General Forum

I ate one of these

I broke all the Topps 80-81 Basketball panels into single players...  I can't believe I did that.   The other thing that I did was using the checklists as actual checklists and marking off the boxes of the cards that I had pulled from wax and cello packs... doh!

When I was 9 my dad bought me a lot of 74 Topps baseball and 74 -75 Topps hockey. I thought it was cool to cut all the white borders off of them. I still have some. They are wonderful reminders of my dad taking me to the store or coming home with packs of cards for me. My dad was the best.

In the mid-60's, for a Cub Scout project I glued my 1964 Topps cards onto white construction paper and put them in a homemade binder of two pieces of thin plywood for them.

Sharing the pain with mvs0219 on the Topps 1980-81 basketball set, though the winter of 1981 was doubly traumatic thanks to the Topps 1980-81 hockey set. I still claim youth and the draw of the card gimmick.

However, I only have myself to blame for the decision to use a marker as a highlighter on 1978 Topps baseball cards--specifically the managers cards, and highlighting (or not) the portions of their major league careers. To be fair, I was 8 or 9.

This one is from my dad. As a kid, he thought the white borders on the cards were boring, so he took his Big Banana markers and colored the borders in.

When Gil Hodges passed away, I wrote DEAD across the front of the few cards of his I had. I cut up all of my multiple player cards. This included a few copies of the Fisk rookie card. Of course I did the rubber band thing too. And the bike spokes thing. Built lots of house of cards, which always come tumbling down.

When I was in fourth grade, I cut up a Joe Namath card as a puzzle to be put back together by a friend and me. Not a smart move. At the same time, I also used a 1973 Topps Ken Holtzman card as a straight edge when I was drawing something with a blue-felt marker. I still have the card.

It always seems that lots of people have stories about their moms throwing out their cards. Bless my mother, she never did that. By fourth or fifth grade, I got pretty serious about card collecting. By seventh grade I was buying older cards. She was always very careful around the cards. I recall once she was at a weekend flea-market when I was in 10th or 11th grade. Somebody there had baseball cards, so she called me and was trying to figure out what that person had that I didn’t. Remember, this was before cell phones, so she had to find a pay phone (and change) to call me. She bought about 25 cards. Almost all of them were 1960 Topps, which I already had, but it’s the thought that counts, right? I don’t have any of those 1960 cards she bought anymore because some of you have traded me for them. She did find a 1958 Walt Dropo that I still have. Not in great shape, but that’s one I’ll never upgrade.

I have done a few silly things with cards in hindsight.

The only one I really regret is carting around this Brad Mackay autograph rugby league card as a 12 year old. My friends and I had a few other "gold" cards but none were autographed making it a novelty. As such this meant it always resided at the top of my card pile so took the bulk of the rubber band damage. However, what really maimed it was forgetting to take my cards out of my pocket during a rep rugby practice.

Other highlights were creating a rugby and rugby league game for my cards on a large cardboard base covered in a card-sized grid and using a dice. The cards took a bit of a beating though worst was when I entered the game in a local science fair and a bunch of my cards got nicked.

I also enjoyed updating the player stats on my rugby cards with a biro when they played more games or scored more tries.

Omg.i laughed out loud to this.