Night Owl Cards

When you grow up during a specific time, you experience all of the events of the era with everyone else living in that space at that particular moment. Those moments become part of your past and you share them as you move through the years with those who were on the earth when those great and not-so-great events took place. But as those years continue to pass, it's easy to forget that not everyone has experienced those same things. As I've grown older, more and more people have come along -- much younger people -- who experience their own moments that are not my moments. All of these people have shown up who remember the "good times" as The Power Rangers and 1987 Topps or Pearl Jam and Harry Potter. Not one of them, not a single one, remembers the stuff that everybody used to know, like the Bicentennial and WKRP and Battle Of The Network Stars and CHiPs and ... Holy crap, there are actually people who don't know former baseball player Ron LeFlore served...

(Hello on National Blueberry Day. I grew up in a family that required the children to toil at "u-pick-'em" farms. I wasn't a fan. But to this day, I know the best time to pick/buy certain fruits and vegetables. Strawberries, cherries, blueberries, raspberries, corn, tomatoes, apples, in that order. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 259th in a series): Sometimes Twitter gives me a little nudge when writing posts. I have had this card sitting in my scan folder for more than a year with a plan to write about it. Then, the card was brought up yesterday and that was my cue. To me, this card represents the center of the stolen base era. It is not the most notable stolen base moment. It doesn't show Rickey Henderson or Lou Brock or Tim Raines. Heck, the achievement Topps is celebrating in the 1981 set isn't even a record anymore. But it gives you a snapshot of just how prevalent the stolen base was from the 1960s through the 1980s. Two pl...

Sometimes being a home owner means going to the store when you don't want to go. I try to avoid stores, malls, plazas at all costs on Sundays. I don't know how Monday-through-Friday, 9-to-5ers do it. I detest the weekend crowds and the driving is getting worse out there. Maybe I'm more sensitive to it because I've never had a 9-to-5 job in my life and all of my shopping is done during "off-hours" on a Tuesday or Wednesday, or at 2 in the morning. But because I had to get to the big-box hardware store I found myself in annoying Sunday shopper traffic. People forgetting what turn signals are. People practically stopping in the middle of a busy four-lane road for -- I have no idea, did they have to tweet something? -- absolutely no reason. And the crowds of people, the people around every turn, the lines. Ugh. I figured since I was enduring this inconvenience, I might as well hit the nearby Target and its well-known card aisle. I think you know I don...

One of my regrets from last weekend's card show is holding 1970s Kellogg's cards in my hands and not buying any of them. Normally, when going to a card show I note that if I find '70s Kellogg's cards, I will make certain that they are captured, tagged, bagged and strapped to the top of the car for the long trip home. But I had them in my hands and then I let them get away. I can only hope that they will be fruitful and multiply. I had an excuse of course. When I'm surrounded by deeply discounted 1950s cards even Kellogg's can't compete with that. The other excuse was I had just received a bunch of '70s oddballs from Scott Crawford On Cards! Exclamation points!!! The reason I love '70s oddballs so, and prefer them vastly to any other kind of oddball, is because they are part of the pipeline. I've written about the pipeline before, many times. The pipeline is cards from the '70s. Specifically cards from 1974-80, but I'll allow...