In 1975, 2nd grade, the big thing at my school was baseball cards (then yo-yos, those little parachute army men, etc.). For the unfamiliar, it's a pretty amazing set, art-wise. All cards are divided in half with one color on each half, and a different scheme for each team. I remember seeing older kids with rainbow stacks of gum-scented cardboard and thinking I have to get in on this whole deal.
My neighborhood is in the hills in the SF Valley. My folks' house (where they still live, 39 years and counting) is on the corner of 2 impossibly-steep hills, Eddingham/Adamsville. The ice cream man, whose truck said "Uncle Ron" on the driver side (and who my mother was sure was a child molester, but that's a whole nuther can of woims), made the loop around the hood and then parked at the corner by my house with that horrible music blaring out of the 2 dollar speaker every day of the summer. Every kid in the neighborhood would congregate and buy his wares there. I don't know why he didn't catch on and stop doing the loop around the other streets, but Uncle Ron had his methods.
At first it was innocent. I'd take my allowance money and wait my turn to buy 25 cent packs, forgoing the tantalizing Bomb Pops and 50/50 bars. By the time, I had exhausted those funds, I turned to the plastic water bottle in my closet that my parents must have been filling with pennies for me since I was born (I had no idea where they came from). I'd organize front pockets with 25 pennies carefully counted out in each, and then invariably spill them on the sidewalk and down the gutters when trying to extract them when it was my turn. I can remember the look on Ron's face as I approached the truck, and now that I have children, recognize that it was that grimace born of wanting to tell a small child to fuck off, but knowing it's not really the best choice under the circumstances.
My other main source was the blood money my dad paid me at the liquor store when he bought the cigars that he smoked in the car away from my mother. Every visit was good for a pack or two with the implicit deal that I wouldn't rat him out. Then there were the jumbo cellophane packs that I could pester the babysitter into getting me once in a while at Thrifty's.
In those days, it was all about getting the Dodger cards, none of which, by the way, are worth anything to collectors nowadays. My cards were sorted and resorted into dogeared condition, like most kids'. I was so young that I learned that the Dodgers had been in the World Series and lost to the A's by reading about it on the cards.
And so it went for several years, culminating in the 1982 Topps set, which I shoplifted pack by pack down my pants at the Alpha Beta, before I lost interest in new cards and started trading up to the good stuff: Mantle, Clemente, Mays, Bench, Rose. The national fever for cards was in full swing, and I would spend hours on my bedroom floor calculating and re-calculating the supposed value of my collection (more on that in later installments). I did great work with a spoiled only child up the street named Brian, whose methods were erratic and quantity over quality-centric. I ended up with most of his best stuff for larger groups of my crap. At its peak, I had a pretty impressive collection of all the Hall of Famer types worth at least a few bucks.
This went on into my first years of high school, when I kept it my little dirty secret, as it had become obviously dorkish by then. Then water polo, girls, cheap beer, and minor acts of juvenile delinquency replaced baseball cards and they gathered dust in my closet for several years.
In the next installment: how I learned that I'm an idiot in earnest/lost all my cards.
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