As a kid, from 1955 (age 11) to 1960 (age 16). I had 3 buddies who also collected bb cards. We were very competitive, and we played games to win one another's cards - some flipping, but our favorite games were called "sail touch" and "knock down" - we usually just "risked" our duplicates, but one day we got bold and risked our "singles"; I got lucky and won all of my buddy's Dodgers (incl. Koufax, Snider, Reese, etc.) without losing any of my cherished Senators! As we got older, we learned to play blackjack and poker and gambled using our bb cards! Those were fun days!!
Fortunately, Mom didn't toss my bb cards after I left home. Circa 1970, Mom called to say she found my boxes of cards when she and dad were cleaning out their storage area, and she asked me if I wanted them. I asked her to hold them for me until the next time I visited, thinking that my toddlers might take interest in them when they grew up (they didn't).
When the first Beckett & Eckes price guide came out (1979, if I remember correctly), I learned of it from a story in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, which stated that adult sports card collectors were "coming out of the closet" so to speak about their collecting fetish. I drove over to Eckes' small retail shop in Laurel, MD, and purchased a copy, which I used to checklist my childhood collection that I had stored for several years in my damp basement. This served as the catalyst to get me back into card collecting during the 1980s.
Val
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