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

[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.