"Collecting Sports Cards, a Youngster's Delight" - Time Out #58

Ahhh...to be a youngster in the middle of America's Heartland in the mid-1950's, when life was simpler, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and OK celebrated its first half century of statehood!

That's what I'm talking about, youth were on bicycles everywhere around Our Town, little league sports were the gold standards of extra curricular activities, and auto air conditioning was a novelty.

This was the ideal setting to develop another great activity. With the upcoming Fall Classic (aka World Series), my early years of sports card collecting jumped to the front of my scribe head to briefly discuss with you.

Way back, our gang carefully looked for those few empty soda pop bottles, worth 2-cents each, assembled the empties in a hand-pulled red wagon or our bicycle front wire basket, and transported them to the nearest mom and pop neighborhood grocery store. Once there, you would be given your hard-earned change to quickly spend at Tiger Drug, College Drug or a few other locations around then compact Stillwater, buying several wax packs of sports cards, usually the baseball variety.

It was very addictive, even at 5-cents per individual pack, or a crisp George Washington (i.e., $1) for a full box of 20 separate wax packs. Very few of our gang had pockets or allowances deep enough to afford the box purchases, although those purchases brought lots of ooooooos and ahhhhhhhs from your peers.

So what to do with your hard cardboard picture prizes once you had purchased them?

Well, duh, open them, of course, to see what stars you were lucky enough to have gotten in this particular attempt.

There were individual check list cards and several series (specific numbers released in order from the different card manufacturers), and, of course, you always got doubles, triples or more of the same player. Because of this duplication regularity, it created card trading interaction with your buddies. If you were trying to secure a highly sought-after player, you might have to offer several or many of your duplicate cards in order to get the super star players or rare (fewer printed) players.Your ultimate goal was to have a complete set of every card printed that particular year. This caused youth entrepreneurship, certainly a little known benefit of that time in Our Town long ago.

And guess what else you had WAY too much of during these precise pack opening times?

Way, way, way too much thick, extra sugary, multiple flat slabs of pink bubble gum. Each pack came with a generous slab of the pink stuff with your usual less than 10 cards enclosed.

Because you would become so absorbed with your various new players, you would naturally stick slab after slab after slab into your small mouth. In almost no time, your cheeks would look like a chipmunk with bulging pouches, and trying to chew this glob of goo was like trying to manipulate a mouth full of concrete. Forget about trying to talk to your buddies or blowing a bubble during those happy times.

After all the initial excitement and trading calmed down, you would take your cards home and carefully file them away. Another fairly common way to celebrate with your "doubles" or multiple cards, were to upgrade your single-geared, regular bicycle by putting the disposable cards on your bike spokes. This trick, of course, was cool, and made you sound like you were peddling a motorcycle at age 10.

It also ruined lots of your cards, but usually you had so many you really didn't care, and would rather have the roar of your bicycle's "card motor" as you rocketed around our community.

Card collecting was also a memory challenge for yours truly. For hours, I would play a game with my buddies and/or by myself, showing part of the front of a card, then guessing who it was, what year the card was released, and various statistics on the reverse side. Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you, the front side showed the player's color photograph, and the reverse side gave a brief bio and stats about the player. That reverse side would be mostly memorized by me, too, and, at least, some of the time, correctly. Lots and lots of useful (?) information for a young mind to recall. Yes, folks, that was then, not so much now.

I would also devise games to play with the cards, and my dear friend, Fred, and I would play against each other for hours with our cards. If I remember correctly, he won most of the games, and that always made me want to try harder!

As the years rolled by and Debbie and I had our 3 children, I passed the love of collecting sports cards on to them and my bride. On most of our many American road trips we regularly took as a family, we would stop in the middle of No Where, USA, and buy several boxes of whatever sport cards the roadside merchant had available. When we arrived at our nightly motel, we would have "openings" which consisted of opening ALL the wax packs, roaring and laughing with each other each time someone would capture a special card in his or her pack.Remember, too, someone had to pick up all the trash pack wrapping paper.

In the late 1980's, our family even owned a brick and mortar sports card/memorabilia retail store on Main Street in Our Town. It was a fun/crazy idea, but far too labor intensive. No, we didn't sell out to billionaire Warren Buffet. After several years, we merely closed, locked the doors, and retained our memorable experiences in that exotic undertaking.

The silver lining is I still own most of my childhood (50's & 60's) sports cards, and that is a good thing. Many of my peers way back when, don't have their cards today, due to them throwing them away, their mother's throwing them away or many other situations where the cards cannot be located many decades later.

As I reflect back, it really brings me pleasant feelings to think back on just how simple cardboard color images could have brought so many people so much pleasure and personal interactions long ago.

And that's my sports card story, and I'm sticking to it, without that incredible pile of slab bubblegum............