Another 40-year want down

One of the elements that drives me most in this hobby is simply obtaining all the cards that I wanted when I was a kid.

Like most kids of that time, I didn't have a lot and I was forever in want mode. I received a small weekly allowance, which permitted me to buy --- well, nothing really. I'd have to save up that allowance for three or four weeks to get whatever I wanted. Grandma came around, oh maybe a couple times a year, with a 20-dollar bill, but other than that, you have a birthday and Christmas, son.

This lasted into my teenage years. WANT. WANT. WANT. I received a paper route and even the meager cash I landed from that was practically a windfall for me. Finally, for the first time ever, I could buy cards every week!

That's what I did. Sometimes with my brother, sometimes alone. I'd walk to the store, about a mile-and-half to buy -- about three packs. That's what I could afford.

As I've mentioned many times, on our card trips we discovered that a Greek market, which we had either previously ignored or was a new arrival, also sold cards. But these weren't your average everyday packs that I had been seeing for five or six years. They were odd-shaped things.

 

Tiny stickers. Regular-sized stickers but without players, instead team logos! And BIG PHOTOS. Glossy. 5-by-7's. What are these things? What is this store? It was a little disorienting and only partly because the woman behind the counter barely spoke English.

What had happened was I had stumbled into 1980 and 1981. A new decade with brand-new card inventions. What was really happening, and I was totally unaware, was Donruss and Fleer were trying to break Topps' monopoly, had successfully done so, and Topps was trying to counter with new doo-dads of its own. My clueless self -- and the Greek market -- was the beneficiary.

I bought a lot of the '81 stickers there -- well, "a lot" according to my "salary" in 1981. I wasn't buying the whole box. I never could do that. Were there kids who did that then? I never heard of any.

I bought a fair amount of the Fleer stickers, too. It felt weird to buy cards that didn't have players' pictures on them. But I loved the cartoons on the back with tributes to the old Laughlin World Series sets from a decade earlier (who was Laughlin, I had no idea then).

And I bought those glorious 5x7 picture cards. One per pack. 1980 Topps Supers, they were called.

I've written about these before and how I ended up selling almost all of them, except the Dodgers, in a garage sale 20 years later.

The following year you could send away for those 5x7 glossy photos. The 1981 glossies were called the "National" set, issued across the country. Those were the only ones I knew. But at some point I became aware that there were other Dodgers cards of that same size that I couldn't get.

That's because there were "Home Team" sets issued as well -- only in the area of the home team.

I had never been more at a disadvantage living on the opposite side of the country as my team than at that particular point.

I pined for those for a few years and then forgot about them. When I returned to the hobby, I remembered them, but with so many other cards to obtain, who had time for larger size items? I had a lot more money but there were so many more cards!!!

But, what I am finally getting to here is:

I now have the Home Team set of the 1981 Dodgers! World Champs, baby!

Just as importantly, I have the two-pockets to store these.

Not a lot more to say about these that I haven't already said. The backs are blank except for the Topps logo repeated over and over and a tiny checklist at the bottom. The Dodgers' Home Team set was bundled with the Angels. Why there are 12 Dodgers in the set and only six Angels shows you how nobody cares about the Angels.

And so another 40-year mission is done. I have another want, want, want from that time. It feels great. Onward!