This cartoon from today's Wash. Post ...

[ValKehl]

will bring either a chuckle or a painful reminder. I'm so fortunate that Mom decided to ask me if I wanted my childhood card collection before she trashed them.
Val

[GoldenAge50s]

I cut that out from MY paper this morning & forgot to post it! I told my Mother in 1958 when I went away to school to NOT throw out any of my "stuff" and she never did! Those cards are the "heart" of my collection today! Mom would have been 105 a week ago today.

[I Only Smoke 4 the Cards]

Nice

[Jayworld]

Nice. My mom never threw anything of mine out, and she supported me collecting cards (and helped me with my collection as a kid) by stopping at the neighborhood 7-11 back in the mid-1970s to pick up a few 25 cent packs.

I think I shared this elsewhere a while back, but my mom was cleaning out some of her old purses several years ago, and found an unopened pack of 1976 Topps baseball cards that she had evidently bought and forgotten to give me. This was in the early 90s. It was fun opening a pack of cards over 15 years old!

She passed away 10 months ago. I miss her.

[z28jd]

My dad had his cards thrown away by my grandmother before I was even born and he still talks about it to this day. I think the part that bothers him the most is that he not only asked her to save them, they were on a shelf in the back of their finished basement and the shelf wasn't being used for anything else. He didn't have many cards, maybe a shoebox full, but he also had comic books he kept in great shape and 100+ ticket stubs from Yankee games in the late 50's-60's. The shelf was built for his stuff and it was so far out of the way, there was no reason the stuff couldn't have stayed there.

One item that luckily was kept from the scrap heap was a Mickey Mantle Day program from 1965 with signatures from Tommy Henrich, Phil Rizzuto, Jerry Coleman, Joe Garagiola and Dizzy Dean. They were all broadcasters at that time, though not all for the Yankees.

[KCRfan1]

Originally Posted by Jayworld

Nice. My mom never threw anything of mine out, and she supported me collecting cards (and helped me with my collection as a kid) by stopping at the neighborhood 7-11 back in the mid-1970s to pick up a few 25 cent packs.

I think I shared this elsewhere a while back, but my mom was cleaning out some of her old purses several years ago, and found an unopened pack of 1976 Topps baseball cards that she had evidently bought and forgotten to give me. This was in the early 90s. It was fun opening a pack of cards over 15 years old!

She passed away 10 months ago. I miss her.

What a nice memory to have Jay. I'm sorry for your loss, mom's really are special......

[kcohen]

Yes, my Mom either threw out or gave away my cards, she couldn't remember which, that I bought in the late 50s at the check-out counter of Peoples Drugstore (now CVS). And I gave her some mild grief over the years. However, the loss is merely sentimental, not financial. We played with our cards, flipped them, put them in our bike spokes, etc. A protective sleeve was unheard of, at least by me. So they would not be worth much anyway. Nonetheless, that cartoon really hits home.

[hoot-owl]

My mom suffers from PackRatitis as do several other members of my family--so it must be a genetic trait. I don't think she would have been capable of tossing the thousands of cards my two brothers and I bought--primarily from 1965-the early 1970s. I toted them around from western NY to WDC to Boston and back to the WDC suburbs.
So I still have a boatload of those cards--although most of the doubles have been shipped off to my OBC friends.

[ZachS]

I was born in 1980 so I didn't start collecting until the late 80's/early 90's... I almost hope my mom did throw away my cards. I know there are a couple of boxes in a closet at my parent's house. Maybe one day they'll be worth something but I doubt it.

[I Only Smoke 4 the Cards]

Originally Posted by ZachS

I was born in 1980 so I didn't start collecting until the late 80's/early 90's... I almost hope my mom did throw away my cards. I know there are a couple of boxes in a closet at my parent's house. Maybe one day they'll be worth something but I doubt it.

I feel ya on this. I am in the same boat.

[Howe’s Hunter]

I started collecting in '72, and had complete sets built the old way (ten cards and a stick of gum) from '72-'74 (wish I had never thrown away all the dupes, but hey, who needed them when you were trying to build a set?)

Flash forward ten years and when I came home for Christmas that year (first year out of college), there were four like packages under the tree for me. My mom had bought the complete set of '84 Topps, and taken my three year collection to a teacher where she was the secretary who was a collector, who boxed them up properly, without all the rubber bands, etc. Told me she always enjoyed watching me collect when I was younger, but it was time to get those things out of her house. They were mine, take them and do what I wanted to with them, but if was time for her to have the closet space back.

I took them, saved them (for almost another 27 years), filled in the years I missed and finally parted with the collection in 2011. 39 year run of complete Topps sets that were sold to fund my Howe-stamped addiction.

Thanks, Mom.

[tachyonbb]

My mom kept all the 3 by 5 note cards I wrote as study aids for English, History, French and Greek but tossed about 1,000 baseball cards from the mid 50's to early 60's. Of course I had traded away all my Mickey Mantle cards and other Yankee cards as I was a Cardinals fan. One Mickey Mantle for a Ray Sadecki card anyone . So it goes.

[t206blogcom]

My parents kept all of my cards from the 80's and 90s. I WISH they had thrown them all out!

[Joe Hunter]

My mother saved everything my brother and I collected between 1959 and 1964 including cards, Post Panels, Scorecards, Hartlands and a few nodders. I don't think I would have ever gotten back into collecting as an adult had it not been for this. I have tried to do the same for my son with the GI Joe's, Transformers, and Lego's we bought him in the early 80's. Unfortunately, these items have appreciated much more than the cards we bought him as he was growing up!

[ParisianJohn]

Just like most kids, my mother threw away many, many items that my older brother and sister and I had begged her never to trash. We lost our Apple II computer, 1960s and 1980s GI Joe's, old comic books, ColecoVision, first generation Star Wars and TransFormers, old Barbie's, etc. We had unboxed and played with all of them, so the value wouldn't be as high today, but they were really cool things that I wish we had kept or given to someone else. However, the baseball cards were spared.

My father was not so lucky with his collection. When he went to college in 1951 his mother chucked his cards. My father talked about this for decades as he spent a lot of time putting that collection together, with a special attention to Yankees players as he was born and raised in New York. Perhaps that put a bug in my mother's ear and saved my collection.

I imagine today many parents are checking eBay before anything heads to the trash can.

[MyGuyTy]

Originally Posted by ZachS

I was born in 1980 so I didn't start collecting until the late 80's/early 90's... I almost hope my mom did throw away my cards. I know there are a couple of boxes in a closet at my parent's house. Maybe one day they'll be worth something but I doubt it.

In your same boat, lol. It was both a good time and a bad time to be getting into the hobby. Good time because it introduced our generation to this hobby as a whole which has lead to my vintage tastes today. However it was bad in a sense that so much money was wasted on the current players (at that time) which were obviously way over-produced and are now basically worth squat. Live and learn