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JohnI still have 95% or more of the cards from when I was a little kid. My first pack was bought by aunt when I was seven (1978 Topps Baseball) during a trip to the grocery store. I still have those cards as well as the thousands of other baseball and football cards purchased during the eighties. My first older cards were a 1959 Topps Football Preston Carpenter and a 1961 Fleer Milt Plum given to me by my neighbor in 1980. I was hooked immediately. My father would take me to shows and shops and I would spend my five bucks on the "old" cards which were mostly 50's football. I still have most of those as well. After college I began purchasing tobacco issues and National Chicle football cards. Not unlike the rest of you, I wish I would have been steered towards the pre-war issues at an earlier age, but have managed to build a meaningful vintage collection in the last fifteen years. Most of my childhood cards are relatively worthless now, but I plan to hold onto them for no other reason of the memories they evoke (and who knows what they will be worth in fifty years?).