Moms and Cards

[JackR]

When I was away at college (“WE ARE!”), my Mom told me I’d better come home and get my baseball cards. In a cleaning frenzy, my Dad had put them out with the trash. The good news: my Mom brought them back.

In all, my Mom saved about 4,000 cards mostly from 1957-1961. I still have some of them today.

So here’s my question: did your mother save your cards, or did she trash them?

[jchcollins]

My folks saved all my cards, but it was the mid 90's when I went to college, and by then of course everyone knew you weren't supposed to throw away baseball cards. The bulk of my vintage collection got temporarily stored in a safety deposit box when my folks moved around 1998, but I rescued the cards shortly thereafter.

My mother in particular was always a champion of my collection, from age 10 or so on. I rarely heard "no" when it came to cards. From junk wax at the grocery store, to my first true vintage prize (a '66 Koufax) and even Mantle cards - Mom would spring for me and then even endure it when my Dad would say "You spent HOW MUCH on baseball cards?" She was a special lady in that regard and I miss her very much...

[JackR]

Here’s to Moms everywhere who did what yours and mine did!

[riggs336]

I had an army foot locker full of cards in my closet. When I left for college in 1965 I asked my mom to keep them safe. "They might be worth something some day."
I didn't pick them up until 1972 and, not coincidentally, that's the year I got back in the hobby for good.
Thanks, Mom.

[pete zouras]

just a handful worthy of safe deposit cost/protection. my beer can collection didn't survive due to crickets inhabiting them at some point their chirping amplified throughout the house via the vents

[ullmandds]

Having started collecting in the mid-70s… The common theme of “my mother threw my baseball cards away” was already part of The lore of the hobby. She knew not to touch my cards!!

[D. Bergin]

When I first moved out of my parents house to move in with my future wife into a small apartment two towns over, I left all my cards at my parents house.

Not long after, a former "Friend" of the family, broke into my parents house and stole most of my cards, thinking he had hit a gold mine.

Knowing I was moving out of the house with my girlfriend, I had already sold most anything that was worth anything, setting up at local shows. He mostly got stacks of Craig Jefferies rookies and albums full of 70's and 80's stars, that wasn't worth much back then. Might have been something in there that might be worth something now, but not too much back then.

They caught him, but never recovered the cards. Got a little payday from my parents homeowners insurance at about a 1/3rd of the cards value of whatever I could remember was stolen...which wasn't very much, but at the time I was pretty ok with.

[Eggoman]

My Mom NEVER threw my or my 3 brothers cards out! She DID realize how much they meant to us and that they MIGHT BE worth something someday.

But did she EVER throw BOXES OF THEM down the stairs after one (OR MORE) of her sons upset her??? YOU BETCHA SHE DID!!!

[Vintagedeputy]

My dad used to work for the Department of Sanitation at an incinerator where they burned the trash. He was constantly bringing home shoe boxes of cards for me!

[steve B]

Mom didn't throw mine away. She usually brought some home, and sent in for the occasional mail in offer. And picked up a couple Hostess ad signs for me.

When I was very young, she did make me throw out all the coke caps I'd gathered at a party. She didn't want me stuffing my pockets full of "dirty old bottlecaps"

[insidethewrapper]

Not my mother, but my brother burned them all. Why ? He didn't think I wanted them anymore when I was in High School. They were 1957-1962.
My dad had 1933 and 1934 Goudey's and when he returned from WW2 they were gone.

[skil55voy]

My cards (3000) were in a very large box that my mother kept for me. I took them with me to Maryland when I joined the Army.

[cubman1941]

Well, contrary to most of the posts, my mother tossed all of my cards when I went into the Army in 1961. There was not a lot of them just a small box but they were all from 1952-1955. When I finally returned home I looked for them and she said she got rid of them as they were taking up space in the closet. That didn't bother me but what did bother me is she kept two footlockers full of college text books in case my brother (who went one semester) ever went back to school!! These weren't disposed of until my father passed in 1975.

[fkm_bky]

Mom never touched my cards, thankfully. She knew how much I enjoyed collecting them over the years. My Dad got into collecting too, so that helped. Now that they're nearly both 90 years old, and none of my other siblings collected, he had me load up all his cards from the 70's, 80's and 90's on a visit home before they moved into a retirement village. Mostly complete sets from 1973 to 1995 with a bunch of unopened 1989 to 1993 topps, score dunruss, fleer and upper deck. My wife asks what I'm going to do with all of them...I just shrug and say...keep em', I guess! [Insert wife eyeroll here]

This is a fun read!

Bill

[cornhusker]

My parents never threw anything away. They even helped add to my collection. Every Spring, the Easter bunny would hide a couple boxes of wax packs around the house with his colored eggs for my sister and I to find.
Bonus- dad hooked me up with his silver age comics before grandma got a chance to toss them. About a short box worth of cowboy and classic illustrated books with only 2 marvel books. Those just happened to be a Spiderman 1 and Daredevil 1.

[Prof]

My grandma was the stereotype in these stories.

She tossed all of my dad's stuff the second he went to college in the early 70s. He didn't even leave town for school, and would've taken it to his apartment if she'd have asked.

As far as I know, he didn't have many cards. But, he had runs of mid-60s and early 70s comic books that would be worth a chunk of money now.

I have a handful of his that she missed, including a Conan #1 and Dr. Strange #3. Too bad the most high dollar ones are gone.

[GasHouseGang]

Usually you read about how Mom gave away someone's cards. In this case, my cousin's Mom gave away his cards to me! They weren't anything great, but they were older than anything I had, and included 1961 - 1963's. He never asked me for them, so I guess he was okay with it.

[yanks4]

I am seventy years old now and had collected 1961 and 1962 Topps... with some Three Stooges, Phoney Ads, Ted Williams Fleer (which I disliked then). I was also given shoeboxes full of cards from the the 50s from neighbors who had older boys....I can still see them in my mind 57 Mantles etc. etc.....They just disappeared except for the Yankees I had scotched taped to a booklet I made with a Yankee photo pack that I had sent away for ...I still have them all with of course paperloss from the tape...She did save the 4 Hartland Statues my brother and I had Mantle, Mays, Fox and Banks which are in great shape..along with pieces of my Alamo set..and Blue and Grey Confederate plastic soldiers. Little League uniform is long gone. I still have my dads stamp collection from the 20s...among a few of his other toys. I wonder if he collected Goudeys? I remember my mom saying to me in the mid 60s that a Mantle card sold for $35 and she was astounded!!

[ValKehl]

As a youth, I collected from 1955-1960. In the mid 1970's, when I was married with 4 rug rats, Mom called one day to inform that she and Dad had come across my cards while cleaning out their storage area. Thankfully, Mom asked if I wanted them, or if should she trash them. Thinking that at least 1 of my 3 boys might collect cards when they got older, I asked Mom to save them for me to pick up the next time I visited. None of my boys got interested in collecting, but I started collecting again in the mid-late 1980's and have been at it ever since.

[robw1959]

Originally Posted by yanks4

I am seventy years old now and had collected 1961 and 1962 Topps... with some Three Stooges, Phoney Ads, Ted Williams Fleer (which I disliked then). I was also given shoeboxes full of cards from the the 50s from neighbors who had older boys....I can still see them in my mind 57 Mantles etc. etc.....They just disappeared except for the Yankees I had scotched taped to a booklet I made with a Yankee photo pack that I had sent away for ...I still have them all with of course paperloss from the tape...She did save the 4 Hartland Statues my brother and I had Mantle, Mays, Fox and Banks which are in great shape..along with pieces of my Alamo set..and Blue and Grey Confederate plastic soldiers. Little League uniform is long gone. I still have my dads stamp collection from the 20s...among a few of his other toys. I wonder if he collected Goudeys? I remember my mom saying to me in the mid 60s that a Mantle card sold for $35 and she was astounded!!

That $35 Mantle card was likely a '52 Topps issue. I remember how you could buy the '50 Mantles all day long in the mid-70s for around $10 at the most (and that was for a ''53 Topps). By the mid-70s, the '52 Topps Mantle had crept all the way up to around $150 in price.

[isiahfan]

Originally Posted by Vintagedeputy

My dad used to work for the Department of Sanitation at an incinerator where they burned the trash. He was constantly bringing home shoe boxes of cards for me!

That's effing great....what's the best thing you remember getting?...time frame?

[Vintagedeputy]

Originally Posted by isiahfan

That's effing great....what's the best thing you remember getting?...time frame?

The time frame was the late 1970s and early 1980s. He had a coworker who also collected so I’m sure that guy cherry picked the best cards and the vintage stuff. I would get shoe boxes of cards from the 70s, 1972 to 1979 approximately..

[ClementeFanOh]

My mom wasn't the villain either. She knew I loved cards and I did a decent
job of hiding them away. My brother- and then I- were the culprits. He knew
how much I loved the cards, and when we fought he would vow to take several
cards from my collection and put them in his, knowing I may not miss them.
My solution was to write my initials on the backs of the cards! That showed
him, didn't it! I specifically recall this phenomenon with mid to late 70s
Topps football. Ah, what a wonderful memory(??)... Trent King

[John V]

Mom saved mine in a shoe box.

[pete zouras]

I was often the beneficiary of other kids thrown away collections by moms, trash picking them in the wee hours of the morning as I made my rounds. I was always thrilled when I found cards from before mycollecting days.

[GrewUpWithJunkWax]

My mom saved my stuff as well. For 23 years, my collection sat in the basement under a set of stairs, somehow avoiding water damage. I knew she had kept some stuff from my room and had stored it in boxes, but I wasn't really expecting much. So when I finally decided to retrieve it all, I was was surprised to find everything. It was fun to re-discover it, and that drew me back to the hobby.

My father-in-law was an unfortunate one. In the mid-50s, he would bat boy for the local college team, and with the 50 cents he'd earn each game, he'd promptly run off to buy baseball cards. He lost his collection when he was still a kid though. One random day, he couldn't find his cards. When he asked his parents, they told him he needed to stop wasting money on cards, and that they had trashed all of them.

[John1941]

I'm a little young for this thread...

My grandma did not throw out my dad's cards, God bless her. My mom tolerates and partly understands my collecting - my dad's more supportive.

[Stampsfan]

My mom, sadly gone too soon, always said to me that she didn't want to see the cards out. So I kept them in a drawer, out of site. This would have been the late 60's to very early 70's.

After a bunch of time, they moved across the country, and they packed everything. When I got back into the hobby in the late 80's, they were still in the same shoe boxes I had as a kid. You can imagine I was thrilled, and they are still core to the collection I have built since then.

She did a lot of wonderful things for me, and this was was just another. While she passed in the 90's, she did see how much I enjoyed the same hobby when I returned to it.

[Kaneen]

This thread about moms and cards really strikes a chord with me, especially when it comes to its timing. My dear mother passed away a little over a week ago at the age of 91. Such a wonderful and amazing mom, I was so blessed to be her son.

I collected cards as a kid from around 1969 to 1977. When I went away to college in 1979, I left the floor of my bedroom closet covered with boxes of cards, probably 5,000 or so. A year or 2 later I came home to visit one weekend, and all my cards were sitting in the basement beside the door leading out to the driveway. I asked my mom why my cards were sitting by the basement door, and she told me she cleaned out the closet in my room so she could make room for some things she wanted to store. She said she sat the cards by the door waiting to sit them out on trash day. I had stopped collecting when I discovered cars and women, lol. While I hated to see my childhood cards go, I certainly had no place to put them in a small college dorm room. So I didn't put up too much of a fight.

A few weeks later when I came back home for a visit, much to my surprise all my cards were back in my former bedroom closet...this time well-boxed and wrapped in plastic garbage bags to protect them! I asked mom what the deal was with my cards? She said, "Well, the day after you left to go back to school, I was watching the evening news. They had a story about a baseball card that sold for 100 dollars! Can you believe that?! I thought maybe yours might be worth something, so I was afraid to throw them away and brought them back upstairs."

Whew, that was a close one! I was saved from disaster by the fortunate timing of a news story that my mom just happened to see. A few years later when I got married and got a place of my own, I retrieved my cards and took them to live permanently with me.

Thanks for everything mom...you truly were the best!

[kmac32]

When I was at college, mom threatened but asked first. I retrieved them and my wife encouraged my collection. At that time, I kept onlt the Topps Cubs and went on to complete a comprehensive collection of Topps Cubs from 1951 to current including all erroers and variations for base and update sets. Then got bit by the Prewar bug.

[Popcorn]

that’s awesome! my mom saved my junk was 80’s-90’s but unfortunately it had no affect on my net worth lol

[Leon]

Just seeing this.
Very sorry about your mom's passing, Kevin. My condolences. She did have a pretty long life so you got to have her for a long time. That is a great story about saving the cards.

Originally Posted by Kaneen

This thread about moms and cards really strikes a chord with me, especially when it comes to its timing. My dear mother passed away a little over a week ago at the age of 91. Such a wonderful and amazing mom, I was so blessed to be her son.

I collected cards as a kid from around 1969 to 1977. When I went away to college in 1979, I left the floor of my bedroom closet covered with boxes of cards, probably 5,000 or so. A year or 2 later I came home to visit one weekend, and all my cards were sitting in the basement beside the door leading out to the driveway. I asked my mom why my cards were sitting by the basement door, and she told me she cleaned out the closet in my room so she could make room for some things she wanted to store. She said she sat the cards by the door waiting to sit them out on trash day. I had stopped collecting when I discovered cars and women, lol. While I hated to see my childhood cards go, I certainly had no place to put them in a small college dorm room. So I didn't put up too much of a fight.

A few weeks later when I came back home for a visit, much to my surprise all my cards were back in my former bedroom closet...this time well-boxed and wrapped in plastic garbage bags to protect them! I asked mom what the deal was with my cards? She said, "Well, the day after you left to go back to school, I was watching the evening news. They had a story about a baseball card that sold for 100 dollars! Can you believe that?! I thought maybe yours might be worth something, so I was afraid to throw them away and brought them back upstairs."

Whew, that was a close one! I was saved from disaster by the fortunate timing of a news story that my mom just happened to see. A few years later when I got married and got a place of my own, I retrieved my cards and took them to live permanently with me.

Thanks for everything mom...you truly were the best!

[Leon]

Just seeing this.
Very sorry about your mom's passing, Kevin. My condolences. She did have a pretty long life so you got to have her for a long time. That is a great story about saving the cards.

Originally Posted by Kaneen

This thread about moms and cards really strikes a chord with me, especially when it comes to its timing. My dear mother passed away a little over a week ago at the age of 91. Such a wonderful and amazing mom, I was so blessed to be her son.

I collected cards as a kid from around 1969 to 1977. When I went away to college in 1979, I left the floor of my bedroom closet covered with boxes of cards, probably 5,000 or so. A year or 2 later I came home to visit one weekend, and all my cards were sitting in the basement beside the door leading out to the driveway. I asked my mom why my cards were sitting by the basement door, and she told me she cleaned out the closet in my room so she could make room for some things she wanted to store. She said she sat the cards by the door waiting to sit them out on trash day. I had stopped collecting when I discovered cars and women, lol. While I hated to see my childhood cards go, I certainly had no place to put them in a small college dorm room. So I didn't put up too much of a fight.

A few weeks later when I came back home for a visit, much to my surprise all my cards were back in my former bedroom closet...this time well-boxed and wrapped in plastic garbage bags to protect them! I asked mom what the deal was with my cards? She said, "Well, the day after you left to go back to school, I was watching the evening news. They had a story about a baseball card that sold for 100 dollars! Can you believe that?! I thought maybe yours might be worth something, so I was afraid to throw them away and brought them back upstairs."

Whew, that was a close one! I was saved from disaster by the fortunate timing of a news story that my mom just happened to see. A few years later when I got married and got a place of my own, I retrieved my cards and took them to live permanently with me.

Thanks for everything mom...you truly were the best!

[Kaneen]

Originally Posted by Leon

Just seeing this.
Very sorry about your mom's passing, Kevin. My condolences. She did have a pretty long life so you got to have her for a long time. That is a great story about saving the cards.

Thank you for the kind words Leon.