I often wonder.....

[Case12]

Sorta like getting a toy truck for birthday and never playing with it in the sandbox. Or never using the Red Ryder BB gun you get for Christmas. Cards were fun, not pristine collectibles. Rubber bands held them together. (plus some of us bought packs only to get yummy gum strips....yuck). I did have enough excitement for a Bart Starr not to put it on my bicycle - of course he was on the wall of my bedroom using a thumb tack....who knew back then :-)

[jgannon]

Originally Posted by Case12

Sorta like getting a toy truck for birthday and never playing with it in the sandbox. Or never using the Red Ryder BB gun you get for Christmas. Cards were fun, not pristine collectibles. Rubber bands held them together. (plus some of us bought packs only to get yummy gum strips....yuck). I did have enough excitement for a Bart Starr not to put it on my bicycle - of course he was on the wall of my bedroom using a thumb tack....who knew back then :-)

Exactly...Amen!! "Cards were fun, not pristine collectibles". Perfect!!

There are guys here who were collecting back in the 50's. I myself started in earnest in 1968. I, nor anybody else I knew, never gave a thought to condition (at least not in a neurotic sense) or value when we were buying packs.

There's a YouTube channel that I enjoy by a younger collector, who in response to a comment told me that when he was collecting in the 80's they loved the cards too, but they also thought in terms of the potential value of the card. I'm glad that when I was collecting that wasn't an aspect of things.

[JollyElm]

For me, collecting cards in nice shape as an adult is just the continuation of the 'reliving your childhood' metaphor. As a kid, five minutes after they were removed from packs, all of our cards were on the road to Rough Shapeville with stops is Crumpled Junction, due to the aforementioned rubber bands, cardboard boxes, continual sorting and resorting, stuffing them in our pockets, flipping them, studying the backs to glean information on our favorite players, trading them and everything else that rounds the corners and creates more creases than what's found on an 80 year old fat lady. But our childhoods had rough situations as well. Perhaps troubled home lives, or bad days in school, broken bones, getting in trouble from your mom, pet loss...and on and on it goes. When we look back on our youthful days, we skip as much of the nasty stuff as possible and just think about the 'good ole days,' so I see cards the same way. When recapturing my childhood, I skip thinking about the traumatic time a car plowed into our house (true story), and instead think about how great it looked after reconstruction. With cards, I don't want to buy a 1972 Willie Mays that's in the shape mine was actually in - AWFUL - but instead I seek out a beautiful version of that fantastically memorable card. I guess it's just another way of glamorizing the past.