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Posted By: Bill Stone

In 1955 I lived in Burbank, California --our new house was in a former avacado orchard and my brother and I would go and " harvest" the crop, sell the avacados to the neighbors and then take our money down to a little neighborhood grocery store where I would buy as many packs of Topps as I could. My brother would usually buy a huge dill pickle out of a jar on the counter and I would get a Hires rootbeer. We would come home and I would sit outside and open each pack , sorting the players into their teams --hoping to get a Frank Sullivan ( a Burbank boy) or in my case always hoping for a Dale Long , the hero of the Hollywood Stars ( remember this was before the Dodgers came west) but inevitably I would always seem to get one Wayne Terwilliger and one "Spook" Jacobs in every pack!! When the avacados were not a source of income we would go up to the new construction taking place all around our neighborhood and pick up bottles. On Saturdays we would go around the neighborhood and pick up newspapers and store them in a friend's garage and once a month his dad would take us to a recycling plant where we sold the papers --it was a nice little set of businesses that always seemed to give us plenty of money to buy cards .