I am not sure if I have this whole blogging thing down but let me try it again. I have been talking most recently about high school sports.
Given the fact that these sports will be on vacation for at least a few months I want to turn my attention to the world of professional sports.
When I was younger I was a big baseball and baseball card fan. I had everything you could imagine. I was the kid who traded for everyone else’s stuff after they were no longer interested in the sport.
I had Hank Aaron’s rookie card, I had Roberto Clemente’s rookie card and I even had Yogi Berra’s black and white Bowman rookie card. Collecting was a fun time for my parents and I.
My dad would take me to the baseball card shows and I would get autographs from Mickey Mantle, Al Kaline, Norm Cash and even Bob Feller. This was a lot of fun for me and I really enjoyed all that went along with collecting.
The problem was as I got older the market begun to flood with cards from all these companies and there was too much to keep up with. I had all the cards from 1976 to about 1991 but it got too much.
The fun was gone for me and I didn’t have enough money to collect all these all cards from various card companies. So I stopped collecting and put they away.
I would say I starting selling them in 1997 and I made some good money with the cards I had. I just wish now that I have a son we could do something similar together. He is only six so I think baseball cards are too easy to mess up and we would need something less fragile.
I just know that some of my best memories of childhood are of collecting cards and sharing time with my family. Buying packs of cards, sorting them out and making list of what we needed was a task I will never grow weary of.
I hope that fathers and sons can find something to bond them together and something to build relationships with. It doesn’t matter what. It can be coins, stamps, and a walk in the park. That relationship is crucial to having a successful life and really looking at things in a much better light.
If anyone wants to know my favorite player of all time was and still is Pittsburg Pirate Roberto Clemente. So if you want to talk baseball give me a call or post to this blog!
1 comment:
Hey Dave,
Sounds like you and me have a lot in common with the ball card collecting. Only thing is, I still got more than half of my childhood collection.
It's a blessing and a curse; I've moved eight times in the last 12 years. It's a heck of a thing to lug all those ball cards from place to place, and the collection currently takes up a lot of room in my basement. To boot, I have two boys, 7 and 9, who are very curious about the collection and are still too young to not be destructive.
I really enjoyed my collection though, as a kid. I active collected from 1979-1985 and I was able to get my hands on some cool old cards too. I had an old Topps Ted Williams that was a prize. A rookie Pete Rose (still my all-time favorite player). A rookie Jackson. Lots of good Kalines. Lots of good Nolan Ryans (not a rookie though). And, yes, a handful of Clementes. Too many to name really.
I sold a lot of my cards in 2000. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the best market for selling cards since a decade before. I only sold some because my wife-at-the-time was always threatening to throw my cards to the trash one day while I was at work. Worthless, she said.
So I advertised a rookie Griffey, got $100 for it, and suddenly, my trash heap of baseball cards started to look like a gold mine. She urged me to sell more, which I did, but I didn't want to get rid of them.
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