What was your first set?

[butchie_t]

There was a company that had a catalog, not large, maybe 20 pages, 8 1/2 x 11 folded over and stapled. I bought a 76 baseball set from them. Along with a 59, 61, 68 (2nd series all blue backs) football and some other cards that I cannot remember. Football is long since traded and traded for baseball sets.

But my first complete set was 1974 Topps baseball followed by 1975 Topps Baseball. I bought them in packs and completed them. I even got the Wash Nat’leag cards in packs too.

I collected 69, 70, 71 cards but did not complete them until the late 80s. I had a friend that had a bunch of last series 71 cards that he had bought and put away, never seeing the light of day until I came along. I got lucky and bought a bunch for around $50. And there were many star cards in what I bought.

Now I am filling year holes from the late 70s to 80s. I need a 73 set and a 79 set and am currently working the 72 set, right around 55% on that one.

I will probably buy or trade for the 73 set. I have complete 74 and 75 sets along with other stuff to barter with.

Edit: I found out in another thread that the company was the Card Collector Company out of New York. I actually bought some of their smoke damaged Bowman football cards. They were singed ever so slightly on the top edges but no water damage. I know I bought other cards from them but that memory is long since gone.

[hcv123]

I didn't yet "collect sets", but had plenty of cards in 1973 - as many as would fit in my pockets to flip for colors or scale during recess. Other kids spent all their money at the corner coffee shop on candy - I spent most of mine on packs of cards - heck, you even got gum with them! I apparently had a bunch of cards from 1972 ( I was 5 years old) which I clearly remember trading a whole box of years later for some comic books at a comic book show - live and learn! I had TONS of cards from 1975 and remember a local discount variety store had 2-3 huge dump bins filled with rack packs - my sweet grandmother would generously buy me a bunch everytime we went food shopping at the super market next door. I really loved the radical change in design from the 1974 ards although for flipping purposes top or bottom color needed to be declared ahead of time. The first year I recall actively trying to collect a set was 1978 - I don't remember much else, but Billy Almon of the Padres was the final card I needed to finish it.

[jayshum]

The first set I collected was 1975 when I was 7. I don't remember anything about collecting it, but I know I still have the set.

[cardsagain74]

The little helmets from those quarter machines (both baseball and football).

I just loved those as a little kid. Was around seven years old, and it was about the time that the Bengals changed to the stripes. Before long, I had them all but the new Bengals helmet (both were needed of course). Plus it looked really cool.

After thousands of dollars/the family fortune spent quarter by quarter and no Bengals stripes, my great aunt finally shared enough w/ my frustration to explain this horrible predicament and ask a toy store to open the damn thing up and pick a Bengal helmet I could see pasted against the glass front. They understood, naturally.

Didn't care if I broke the spirit of it. Was still the best quarter I've ever spent

[Cliff Bowman]

1977 Topps Baseball as a ten year old in the spring in Jacksonville FL, the summer in Waukegan IL, and in the fall in Lakehurst NJ. I still remember the US Navy commissary store in Mayport FL having baskets full of 1977 Topps Rack Packs by the check out registers.

[Butch7999]

The three of us here, as young kids, all fell in love with baseball when we attended our first Buffalo Bison (IL)
games around 1960, and soon discovered the Diamond Herd on radio and major league games on TV.
The game became an obsession for us once Post cereals and Jell-O started printing something called
"baseball cards" on their boxes. Like Dewey, we'd been completely ignorant of the entire concept, and
except for the Post and Jell-O sets, we knew nothing of older sets, of Topps, of Fleer and so on -- and
with no other kids in our neighbourhood, nor any school classmates, the least bit interested in such stuff,
we remained woefully ignorant for years. We never completed any of the three editions of Post / Jell-O cards
(some of those cereals and Jell-O flavours were inedible) and we eventually, immersed in box scores
and transaction reports in the local newspaper sports pages, ruined almost every card we did have
by writing, in ballpoint pen, on each card, the team to which each player had been traded, dismally unaware
of new cards issued by other companies and by other means.
We didn't discover Topps until the late '60s, when the grumpy pharmacist at the drug store where we
bought our comix started setting out boxes of packs at the checkout counter. No other store we could
reach by bicycle carried baseball cards, and the pharmacist never ever ordered any fourth series
(another concept of which we were woefully ignorant), so we wasted our allowances gormlessly amassing
boxfuls of doubles and triples of every 1st, 2nd, and 3rd series card... But we did keep them pristine,
and we still have all those Post / Jell-O and late '60s-early-'70s Topps cards...

[ALR-bishop]

In the last issue of the SCD Standard Catalog with both pre and post 1980 listings, 2011 I think, Lemke listed quite a few panels of Topps cards from Dynamite Magazine from the 70s and 80s. Not sure why he listed the panels he did since there were many other panels not listed. I picked up most of the ones he listed and put the panels with my sets.

The first Topps set I completed was 1959, but also had cards from 1956, 1957 and 1958 as a kid