[carney22]

Nearly four years since the last post, but this is a pretty timeless topic . . .

Collecting by series, for me, was what collecting was all about. It's what made it fun, and what made it a challenge. Remember, there was only one card company in the game, one major set each year, and the experience of collecting that set over the course of the season was both exhilarating and frustrating.

My first year as a collector was 1967 (so, not surprisingly, it ended up being my favorite set of all time). I was 10 that summer, and I had a mentor, another kid at school who'd been collecting for a couple of years and helped explain the concept of series . . . so unlike a lot of the posters here, I knew what that was all about.

Living in several different locations in the far south suburbs of Chicago over the course of my youth, I was always able to find a drug store or 5&10 that carried baseball cards; fortunately, the places I used as primary sources never seemed to have a problem with putting out the new series when they arrived, no matter how much of the previous series remained. But you never knew just when it was going to happen. It seemed like it was every three or four weeks, and in my area it always seemed to happen at the end of the week, a Thursday or a Friday. Inevitably, my thirst for the next series would mean I'd optimistically go looking for the new cards a week before they were released. You bought a pack and hoped it would be something you hadn't seen, but usually I'd go home disappointed, knowing I had another week or two to wait.

And remember, most kids in the '60s or '70s had a nickel or a dime or maybe a quarter in their pockets. A full box of cards could be bought for less than $2, but no one had $2. So it wasn't instant gratification. You'd open your packs, play the "got-'em-got-'em-need-'em-got-'em" game and then walk or bicycle home, until you could scrape up a few more coins. Each series took awhile to put together. But one of the cards in each series was the checklist for the next series, a tantalizing look at what was to come in a few weeks. Who would be on the rookie cards? What did the combo card titles mean? It was all a part of a six-month journey from one series to the next until . . . completion.

I did, at some point, understand that later series were less available than the first few, but what I never understood until years later was the concept of the double-printed card. It all made sense later, of course, but at the time, no one could understand why you got so many cards of one guy and no one could find a card of someone else.

In the summer of '67, I can remember buying pack after pack of fifth series cards before finally getting a Dave McNally. I remember doing the same with the sixth series, seeking a Juan Marichal, until after walking out of a local pharmacy following another fruitless purchase I ran into another kid who'd just gotten a Marichal in a pack he'd bought. I offered him everything in my hands for that card, and since he wasn't really a collector, he agreed. He probably would have just given it to me.

After suffering a 10-year-old's angst over completing those two late series, I mad a key decision: responding to an ad in Baseball Digest, I saved up a few dollars and ordered a complete set of the seventh series cards, from Bruce Yeko, one of the early mail-order dealers. Now, the 1967 seventh series is one of the legendary "hard-to-find" sets of the baby boomer era. I don't think I ever saw any seventh-series wax packs in my local stores (although I probably wasn't looking too hard). I completed my 1967 set, and still collect the annual Topps set to this day.

Would I have continued to be a collector if I'd suffered week after week of disappointment in trying to find seventh series cards at the drug store? That's a question I can't answer. From then on I did frequently lean on ordering sets from Yeko and, later, Renata Galasso . . . and yet I continued to buy wax packs. As a later-year boomer, those simple experiences always invoke the most blissful of summer memories.