My first set that I completed in it's entirety was 1967 Topps. I was nine years old in 1967, just beginning to realize what was going on. My neighbors and pals Mark Terry, Chuck White, Edwin Jaffe and Louis Kimery had been buying packs of cards for some time, and I remember the 1966 baseball and football cards well.
My oldest sister graduated from Memphis State University in 1965 and within days, she and some other girls, Linda Barker, Gail Bishop and others, signed up with Delta Air Lines and went off to stewardess school (that's what they called it back then) in Atlanta, and after graduation, they all were assigned to Dallas, Texas as their base. My sister Linda, Linda Barker and Lucy Anderson moved into an apartment that was somewhere near Love Field. They were called the Four Seasons Apartments, and they were upper-crust in 1965.
I made my first trip with my dad to Dallas in 1967. I remember the pool at the apartments was lit up with tiki torches at night, first time I ever saw anything like that. Everyone was sitting around the pool one evening, and this guy in tiger skin trunks came over to talk for a while. He was Lance Rentzel. Yes, that Lance Rentzel, and he seemed perfectly normal. There were other Dallas Cowboys players who were living in the Four Seasons.
During that trip, my sister and I went to a Safeway grocery store somewhere near the apartments. I noticed they had Topps cards at the checkouts. They were 5 cents a pack, and I was allowed to get 6 packs. These were the first packs of cards I ever bought. One card I distinctly remember out of those first 6 packs was Mike Shannon. It remained one of my favorite cards.
Well, as time went by, I bothered my parents and sisters to no end for change to buy baseball cards, pack after pack after pack. I got all the checklists, and finally all the cards. And then some. Duplicates of every card. This opened the door to trades, and even more cards. I sent away for a green plastic locker, and organized each team. I organized shoe boxes. This went on into 1968, 1969, 1970. During 1969, when I was eleven and old enough to move up from Cub Scouts and Webelos to the Boy Scouts (Troop 2, St. Luke's Methodist Church), Dolph Belton, an older kid in the neighborhood, going away to prep school, came over one Saturday morning and bequeathed me a box of Boy Scout stuff, Hardy Boys books, comic books, and...stacks of wood-paneled 1962 Topps baseball cards!
Finally, I moved on from the baseball cards. They were relegated to under the bed. Time went by... I got a job at JC Penney and then K-Mart. I got a car (a 1956 Chevrolet). I graduated high school, started at Memphis State and realized that college wasn't for me, and worked full-time for the City of Memphis Division of Public Works at the North Wastewater Treatment Plant. I got my own apartment, and traded the 56 Chevy for a 1977 Camaro. Totaled out the Camaro, and got a 1977 El Camino.
Then I went into the Navy at age 23. My dad died of cancer 3 years after I went in. I got married and we just celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary on July 30th. My daughter is now 37!
Somewhere around 1986 or 1987 I came home on leave. Louis was over at his folks house, where he grew up, and they were going through the attic. Sure enough, he finds a shoe box of his old cards that he thought was long since gone. But not just cards...his best cards. Mantle, Mays, Koufax, Robinson, etc. We looked at them, and he says, you know, let's take these over to that guy at the flea market. That guy's eyes nearly popped out! Then he says, I can't give you book value for these. $300, that's it, take it or leave it. Louis took it, because he needed the dough.
When we got back, I ran over to our house. Mom, where's all my old stuff? You told me to get rid of it, so I did, years ago. So that's what happened to my first-generation card collection. I have been re-collecting it ever since.
But that is not the rest of the story. Somewhere in the late 1990s, when I was a Chief Petty Officer stationed at Charleston and then Key West and driving home to Fort Lauderdale every weekend, money got tight. I sold a 1934 Goudey Gehrig, 1941 Play Ball DiMaggio, 1958 Topps Mantle and other cards for something like $200, just because I needed cash and couldn't float a loan because I had a top-secret security clearance up for periodic review, and you have to be squeaky clean. It made me physically ill after I did it, and I swore I would never do that again, and I haven't. I only just recently put together a 1953 Bowman set, with help from folks right here at net54. I have all the cards from my youth I have ever wanted, even 1800s cards, t-cards and pre-war cards I never even dreamed of having.
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