetime obsession. I can remember trading Moe Drabowsky and Dee Fondy to help a friend finish his first series, then getting them both in the packs I purchased the next day; paying a kid I'd never seen before 5 cents for Yogi Berra to finish my first series; pedaling crosstown to find the second series and coming home with Duke Snider; trading a pile of 1956s I gotten in the Drabowsky-Fondy deal for Gus Bell to complete Series 3; finding only a handful of packs of the Fourth Series, then being inundated with Fifth Series cards.
That winter we moved 15 miles into the country (3 miles from the nearest store) and I thought my collecting days were over. But a couple of days after we arrived, two neighbor boys arrived on bicycles from their house a mile away and asked if I had any baseball cards. As luck would have it, I had a duplicate of the older boy's favorite player, Ted Kluszewski, and a friendship was forged. Jimmy later traded me most of the 57 Fourth Series cards I needed for chemicals from my chemistry set.
That spring the younger boy and I collected 58s together, discovering an ad for the Card Collectors Co. in the Sporting News that enabled us to fill in the gaps, and we even bought a few cards from older sets. Wayne abandoned cards when we moved up to junior high, but I continued through 1962, buying a box every two weeks when we rode through Warrington on the way to the base commissary.
I didn't quit cold turkey, however. I bought complete sets from 1963-66, then returned to the pack-by-pack method in 1967 when I was a junior in college in Orlando and continued until 1972 in Boston where I discovered the vintage version of the hobby.
Believe it or not, these are very same cards I pulled from those packs in 1957, identifiable by the pinholes I poked in the cards to simulate injuries for a marble game. The 56 Football McCormick is my first sports card, found on the street in San Leandro, Calif.
Sorry to be so long winded.
Bob Richardson

[Matthew H]

Spec, you should post more often. Thanks for sharing.

[barrysloate]

Hi Bob- it's been a very long time. Hope you are doing well.

Regards, Barry