Even after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the citizens of Rome still had to feed themselves and feed their spirits with laughter and hope. With that thought in mind, let's turn our attention to a precious childhood memory, that is to a sign of spring that was more eagerly anticipated by my friends and me than the bloom of daffodils or the return of any robins. I'm referring to the almost unbearable wait for the unveiling of the new season's baseball cards. Starting in February, there were only two wordly questions that concerned us: What would the new cards look like and when would they get here? The March issue of Baseball Digest might give us a black and white answer to the first question as an ad for the complete set might appear in the back somewhere. Part of that ad might just show the design of the new cards. Of course, the illustration in the ad was about the size of a fruit fly and it revealed nothing about the color schemes that would be used for each team.
Beginning about this time of the year, at the end of March, we would talk our parents into driving us to the general store on Saturday to see if they had arrived. If they couldn't take us, we would just walk across the couple of miles of pasture that lay between us and the store. Nickels in hand, we would burst into the store, straight to the candy counter. Rarely were there any boxes of baseball cards the first day we checked. Sooner or later, however, there in the lower left corner would be a Topps box filled with wax packs. It was always gratifying to buy the first packs of the year and always somewhat annoying to see that a few packs were missing and that some other kid had gotten there first.
An older couple by the name of Sewell ran that store and they would let us pick out the packs we wanted. They knew that you couldn't just grab 5 right off the top; that was a sure fire way to end up with 10 Chico Salmons. No, you had to root around taking a pack from various levels in the box in order to avoid doubles. It didn't really work like that, but it gave us a sense that we had some control over our world.
Now, of course, cards are available all-year round and each pack cost what would have been about 6 months of my allowance from back then. And there's no longer any gum that comes with the packs. That pink slab of goo--or two or three--made for some great bubble blowing, assuming that your teeth were up to the task of grinding into its original malleable state. If not, you could always use it to patch cracks in the driveway.
Every spring is beautiful. Those springs were special.
1964 was a great design and the first year I collected baseball cards. This one of a young Boog Powell still has the gum stains across the front.
Can we have a moment of silence for all of those irreplaceable cards that ended up as noisemakers in our bike spokes...
Posted by: Melissa Dodge | March 26, 2010 at 06:27 AM