How long you collected as a kid ?...

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Though I never post, I read this board regularly and can't remember a thread I've enjoyed so thoroughly. OK if I join in?
I discovered baseball cards later than most of you (age 10) because my dad was in the Navy and we usually lived on base (Guantanamo, Parris Island, etc.) where there were no little stores with candy counters. But in 1957 we lived off base (NAS Pensacola) in what is now the Warrington section of the city. I had discovered the Topps Flags of the World set that winter, amassing a near set, so, come spring, it was natural to buy a couple of 1-cent packs of the new baseball series. Luis Aparicio and Johnny Temple (I can't recall which I opened first) and so began a lifetime obsession. I can remember trading Moe Drabowsky and Dee Fondy to help a friend finish his first series, then getting them both in the packs I purchased the next day; paying a kid I'd never seen before 5 cents for Yogi Berra to finish my first series; pedaling crosstown to find the second series and coming home with Duke Snider; trading a pile of 1956s I gotten in the Drabowsky-Fondy deal for Gus Bell to complete Series 3; finding only a handful of packs of the Fourth Series, then being inundated with Fifth Series cards.
That winter we moved 15 miles into the country (3 miles from the nearest store) and I thought my collecting days were over. But a couple of days after we arrived, two neighbor boys arrived on bicycles from their house a mile away and asked if I had any baseball cards. As luck would have it, I had a duplicate of the older boy's favorite player, Ted Kluszewski, and a friendship was forged. Jimmy later traded me most of the 57 Fourth Series cards I needed for chemicals from my chemistry set.
That spring the younger boy and I collected 58s together, discovering an ad for the Card Collectors Co. in the Sporting News that enabled us to fill in the gaps, and we even bought a few cards from older sets. Wayne abandoned cards when we moved up to junior high, but I continued through 1962, buying a box every two weeks when we rode through Warrington on the way to the base commissary.
I didn't quit cold turkey, however. I bought complete sets from 1963-66, then returned to the pack-by-pack method in 1967 when I was a junior in college in Orlando and continued until 1972 in Boston where I discovered the vintage version of the hobby.
Believe it or not, these are very same cards I pulled from those packs in 1957, identifiable by the pinholes I poked in the cards to simulate injuries for a marble game. The 56 Football McCormick is my first sports card, found on the street in San Leandro, Calif.
Sorry to be so long winded.
Bob Richardson