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Originally Posted by Seven
I think it's also dependant on how the kids are raised, and what they're taught to value.
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Well said. Interestingly, my ten year old son and I just minutes ago got off a long call with a seventy-nine year old gentleman who pulled our 1952 Topps Mantle from its pack, way back in the Summer of '52, using money earned from his paper route. He bought the pack at a tobacco shop in Illinois.
My son and I were hanging on every word the original owner said, learning exactly where our Mantle card came from and how things were then, what his life was like, how into baseball he was, etc.
How many times do we collectors look at a card in our hands and wonder to ourselves about its journey through time to us? My son and I discussed how rare and special it is to trace a card's lineage like that. The discussion even ranged to the advent of TPG grading, and how the owner and his own son drove the card up to PSA some years ago for grading (I can also add both its owners find the arbitrary grading rules irksome LOL!).
Tangentially, a work colleague sent me a holiday gift this year; it is a coffee table book about the baseball HOF. My son and I cracked it open, and who was staring at us on the first page picture? The Mick. Of course we then went through all the other greats.
When I was a kid, my parents didn't teach me about Ruth or DiMaggio or Mantle or any of the others, and yet I still came to revere their cards— my cousins got me into collecting, and from there I just found the old greats. So one doesn't even necessarily need a parent to find their way to the classics. And one doesn't need to have seen them play either; that is what makes them legendary figures— that they existed in an often romanticized past world. They take on a more majestic character and mystique that way, actually.
I think music is an interesting analogy— someone can get into any modern artist, and if they are intellectually curious they will eventually delve into that artist's influences, roots, and samples, and journey onward from there.