Part III
I collected baseball cards. [8] When I was in the
first few grades of grammar school, my parents gave me an allowance of 25 cents
a week. Soon afterwards—inflation, I
guess--they bumped it up to 50 cents.
Maybe that doesn’t sound much, but in 1959, for an 8 year-old kid, it forced
a decision. Quite often, I’d ride my
bike to the corner store and blow the whole half-dollar on Topps’ baseball
cards.
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This 1955 Topps card is going for $27,500 on E-bay.
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Assuming (as I remember), they sold
for 10 cents/pack, I could get five (or maybe it was Buy 5, Get 6) packs, each
with 6-8 cards in it. Oh yes, and each
pack came with a sheet of pink bubble gum, covered with white powdered sugar. I’d stuff 2,3, sometimes all five of the
bubble gums into my mouth and chew it down till all the sugar was gone and
absorbed into my bloodstream. [9].
This is a 1953 pack, only a nickel. You can see impression made by the sheet of
bubble gum.
By the summer of 1960, when our
family moved to Eugene, I had over 1,000 cards; I needed two shoe boxes to hold
them. I had a friend named Neal,
who was similarly obsessed with baseball cards and addicted to sugar. I remember going to his house on NE 74th
(We lived on 75th). His mom
would give us a can of concentrated lemonade and a big plastic pitcher. Neal would “make” the lemonade and we’d drink
the whole thing. When the pitcher got
down to half-full, we’d simply add more water, and magically we’d have more
(though weaker) lemonade.
Neal and I would sort through our
cards, compare, and trade those that one of us had too many of and the other
not enough. Here’s an example of a very
common card: Vic Wertz, who played with several
teams from 1947 to 1963. He was a solid
journeyman player, even made the all-star team a few times, but his Topps’ card
seemed to turn up in every pack. I must
have had eight or ten of them. Cards of
Mantle, Mays, and Williams, though, were so rare as to be almost impossible to
hope for. We wondered if anyone got them. Before the days of the internet and social
media, how were we to know? Write to the
Topps company? Perhaps we should have
tried.
Neal and I would spread our cards
out and see if we could “field” each of the sixteen Major League teams. We could trade to fill out each other’s
missing spots on the field.
What happened to my baseball
cards? In the summer of 1960, before we
moved to Eugene, I simply gave them—all 1000+ cards-- to Neal, or more likely
traded them for a toy of his that I coveted.
Why did I get rid of them all?
I’m not sure; maybe I got bored or realized the futility of waiting for
a Mantle or a Williams. I had no thought of the future, or what they might be
worth in fifty or sixty years. I hope
Neal hung on to them.
If anyone is still reading this, you
need to know that I played baseball,
too. We didn’t sit inside all day, watch
TV, listen to the radio, chew bubble gum, drink sugary beverages, and trade baseball
cards. We did do all of those things, just not all
day.
In those years, summers seemed
endless. There was enough time to do—or not do—everything in those summers. September and the end of summer vacation was
so far away as to be just a meaningless abstraction. We’d walk or ride our bikes to the nearby
park and see if there were enough kids around to play a game or just
work-up. The problem in summer was that
kids would go away on vacation with their folks, and often there weren’t enough
kids for an actual game. If we did get
as many of three, we could play in Neal’s back yard; one to pitch, one to
catch, and one to swing the bat. (We weren’t allowed to use a real hardball in
the back yard; the dimensions were too small and the risk too great of breaking
a neighbor’s window. We’d use a
rubberized softball or a wiffle ball. [11]
NOTES:
8. “One
of the features that contributed significantly to Topps' success beginning
with the 1952 set was providing player statistics. At the time, complete and
reliable baseball statistics for all players were not
widely available, so Topps actually compiled the information itself from
published box scores. While baseball cards themselves
had been around for years, including statistics was a relative novelty that
fascinated many collectors. Those who played with baseball cards could study
the numbers and use them as the basis for comparing players, trading cards with
friends, or playing imaginary baseball games. It also had some pedagogical
benefit by encouraging youngsters to take an interest in the underlying mathematics.” [Wikipedia]
9.
This contributed to my early sugar addiction, topic of a future
essay in this collection of memoirs.
10. Dissatisfaction
was a recurrent theme of my childhood and youth, and it contributed at least
partially to my later “adult” problems.
11. Wiffle Ball.
History: https://americanprofile.com/articles/wiffle-ball-inventor-david-mullany/ These came out as one of the fad toys of the
fifties, all made of plastic: Hula
hoops, frisbees. Say what you will of
the 50s, but…
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