BY TROY KIRK
Staff Writer
When I started collecting baseball cards in the late 1960s, it was very difficult to really know anything about the history of what I was collecting. The internet didn’t exist and there were no baseball card price guides. All I had to work with were the cards I bought at the store and other cards that came to me in trades with friends. Truthfully, at first I didn’t really care about the history of cards, as all I really wanted was to get cards of the current Detroit Tigers players.
Though I started collecting baseball cards in 1967, I was aware that cards had been issued in prior years, but I really had no idea how far back they went. Before I even started buying those 1967 cards, a neighbor friend had given me a handful of baseball cards. Those included a prized 1966 card of Tigers star Willie Horton, a 1964 Cardinals team card, and a mysterious card of Walter Johnson. I also had a 1965 Ron Santo card that I got from a teacher at Halloween.
So, I knew there were different card designs every year. Those old cards were cool, but I really had no interest in pursuing old cards when I was collecting those 1967 cards, I just wanted more 1967 cards.
When 1968 came around, I dropped all interest in my 1967 cards and went full force for the new 1968 cards. I even traded away most of my 1967 cards for 1968s (not sure why I did that!). I remember checking out the toy section in a dime store around that time and seeing rack packs of 1966 Topps baseball cards hanging there. I couldn’t believe those old cards were being sold as new two or three years after they came out. I was tempted to buy some, but didn’t. Maybe that was the first time I actually thought about collecting older cards.
⦿ 1967 Topps Tigers cards (above) ⦿ ⦿ ⦿ 1968 Topps Tigers cards (below) ⦿
In 1972 I came to a crossroads in my collecting. After collecting baseball cards for five years, I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue. At 13, I was at the age when most boys stop collecting baseball cards. I contemplated my cards and my other collecting hobbies (stamps, coins, bottle caps, erasers given out with Fritos, and other small collections). I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere with any of my collections, so if I wanted to continue, I should specialize in what I liked best and drop the rest. I decided I liked baseball cards best, so I jumped into those with much greater purpose than I had ever had before.
The problem was, I didn’t know what there was out there to collect. I looked at my older cards closer to try to learn what I could. It was clear that cards went back to at least 1964, but how much further back did they go? I studied my Walter Johnson card to try to figure out what I could about that one. I looked him up in the Baseball Encyclopedia and his career ended in the 1920s, so could that card actually go back that far? I had my doubts, mainly because it looked pretty similar to my other Topps cards, and I thought that if there were cards in the 1920s that they would probably look more different.
⦿ 1960 Topps ⦿
Around that time, someone gave me an old Clem Labine baseball card with a design I had never seen. I knew you could figure out the year for cards by looking at the last year of statistics and adding a year, but the Labine card just said “Year” for his one statistics line, so my cheat was no help. I finally looked him up in the Baseball Encyclopedia and compared his stats and figured out that it had to be a 1960 card. So that pushed baseball cards at least that far back.
It was kind of fun collecting in the dark and trying to piece together baseball card history, but this came to an end fairly soon after that as I latched onto a very early baseball card checklist book that showed all the Topps cards from 1951 through 1973. I finally figured out my Walter Johnson card came from the 1961 Topps set, as they had a group of all-time greats in that set.
⦿ 1961 Topps ⦿
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