Here ya go, kid

 

 

Over on Twitter, Daniel of It's Like Having My Own Card Shop posted a find from his local card shop, landing the above book for 5 bucks.

That's some magical LCS he has, I could never expect to find a book like that in any LCS I have entered in my entire life and if I did, it certainly wouldn't be that cheap.

Daniel's tweet said something like "I've wanted this for a long time," and I can relate. My daughter bought me the same book for my birthday last summer (it cost more than 5 bucks), and I also had wanted it for a long time.

I wasn't a kid when I first came across this book, I was in college. But the want was real and it never went away, lasting decades, until I finally unwrapped it 35 years later.

This is what drives me as a collector. I'm trying to track down the cards and other baseball-related memorabilia that I wanted as a kid. Yeah, it's nice to get some current stuff, but it isn't close to the feeling of landing something from childhood. What a moment that is, tracking down a card that I couldn't afford way back then, pulling it from its envelope or top-loader and saying to 9-year-old me: "Here ya go, kid."

 

Chills.

 

Inspired by Daniel's purchase, I went through my own timeline to find where I had obtained something and said that familiar phrase: "I have wanted this for a long time."

 

 

Advertisements for these Renata Galasso/TCMA "Stars of the '50s" cards appeared in the late 1970s Baseball Digest that came to our house. It's no exaggeration that I spent hours wishing I owned these. In 2020, 40 years or more since I first saw those ads, I finally added them. The kid is still really excited.

The 1979 Pete Rose Burger King card expanded my desire for food-issue cards from breakfast cereal and snack cakes to hamburgers. "Traded" cards were a novelty in the '70s -- mind-blowing actually -- and seeing Rose as a Philadelphia Phillie did not compute. I so wanted it. I finally got it -- 37 years later.

 

OK, not a kid when this drew my attention either. I may have been in college, it may have been even later. But it's safe to say I've wanted it for 30 years or more. Box-bottom cards were all the rage in the '80s and not easy to find for those who couldn't possibly dream of buying an entire box of cards. What was that madness? I still remember the time I worked for a CVS and saved some 1989 Topps box-bottoms from the trash compacter. Box-bottom cards for free!?!?!? I still have those things.

More TCMA stuff I saw advertised in Baseball Digest in the late '70s. These Stars Of The '60s cards showed up in 2020 and, best of all, they arrived from a man named Aronstein -- you know, the "A" in TCMA. The kid is impressed.

 

More oddball legends sets. Long before retro cards arrived, this is what we wanted. So fantastically colorful. As a teenager I saw these in Fritsch catalogs and the like. Since they were modeled after the 1975 Topps set, I may have drooled over the pages a time or two. I spent years looking to obtain these and ebay searches had been fruitless until one winter day in 2021. Another 40-year-want slain! Here ya go, kid.

 

If you think all I desired as a kid were oddball sets, that couldn't be further from the truth. There were all those '75 Topps cards, of course, and really anything card-like that came across my vision. One of the prime things were cards from just before I started collecting, '71 and '72 Topps, for example. And then there was the time my friend down the street was gifted with his older brother's cards, almost all of them from 1969. I managed to land some of them in a trade but that just touched off so much waaaant for the rest of them. The Earl Weaver especially interested me. I finally got one about 36 years later.

I could do this for so many other cards that came out when I was a kid or earlier. It's still what drives me today.

The thought of beginning to collect, say, two years ago and just desiring cards from around this time is quite foreign to me. The nonstop quest for Prism or whatever. I can't imagine collecting without hearing that kid inside saying, "I want that one and that one and that one."

That kid spurs me on to this day. Without him, I may have given up on this a long time ago.