"A '52 Mantle"

    Like most men of my generation, I collected baseball cards as a kid.  My grandfather had been a Major Leaguer back in the 1920’s and he began to teach me to play baseball before I was 5 years old.  I went to my first game with him in 1951 and began collecting cards soon after that.  My best friend and I scoured the neighborhoods for empty soda bottles which we would turn in at a local candy store and immediately spend whatever money we got on baseball cards.

     We would sit on the porch of the store and tear open the packs; I can still smell and taste that dried out piece of brittle bubble gum. (It tasted like cardboard.)  I was a Yankee fan and Mickey Mantle was my favorite player.  Tommy was a Dodger fan, so we traded a lot.  One Duke Snider was worth one Mickey Mantle, but it might take four Carl Erskine cards to get a Mickey.  When we got the cards of players we didn’t especially like, those cards ended up stuck in the spokes of our bikes and it made a really cool noise.  Most of us collectors arranged the cards by team in an old Keds or P.F. Flyer box, and stacked them year-by-year.  I must have had 9 or 10 Mickey Mantle cards every year between 1951 and the early 1960’s.

     When I went off to college in 1964 my mother decided to clean the “junk” out of my closet (And around that time thousands of other mothers cleaned out thousands of other sons’ closets, and the “seeds” were planted). When the memorabilia boom hit in the late 70’s and early 80’s the value of older cards went through the roof.  If my mother hadn’t thrown out my cards I would probably be retired today, painting for fun and playing more Senior Baseball.  At a recent auction, a 1952 ‘Topps’ Mickey Mantle card sold for more than $15,000.  (I still love my mother.)  This piece is for all those sons who came home one day and found “clean” closets.

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