BY MARK A. LARSON
Editor & Publisher
My Mom — bless her heart — did NOT throw out my baseball cards.
For a collector from the baby boom era, that might just be one of the greatest compliments they could give dear old Mom.
I believe my Mom instinctively knew how much my baseball card collection meant to me. She knew I loved to watch and follow baseball. She saw me go off and play with friends in sandlot games almost every summer day. She and my Dad attended my little league games. She was aware that I began to write about baseball in a journal at a young age.
Even each spring when my younger brother and I were both collecting, Mom obliged our request for baseball cards in our Easter baskets instead of lots of candy. She made those Easters extra special and they still provide great memories for us.
After finishing college and moving 2,000 miles away from my parents, my Mom would occasionally visit a sports card shop in her town and buy me cards. She didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but the owner reminded her of me and she trusted his card-buying suggestions. Mom would mail the cards to me — which was always a pleasant surprise.
When I was a full-time card dealer in the late 1980s and early ’90s, guys would often come up to my table and painfully recall how their moms threw out their baseball cards. If I heard it once, I heard it a hundred times.
A heart-wrenching hobby memory from when I was about 10 years old involved a friend’s mom. He had accumulated more than a thousand baseball cards from the previous three to four years. When I first saw them, I think I drooled a bit. Yet, my collecting buddy was one of those guys who viewed cards sort of like an old newspaper: This year’s cards were interesting, but he no longer cared about his older cards. So when I found out his mom threw out over 1,000 cards, I gasped. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t care about the older cards and all I could think of was that I would have gladly taken them off his hands. … Sniffle, sniffle.
Like my friend’s mom, mothers of baby boom boys have taken much of the blame over the years for throwing out their sons’ baseball cards. However, that’s not to say the mothers of America who did arbitrarily dispose of their sons’ collections were bad or unfeeling. They just felt their job was to get rid of junk. And let’s face it, in the 1950s and ‘60s very few could foresee the rise of the nostalgic adult interest in cards that eventually took place when their boys grew up to be men in their 20s, 30s and 40s. So, please don’t hold a grudge against dear old mom.
Also think about this: If all the moms in America left their sons’ cards alone and didn’t throw them out, maybe the hobby wouldn’t have evolved as it did. Theoretically, at least, with so many more cards available would baby boomers have been as interested in returning to collecting? Prices might also be substantially lower due to the increased baseball card supply. Guess we’ll never really know how different things might be.
My Mom wasn’t the only person who supported my collecting and interest in baseball when I was young. My Dad took my brothers and I to dozens of major leagues games during our years in grade school, middle school and high school. In addition, he also drove us to some card shows.
In later years, my wife has been 100 percent supportive of my hobby activities and has even attended three Nationals with me. She enjoys watching people and will “scout ahead” for items she knows I might be interested in. She’s a collector at heart and has even started her own collection of Disney cards.
This is quite in contrast to what I sometimes observed at shows when I was a dealer. A man – usually in his 20s – would approach my table with his wife or girlfriend. As he was perusing cards, she would stand there with arms crossed, jaws clenched, a frown on her face with a look of: “Why is he wasting my time with this junk and squandering money he should be spending on me?” In my mind, I could only shake my head.
Therefore, I say “Kudos” to all the moms (and dads), wives and girlfriends who not only tolerate, but encourage guys’ sports collecting. And welcome to all the women and girls who are actively participating in the hobby as collectors, dealers, show promoters and journalists.
Finally, thanks Mom for being able to recognize how important baseball and baseball cards were to me.
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