How long you collected as a kid ?...

[Volod]

Originally Posted by theseeker

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Now for the painful Mother story. I have three older cousins who had moved on to college and marriage by the time my parents would drag me along to visit my Aunt and Uncle's house in the mid '70's. Bored during a visit, I ventured from my siblings in the TV room to the garage were I found 2 brass ringed, cardboard industrial drums both filled knee high with cards from the 1950's through the early 1960's. Everytime I visited, I could be found sorting through these NrMt gems. And they were all there; Mantles, Mays', Sniders, Berras, Spahns.....

One day as my parents were preparing to leave, my mother along with my Aunt, went to get me. As they entered the garage and found me at my familiar spot, on my knees looking at the cards, my Aunt said "you seem so interest in those old cards, why don't you take them with you?" My mother jumped in" oh no, he's got too many of his own." My "oh please, Mom" went on deaf ears. If she'd only thrown my earl '70's collection away instead

Ahh, brings back so many fond and anguished memories. I had long since stopped collecting at the time I enlisted in 1961, but I was still working on a large stamp collection, so before I took off for boot camp, I gathered up all of my nerd stuff, including several hundred early '50's cards, and secreted it all in a locker in a dank, musty part of the family garage, thinking it was unlikely to be found while I was gone. Wrong again, Watson - I still recall that day sitting on my footlocker in the barracks, reading a breezy note from my sainted mother that ended with, "by the way, your father was cleaning out the garage and found some of your old things that you had forgotten about, so we put them in the trash to make more room for the cars." To this day, I believe Ma knew I treasured that stuff, but she wanted to punish me for choosing the military over college. Judging from the other memoirs posted here, I guess we're all a bunch of obsessive-compulsive hoarders with childhood regression issues, huh?