1987 Topps Baseball Forum

This has been an interesting string so far.  I forgot that I had actually started a year earlier--in 1986--with Garbage Pail Kids 3rd/4th series.  Since I don't have any of those anymore, I tend to revert to my sportscard collecting start in 1987.

I'm in the 'late to the party' camp.  Sure, when I was in 1st and 2nd grade I ran around with a wad of Star Wars cards in my pocket, and in 1981 I made a concerted effort to put together the set of ET movie cards, but cards in general didn't hold my interest back then.  I truly became a trading card collector at age 28.  I started following NASCAR closely in 1995 and quickly picked Ted Musgrave as my favorite driver.  Unfortunatey, at the end of the 1999 season, Ted lost his full time ride and had no prospects for another for the following year.  For Christmas 1999, a friend of mine thought he had a nice idea for a present for me.  He went on eBay and bought a bunch of Ted Musgrave trading cards, singles and lots, along with some handouts and some other misc. merchandise.  He thought it would be a nice way to memorialize Ted’s career for me.  Well, I looked at this pile of trading cards (there were probably 150-200 different ones) and thought "this must be most of them, I’ll just take a year or so and finish up the set".  That's when I was hooked.  Little did I know just how far this new obsession would take me, or how many great friends I would make along the way.  So here I am, over fifteen years into my original ‘year or so side collection’ and going strong.

-Tom

Started in 1980 when I was 7.  My dad was a letter carrier for the USPS and would stop at the Country Fair convenience store a few times a week with a handful of 1980 Topps packs.  The first pack I ever opened had the '80 Topps Mike Schmidt and I've been a diehard Phillie Phan ever since and Michael Jack is my all-time fave player.  I've received many hand me downs from friends moving, etc. I have stopped buying until I got back into it on this site.

1984 topps baseball age 7, although i did get a few 81 baseball and a few 83 football but i think it was old packs that i bought on accident.  I treat 1984 topps football and baseball as my first foray into collecting.

I was about 6-7 years old when I started collecting in 1989-1990.

I started collecting cards in 1995 when I was 5 years old.  Used to buy packs of 95-96 Fleer at a grocery store called Smitty's.  (No longer exists, they are all Fry's now.)  I mainly collected NBA cards with a little bit of MLB as well, which is still what I collect today.  I had an album to store my "good" cards, and the rest were kept in an old chlorine bucket.  My mom thought it was a good idea to give me hosed out chlorine buckets to store my toys and cards in.  Still waiting on the health effects of this lol.

I stopped collecting cards in 2004, and I ended up throwing away all my cards other than what I had in a small 40 card album when I moved out of my mom's house in 2008.  I decided to start collecting again early 2016, and I am glad I did.  I sure wish I had kept all my old cards from my childhood, but considering where they were stored, maybe it's best they were tossed out.

Not sure when I really became a collector. I know I bought some Topps movie cards in the early '80's, like Return of the Jedi, and sometimes people would give me extras from sets. The earliest sports card packs I can remember buying are 1984 Topps baseball, but I didn't really start seriously collecting anything until 1989 when Nolan Ryan became a Texas Ranger. I stopped collecting around 1993-94. Restarted when I began my TCU Horned Frog project back in 2010.
 

I started with baseball at 5 in 1973. Went to football in 1975. Then soccer in 1979 with sticker sets mostly from Spain (my parents would send me there every summer), basketball and hockey in 1981. Unfortunately I lost , or played all kinds of games damaging them when I was younger. Like most I took a hiatus1982 until my early 20's,(and like most b/c of girls and partying). Funny thing happenned, I gave up the drugs and had all this money left over so I started collecting again, and haven't given it up since. Like most, my wife can't understand it, but since I put a limit on myself of $10 a week she really doesn't say anything about it anymore except for the space.