It was the 1967 Ken Berry card . . . I was 10 years old, just starting to follow baseball. The first series had just come out, so it was probably April. As all of us grade schoolers were milling around in front of the school, waiting for the doors to open, a friend of mine who'd been collecting for a couple of years and had a stack of '67s in his possession, showed me the Berry card. A posed swinging shot, big blue sky in the background, along with the stadium's outfield walls and other players out for batting practice . . . It had "WHITE SOX," my adopted team, written in big, deep purple letters across the bottom and a (gasp!) facsimile autograph. It was beautiful. I started collecting soon after, and have never looked back . . .
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