[Balticfox]

Originally Posted by Balticfox

The summer of 1963 was when I went big time, however. One of my buddies Anthony proposed that we pool our efforts and collections and just collect any card we could get our hands on. This was initially to his benefit because the 1963 Baseball cards I had lying around dwarfed his meager stock. Nonetheless, over the ensuing two years Anthony and I amassed close to 4500 different cards. Needless to say, sheer numbers as opposed to condition was our defining priority.

We succeeded in gathering up most of the sports cards issued in our neck of the woods back to the 1960-61 Hockey cards. But any cards older than these were very tough to find and we only had a very few specimens from even sets as large as the 1960 Baseball. In fact, coming across any pre-1961 cards in the schoolyard was such an uncommon occurrence that it seemed to be an almost magical event. And even today I feel the same sense of wonder, the same sense of magic, perusing the pre-1961 cards that I have even if they number in the hundreds and fill a binder!

Among the cards we managed to acquire was a wild but very curious one called “Hairy Fiend” which we got in a generic pack while trick or treating on Halloween. We’d never encountered any of this set before and without the wrapper didn’t even know it was from a set called Mars Attacks. Nonetheless, it became our favourite card.

After I went off to boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine for grade nine in 1965, I just turned my half interest in the cards we’d accumulated over to Anthony who was a grade behind me. Bad mistake. By the late spring of 1966 he too lost interest in the cards which were approaching 6500 in number by then and gave them to Billy, the snot-nosed kid across the street. Anthony’s thinking was that Billy would carry the torch so to speak and continue to build on the collection. To Anthony’s horror and dismay though, Billy went and scrambled the cards in front of his eyes! That’s right, he tossed the contents of the whole box up into the air just to watch every other little kid on the street scramble to get as many as he could! Anthony still grouses about that to this very day some 58 years later.

I just learned that Anthony passed away on July 22nd. That's a really bad body blow for me. Anthony was my oldest friend. We've always kept in touch and gotten together whenever I was back in London.