I was thinking about writing this post within the next month or so, ideally around when I found the first cards of the season. But it's going to be far too busy then and I'm not good at planning posts in advance, so you're reading it now.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of me in the hobby, buying baseball cards -- in the spring and summer of 1975 I made periodic trips to whatever nearby store sold cards and greedily purchased them.
The instances were relatively rare -- I wasn't going to the store every week. I had a meager allowance and had to save up in order to buy a few packs. The occasions were so seldom, I can sort of remember all of them:
1. Walking to a drug store several blocks away in Binghamton, N.Y. (this happened maybe three separate times)
2. Walking to a corner store -- we didn't know the name of it, we called it "the green store". This is where my 1975 mini cards came from, in cello packs, the kind you see above. It was closer than the drug store, and across the street from my elementary school.
3. Walking to a grocery store in Cassadaga, N.Y., while on vacation. I don't know the name of it, it was the first and only time I was there.
Other instances of gaining cards that year were from my dad (when I was sick and went to the hospital, on the way home we stopped at a drug store for a candy bar and a pack of '75 Topps), and that pack I shoplifted from a different drug store, claimed I found the cards on the sidewalk.
That blue house I think is where the green corner store used to be, I'm not 100 percent sure. The "corner" that the store was on was kind of a side dirt road that traveled along the right of the store, so it's not apparent in this picture, after many years it looks more like a grassy driveway.
Vestal Avenue was the main drag, if you keep traveling in the direction of that red vehicle, you'll get to the road where I lived, just take a left.
This was the big bad intersection we had to cross to get to the drug store. It's where Vestal Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue crosses. Although we road our bikes everywhere on residential streets, we weren't allowed to ride them on this trip to the store, we had to walk. I'm sure my mom warned me and my brother about this intersection 100 times.
On the left where you see that orange building, that used to be a Loblaw's grocery store, I remember walking past it on the way to the drug store. There were also a couple of side stores with awnings that extended over the sidewalk. This is where I opened a pack and spotted a Johnny Bench and was instantly scared that I'd lose it.
Here is where the drug store was. I almost never drive around this area the few times I go back to where I used to live, so I didn't know what was in this spot, I'm relieved it's still a strip mall, just so I could know where the drug store was. The store was on the left side, probably part of the Family Dollar complex here.
It seems like sort of a journey to walk from my house to the drug store, we'd travel a block down our street to Vestal Ave, then travel the route we walked to school, then passed the school, crossed Rush Street where my babysitter lived, passed the church, reached the big-bad intersection, walked past the grocery store and other assorted stores and then to the drug store in the strip mall. Then all the way back.
I remember the journey back seemed long to me. Usually I opened the packs on the way home.
I've shown these many times before. These are the original cards that I bought in 1975 now framed on the walls of my card room. I kept them for 50 years -- through many moves and many years of not collecting. I'm sure they were stashed in a shoebox under a bed or in the attic many of those years. But I never threw them out.
Here are a few of the '75s I acquired that I haven't framed, I just ran out of room. The two MVP cards I know I pulled out of packs myself that year. Same with the Pat Kelly (a shoplifted card!)
Here are many of the original minis that came out of those cello packs that we found at "the green store," in our little corner of Upstate N.Y., even though those "test issues" supposedly were sold only in Michigan and on the West Coast.
I've since upgraded all of the cards I opened 50 years ago, regular set and mini set.
I continued my collecting journey over the years that followed and I can remember some of the purchasing moments and store journeys more clearly than those from 1975. We moved in 1977 and there were different stores and different routes to travel.
Cards were readily available and in a lot of different businesses, but I don't think they were quite as available as they came to be in the late '80s/early '90s (it's interesting to read collectors from that period refer to that time as "back in those days," when I was collecting a dozen years before then).
We would still use our two feet to walk to the Monroe Market (long gone) or to a generically named drug store (also no longer there) on Washington Avenue, and also a deli (gone) just before getting to Washington Ave.
There is a Subway restaurant on the corner we'd turn to get to the generic drug store. I remember when it opened to much fanfare and it's still there. The street and the neighborhood -- heck the whole city -- has fallen into disrepair and the Subway kind of shines as a reminder of how things used to be.
I can't help but think "I bet that Subway would do more business if it sold baseball cards." I say that a lot. There's a well-known chain drug store where I live that has never sold trading cards and my wife has heard me say dozens of times how I'd spend so much more money there if they only sold baseball cards.
Fifty years is a long time to be doing the same thing. As proof, you can't get cards the way I did when I was 9 years old. Almost all of the places I knew back then are gone -- heck, my elementary school was washed away by a flood and has been totally rebuilt and looks nothing like it did then -- I am surprised any time I go back and see something that's still the same.
But when you collect, you have forever reminders of those times and those people. If I didn't have cards or books or record albums from those times, I would have lost so many memories I gathered when I gathered those items.
It really doesn't seem that long ago.
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