Before people started placing $$ values on cards you often were disappointed to get a Rookie card. "Who are these guys?"

Remember the Team Checklist cards?

If I get over to my folks' place sometime soon, I'll dig out the bin that has all mine and take shots of a few of my favorites.

 

My favorite is the Kirby Puckett rookie card... and about 40 other Kirby Puckett cards. He was my favorite player on my favorite team as a kid.

I have somewhere around 50k-60k cards, tucked in boxes in my basement. I have nearly every complete Topps set from about 1978 to the mid 90's. I also have nearly complete sets from 1971-1977. I used to go grocery shopping with my mom every week and she would by me Topps cards that came in a three pack. I'd open them, and I had a bunch of storage cases that looked like lockers that had slots for every team. I later got binders, and would trade with a bunch of my friends. In the 80's, my mom started buying me just complete sets. I really had drifted away in the late 80's but started buying again in 1993 or so, when the craze really blew up again. That lasted about 4 years, and I really haven't done much since. During the craze in the 90's, I did make some very good decisions, trading some of the rare "chase" cards for older cards. I picked up some Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams and other star cards from the 50's and 60's. I really need to go through my cards and make sure my really good cards get protected and figure out some sort of way to display some of the one's I'm more fondly connected to.

Before people started placing $$ values on cards you often were disappointed to get a Rookie card. "Who are these guys?"

 

I've had and sold this one:

 

I had everything from around 74-75 to about 1981-82. I never did the spoke thing, just never made sense to me. We collected and traded around the neighborhood quite a bit. I ended up with most of the others cards by trading the replica batting helmets that Slush Puppies came in to my buddies for a handful of cards at a time. Then when Slush Puppie came out with replica football helmets that you could get your Slush in, I cleaned up and ended up trading those little plastic helmets for everyone's cards.

 

Then I went to college and my mom sold them during a garage sale for $20...I still haven't forgiven her.

Before people started placing $$ values on cards you often were disappointed to get a Rookie card. "Who are these guys?"

 

I think Koosman might be worth something some day!

Edited July 27, 201511 yr by Jumper_Dad

Back in the day, we "flipped" cards against classmates all the time -- at recess and before and after school against the old rock and brick grade school building, in the bathroom etc. It got so bad that the principal banned the cards, because younger kids were crying when they were "wiped out."

 

We played three versions:

 

"Closests," in which each player (2, 3 or more) flipped a card, and the closest to the wall took all the cards.

 

"Knock-downs," where you propped a card or cards up against the wall, and then took turns flipping cards to try to knock them down, and he who did it got all the cards on the ground.

 

And a game whose name I can't remember but might have been called "tops," in which a line of guys got pretty far from the wall and started flipping cards, and the first guy to land a card on top of another card got all the cards on the ground. But it couldn't just be the little edge, it had to be past that little border on the card.

 

Oh the cards we damaged (which is why when the collecting of cards became commercialized), no kid would EVER flip cards and risk hurting them. Instead, they brought the cards to school in binders. Binders!

 

I remember when flipping, you'd tuck the cards you needed under the stack in your hands to try to avoid losing them. And if you won a Cincinnati Red, a team photo or an All-Star, you might even tuck it in your pocket. How we loved to go against kids who hated the Reds and liked, say, the Yankees or the Cardinals or Cubs, because they'd flip Reds all day with nary a thought.

 

To buy the cards, my brother and I would search for returnable pop bottles (especially along the RR tracks) and turn them into the store for a nickel each.

I have some really good cards. I'll dig a few out and post some of my favorites later today

This is a good thread Clyde.... Kudos :thumb:. I am enjoying reading everyone's memories, cards, etc.

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We cannot forget Kellogg's 3-D cards.

For a few years Topps had "traded" cards.

Here's the "rated rookie" card of the guy the Reds took instead of Derek Jeter.

Anyone remember cutting these out?