Enough With The Damn Money Talk; Show A Card That Makes You Happy

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The two cards pictured here make me very happy, for similar but ultimately different reasons.

In 1961, I was six years old. I'd begun watching baseball games on TV with my dad, and I guess I grasped as much of the game as a six-year-old could. I understood the rules, but the statistics were beyond me (there's only so much math a six-year-old can handle).

I was visiting my best friend when I spotted his older brother (who must have been all of nine) sorting cards of some sort on his bed. They were, of course, 1961 baseball cards. The brother explained that they were photos of baseball players, complete with all their statistics on the back, and that they cost a penny each (actually five cents for a nickel pack).

I told my father about this later that day and he was intrigued. He was an immigrant and hadn't collected cards as a child (although my mother pointed out that she had collected movie star cards found in packs of cigarettes she'd gotten for her father, back in 1930's Germany). My dad had become a huge baseball fan soon after coming to this country, and he thought that baseball cards were a terrific idea.

That Saturday, the family was on their way to New York City for our monthly shopping spree (we lived in Queens, which is technically part of NYC, but for New Yorkers, Manhattan is the "City"). On the way to the subway, my dad picked up the morning newspaper - and he gave me a nickel for a pack of cards.

I held off opening the pack until we were on the train. I unwrapped it - and there was Ralph Houk, newly-minted manager of the Yankees. Topps utilized an eye-opening red white and blue scheme for the manager cards that year. And so the first baseball card I ever owned is burned in my memory. Seeing the Houk card always makes me happy.

By the way, that's the actual first card you see pictured. Most kids threw out their cards at the end of summer, but my father was horrified by that. He got me a scrapbook and a packet of photos corners (remember them?), and he encouraged me to mount my card set every year. Which is why I still have all of my childhood cards, and is probably why I grew into a collector.

As for the T206 of Karger, Cincinnati, by the Seventies I was looking to branch out and collect much older cards. I connected up with an early dealer, a Jim somebody who lived in Brea, California. He said he was selling T206's for fifty cents each, and T218's for twenty five cents. I sent him a dollar for a T206 and two T218's (which I didn't know was a boxing set, but whatever), and included a SASE (remember THEM?). A week later, I got the envelope back. It contained boxing cards of Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson, and this T206. I was officially a serious collector!

Alan Kleinberger