image 65 Me in my AAA Jaguars little league uniform at mom's graduation lunch at village homes (1988)

After third grade was over in the summer of 1987 Mom, Dad and I made our first trip out to visit my brother Reise in Germany. Well technically at the time it was a trip to West Germany. That same Reise who left right as I started public school was about to get a almost fourth grade brother and his parents on a summer visit.

We departed from San Francisco International Airport (SFO), the preflight story may be for this trip or for the one three years later when we went to visit Reise in Hawaii. In fact, I almost think it must be, so I’ll hold onto that for now, just remember when I tell it, I might have been a little smaller. Our first picture from the trip was taken by me though from the international terminal at SFO of the PanAm 747 we were about to embark on.

We flew from SFO to LaGuardia International Airport in New York City on the first leg. This is a relatively short flight compared to the rest of the journey. Having done the cross country drives already though I did enjoy watching the progress of our flight while we did in one hour, what would take a day of driving in the car. I was also pleased to find out the long flights all included in flight movies. I remember one of them being the film Mannequin, and cross referencing the release date for that film it very well could have been.

I was also introduced to the headset for the flight, which I used on all legs to pretty much listen to the comedy channel on a loop. Featuring from what I remember Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner and probably a couple others, but I mainly remember Cosby’s bit about Ice cream and Radner talking about a chair farting. I’m having a hard time finding the origin of that one on the internet. When we arrived in New York I don’t think we got off the plane, I think we just let those getting off there deboard, refueled and loaded up more people for the trip to London’s Heathrow airport next.

In London we did have to change planes, thus my first plane trip came to an end and my first changeover would occur.  We had quite a long trek down the people movers from one side of the port to the other. From there we caught a flight on a smaller plane and here is where I get sketchy on the details, I think we at least touched down in Frankfurt, Germany before going to Munich, or we landed in Frankfurt, and we drove to Munich. Either way our first day was spent in Munich once we arrived.

image 85 Dad, me, Karen, Reise in front of Frauenkirch in Munich German, July 1987, Reise Jr and Yvette in the stroller on the steps. Mom takes a picture of the family on the walk up to Berg Eltz Castle in Germany, technically West Germany at the time.

the Cosby comedey bit from the plane.

We would sight see all day and eventually return to Reise’s abode on the U.S. military base in Augsburg, were we settled down and ordered Dominos. I remember ordering Dominos? Yup because it is the only time in my life, I ever saw someone get the free pizza for the delivery time taking more than thirty minutes, which was a “guarantee” back in the 1980s.

The Highlight of the trip was when we rented a VW Bus and drove around the country for a few days. During the trip around the country, we visited a ruined castle, Cologne Cathedral, we had an interesting time parking in Bonn. We also visited the newly finished Frankfurt Germany Mormon temple, Berg Eltz and Dachau concentration camp.

Cologne just on its own was a fun stop. The Cathedral there was so massive, and being a kid that a year before did a small Mormon temple tour and thought those spectacular, Jesus, pardon the pun, what a house. In America, barring some of the gaudy Mormon temples don’t really have elaborate churches. So seeing something like that was intense. Europe was so vastly different even though everyone looked the same.

This wasn’t just a observation based on religious buildings of which by the time we hit cologne I had noticed every city had a lot of and were a lot of the time the tallest building in the city. Which was strange, because the cities in California, well their biggest buildings were skyscrapers.  And wait, odd, there weren’t a lot of Skyscrapers anywhere in Germany, even the big cities. It was so different even though it didn’t seem like it. We were still in cars, the people looked the same, everyone scurried around but then everything was sort of dusty and close together, and sometimes the road made the car tires bounce around.

It was leaving Cologne that Dad and the VW bus had their own adventure. Unfortunately, being nine at the time I wasn’t going to be privy to whole story, but as Dad was navigating traffic on a main throughfare a rather generously loaded small pickup with a camper built into the bed going the other direction swerved dangerously into our opposite lane of traffic.

That’s when something odd happened. From the backseat, and confirmed by Dad later, the Man driving the pickup reached out and smacked the side mirror of our van with his open palm. Now is where being nine plays into not knowing some of the details. My father and brother puzzled pulled the van over and some sort of louder than pleasant discussion of what just went on occurred. All I know is that the man in the other vehicle was Belgian and my brother didn’t think highly of him.

My take on the matter was he was trying to do some sort of shake down of Dad for hitting his car. Which was peculiar since the only contact made was his open hand and the side mirror of the rental van. Beyond that he had turned into oncoming traffic to make said contact, so I don’t know where he was coming at Dad from. But however it worked out the matter got settled and we went on our way along the Rhine river.

Now being an American kid that spoke English and Spanish, I found Germany to not be somewhere were I could communicate very well. Reise however had a little bit of Dad in him, so on a few occasions he brough us around to the flea markets, where they hunted for items in their respective hobbies, Dad with stamps, more on that later, and Reise with his WW2 items he had started amassing while living in Germany.

This oddly put a Nine year old kid out and about in a foreign country wandering from vendor table to vendor table with a small assortment of pocket change. Well one of the first things I bartered for with a sad face and some change was for some little stuffed bunnies. I thought they were neat friends for the travels around the country. But then there it was.. it wasn’t as thick or in the same shape as its American counterpart, but I recognized that orange cat.

Garfield, Out to Lunch, a book I already owned, but now in a language I couldn’t read. I needed that. So I presented it to the tables owner, he gave me some price in Deutsch Marks. I made my little kid sad face and showed him some stupidly low coin that I think was equivalent at that time to a dime. My pizza lip won the day. And now I had this holy grail of a book, that I owned already in a language I could read. Savvy little businessman I was.

We did some more trips while on this trip. One was to a walled city, I believe it was called Rotterdam. The city was a giant tourist attraction since it had all of its medieval walls still up and still fortifying the city inside. This was like going to a medieval fair, you walked around the town, you could buy things and eat at places, it was just like a really detailed fair. It was awesome mind you, but I think the fact that it’s focus was on tourism made it feel the way I am describing it. We do have a great picture though of Dad trying to boost Reise up onto the Wall which was taken at such an angle that it almost looks like Reise’s daughter Yvette is then holding Dad up.

Another mini-trip was to the Alps and Neuschwanstein. This fairy tale castle in the alps is most notable for Americans, the castle you see all the time on TV and the one Disney ripped off for the Cinderella castle at the center of all their, well everything without mouse ears. Mom was really excited, the castle is something else up in the Alps and has a whole crazy design history.

When we got there though we learned a couple things that might have disappointed some. One, the big castle was closed at the time to visitors. And that well, the site has more than one castle and it was the smaller pink one that was open that day. We had fun and all, but it was interesting to learn all of that. Especially because ever since then I always find it interesting that the pictures of the area almost always never show the second castle of the little town below. They really sell the fairy tale and not the reality of it.

Now I am sure some people know this, but it’s weird having been introduced to this area of the world first as a kid in person, I find it interesting we always see the picture inside the google earth image taken as too sort of ignore the second castle circled there in the background and the civilization below. As though we have to sell the fantasy in America that this fantastic place is in some remote region of the Alps away from modern life.

The whole trip to Germany though was like the trip the year before to Ohio but revved up even more. The comprehension as to what I was seeing on a globe to what it was in real life was starting to really sink in. This made time zones, airplanes and geography so much more interesting. And of course back then, license plates and flags.

What numbs me is that without Reise being stationed their with the U.S. Army I doubt we would have ever gone on such a trip, and without it I might have stayed more narrow in my world view. But here it was growing, just in time for a new school year. That’ll go great!

 Okay, fourth grade, this is a year I remember. It was in fourth grade that punishing kids stepped up a notch and that things like after school detention were installed into my life as something one could earn. You know that big reward for the step up from 3rd to 4th grade. If you deal with kids this isn’t much of a transition. But back then the switch from “elementary” to “intermediate” school was hyped up as though we were now little adults.

What it really brought was letter grades and harsher demerits. This was when I started to rebel, as I said before the stuff prior for the most part was jokes and some standing up for what I felt was fair, but fourth grade I got angry. In the second grade I loved school so much I had perfect attendance, even though still labeled as loud and disruptive. But in fourth grade the attempt to hit me with bigger punishments and shame me started to fuel me. Causing me to be less into the competitive learning that was still the daily norm in my class versus my new need to exact revenge on authority.

The addition of non-class run detentions was big though. In “elementary” school, most discipline was done in class by your own teacher. Now as a more mature student we were introduced to “citations” which were pieces of paper any adult, including your own teacher, could give you that would earn you a trip to a classroom during recesses or after school for sitting and being quiet in. This makes for a harsh change in school climate to be sure and an unhappy little camper.

Even though in reality only two and a half months had transpired from the end of the third grade to this grade, now getting a stern talking to at worst had tuned into any behavior an adult found unsuitable was a slip of paper and losing some of your own time. As we are starting to see, I was really getting to understand the world could not be fair, and after eight years of trying to make it work I lost it a little.

Fourth grade then became the age I would first think of just leaving campus versus dealing with any adults on campus who I deemed unjust or ridiculous. I just loaded up on my little bike during recess one day when I was particularly mad at my teacher and road home. Since my parents were not home, I just broke into my own house by crawling in through the bathroom window in the back yard (not an easy feat mind you, but was always the emergency way to get in the house for someone with the drive to climb).

My mom came home later to find me just sitting there chilling and watching tv. I don’t really know how that parent teacher conference went there, since I would have successfully gotten away with it if it were a day Mom got home after school was out. But I am sure it wasn’t pleasant, whether on my side or not of the issue, which I don’t remember what it was, the school had let a small child escape.

Was it worth it? I don’t remember, I know I got punished heavily for it, however it did bring to light that I was having some real personal issues with our morning teacher and would rather go home and listen to Bob Barker on the Price is Right than be in class anymore. Oh, yeah, morning teacher, that’s not terribly normal is it?

Another change happened for fourth grade, our day was split between two teachers. One in the afternoon, a familiar face, the folk singing Wellings from the portable just a couple of years ago, and the morning, a guy, wait what? A man teacher this was new, named Mulligan, I guess cause he liked to do things over, am I right? Wait it was Milligan… oh so close.

I postulate as an adult that the fact he was a male was one of the major reasons for my clashes as well as what I already stated. This was a change, my whole life we had female authority figures in the classroom, and really at home. Dad, for all his grace, worked a lot, and therefore was mainly who I watched TV with, went to football games with, helped with yard work, bought sports cards.. wait that’s next. Anyway Dad only laid the literal smack down on my candy, well you know, when Mom told him I was up to no good. So, now here I stand eight going on nine and this hippie looking dude is going to tell me what is right and wrong, I bet he doesn’t even know who Joe Montana is.

So my first case of ditching class I think woke up the adults to maybe I wasn’t just acting up to be silly or ADHD, but was feeling out of my norms. Which is probably true on the level I thought it was when I was a kid, and on the level I can see more of in retrospect. It was a lot of change, and like I said change makes adults form mobs and murder people that think differently from them what’s a fourth grader to do?

It's not a total doom and gloom year. That year I also remember the fourth grade for having a student court. Ah finally something corruptible to benefit the kids. A turn of events that now in my much more cynical fourth grade head felt like justice. See the idea was we could dispute in-class issues, mainly between students, but I recall being able to dispute some other behavior issues as well, in a mock court. Well, this was easy to manipulate, and thus I can’t remember it lasting too long to be honest. That age of child is going to revel in being able to administer justice in a world they all find unfair, and a jury of their peers is easily bribable. And luckily for us, there was a in class currency that was given out as a reward, so, bribing really was a thing.

I can’t imagine we developed into the class culture they were hoping for. Maybe we were I could be wrong, but we were kids, and since the in-class money could be spent on real world things, either once a week or every couple weeks, it slowly breed some many in-class culture issues. Theft being another big one, it was a mess. So much that I can’t remember watching the money change hands underneath desks and so on. Give us a taste of the real world, and we went probably the most logical way with it.

Luckily some positives come out of this year. After Garfield’s years of tyrannical rule over our comic eyeballs the spring scholastic book forms would bring us Calvin and his best friend Hobbs in Something Under the Bed is Drooling. This book seemed to spark the same popularity as Out to Lunch had with Garfield back in the second grade. And maybe that is it, no I am sure there was more.

Okay, other good things, yeah there was a big thing to come out of 1987, I keep hinting about it, Now we are here. Bubble gum cards… er Baseball Cards.

1987 Toops wax packs. The source of it all.

Here we go, dateline 1987. Up to this point we have covered the great rush of Panini He-Man stickers and a love of little plastic men that would carry on through grade school, I guess most recently Topps and its line of Garbage Pail Kids had caught that part of one’s mind that has to hoard towers of the same thing. That has led us all the way to this narrative.

Now I have talked a bit about my own hobbies as listed above. But I haven’t mentioned Dad’s yet. Dad was a philatelist. Which is to say he was an avid stamp collector. Now stamp collecting is really more of a hobby from a bygone era at this point in time, Dad inherited the hobby from his own father to begin with so by the late 1980s it was a hobby mainly made up of older men.

This wasn’t the case though for Dad when he was a little guy, so he had slowly amassed what he could over decades of slow and steady growth. It seems from accounts I have collected from my older brothers he just always tried to get stamps when he could. A short time before I was born I believe my grandfather passed away. I don’t remember the exact date, I should get that. Anyway, it seems there was a major event in which at least one of my brothers went with Dad down to where my grandfather had last lived with his (second?) wife. The main order of the trip was at least in retelling to collect grandfather’s stamp collection.

My brother was able to send me a newspaper clipping that I think has the relevant setting information, which is crazy. Back on topic, seems that some discussion went on by Dad came out angry and without the collection which honestly makes sense that it would have been the one important thing for Dad to inherit given the history there. Seems however that either the collection was already gone or was not going to be given to Dad that day or ever.

From what I am told this visible upset my father and seemingly Dad cut himself off from his step-mother and that part of the family over whatever was said that day, if I am to understand things correctly. This is of note because Dad was never one to not try and go visit family, thus this must have really upset him. I guess figuring that this was something he grew up with the idea would one day be his little piece of his father, I can kind of see where the rift would be formed.

This also shows how important this collecting thing was for him, and then would be passed down from him to us kids. Now I don’t think I have gone over this characteristic of Dad yet, so now is the time. Dad is a borderline hoarder; however he also can’t help trying to negotiate a deal that involves money. These two traits make for some who collects avidly but is also always trying to sell their piles of “collectibles”. As we get to the late 90s and beyond this trait will have an expanded story as Dad discovers the internet and eBay.

For now, in the late 1980s Dad is just a hobbyist who is always looking for a deal. The nine-year-old with him didn’t even understand the idea of getting excited over something you put on an envelope to send away. Dad had tried already to pass along the idea of stamp collecting. But as we have seen, that instead was overshadowed by Panini stickers and Topps comic cards.

Well on a forgotten day in 1987, a nine-year-old Ryan was taken to the Gold and Silver Exchange in the University Mall in Davis. The gold and silver exchange beyond its name was also a location that dealt in secondhand collectibles. Not terribly unlike a pawn store but without the guns and contracts over ownership etc. Therefore, a lot of collectible stamps with secondary market prices could be hunted down there.

Dad would drag me along on these stamp hunts. At my age though the hunts seemed dreadful, the only bright spot in them was the McDonalds lunch that would come for sticking it out with him. Since I never really got into the passion of postage stamps he had. On this day though things would go a little differently. Perhaps after watching me go through the He-Man stickers and the Garbage Pail Kid trends of years gone by, Dad got an idea when looking over the stores stock of Baseball cards the shop had to offer.

Dad started asking about Baseball card prices and eventually got deep into a discussion on what packs to buy to get the better cards in. Then we bought a couple of 1987 Topps wax packs and cracked them open there on the glass display cases at the store. One of the packs was home to a Jose Canseco card. At that time that was one of the “hotter” cards in that set. He was the reigning rookie of the year, and while not his official-official rookie card it was at that point more expensive than most cards in that set.

Dad quickly convinced me to flip that card for more packs. That was the day I learned how little kids can gamble “legally”. We got more packs but didn’t hit any more gems. But the rush got Dad excited and his wallet loose. He continued to go on about card prices and sets and eventually got sold, for me to collect, a 1986 Topps traded set of 132 glossy cards that were considered an update to the previous year’s set, which included some currently sought after “first time” cards of some rookies.

image 67 1986 topps traded set.

And so, the spark was lit. This spark had to have been lit early on in the run, Probably around May or April, because the time I would spend on the 1987 sets, to this day, still feels like the longest time I spent collecting, even though logically it isnt. I started buying packs of baseball cards and finding local kids that were collecting as well.

The first kid my age was a kid on my baseball team that spring named Jed. If I follow back my sports photos Jed and I had been on soccer together the past two seasons with his father as the coach. I think my “The Animal” nickname from 1986 came from his dad in fact. He lived maybe three blocks down L street and as kids are collected the same sports cards.

About a block closer to Jed lived a family my folks knew through church, and they had two boys, well they had more children, but they had two boys one a year older and one a year younger, Bryan and Cameron. For the next few months, the wheeling and dealing of baseball card collecting would go through this avenue on L and K streets.

Now we get into a story about kids and baseball cards. When I first started collecting cards, I had some care for cards with a high value, but what I cared most about was trying to complete the sets. I think Dad probably was the influence for that, that being collecting as a completionist and not a trader.

That seems to be an important distinction to make as now I am getting older and doing more hobbies like this. A Completionist would be someone who collects a set or cards, stamps etc, that can be tracked via a checklist or something like it to the point of having one of each thing. When I was a kid a lot of children attempted to be that sort of collector, but as we will see, baseball cards had so many cards it was a lot harder than it was with the smaller Garbage Pail Kid sets and the like.

What I would then call a trader is someone who collects the value individual pieces from sets. Instead of wanting cards 1 through 792, which was what the Topps set of that year comprised of, a trader would be looking for say, the example of the Jose Canseco. In many cases to try and hoard as many of those as possible in trade for, especially with kids, the many cards for players they didn’t care about. Then like little stocks, could check in the newest issue of the Beckett pricing guide to see their card prices drop or increase.

The guides were super important, especially to traders because it helped them follow which cards to try and hold onto and which ones to try and unload. Now as a cruel joke of society, this was all happening in an era where the trading card companies were printing beyond demand, so almost nothing from these times holds the kind of value that people acted like they were going to at the time.

Now there is sort of an outlying third type to this, which is the single player collector. Maybe you have someone who just likes one particular player and just gets those cards. More often than not, either of the main two types would have players they coveted like this, but in junior high I met a young lady that just wanted cards attributed to one player nothing else. So it was a thing just not terribly common.

Back to me and my set collecting. Starting that spring I would start working on that 1987 Topps set of 792 cards. Well, even though it seems illogical, it felt like Topps trading cards didn’t have even distribution of cards in their packs of cards. You would buy a couple packs and see the same players over and over again. So just buying packs alone didn’t complete sets very quickly. So, I got introduced to trading for the cards you want, to be a collector, one would then probably have to work with traders.

There were pricing guides and people would need a card you had, and you would need a card someone else had, look at the estimated secondary values and swap, easy as eating pie. Bryan though, the older brother mentioned earlier, was more of a “advantage” trader. You need a card to complete a set, sure the becket baseball guide says it’s a quarter card, but you would complete a whole set, that’s worth more to you than just a quarter, so a “fair” trade is to give him something of higher value since a whole set is so much better than a single card. In other words, he wanted to get more out of every trade with unquantifiable variables. This is what made little kid trading the mess it always seems to be. Even in the modern world with apps and the internet, the idea of finding a way to give your end the trade you’re unloading more value than it has is the thing that can lead to broken childhood dreams!

Sure, we’re Americans and that is considered exemplary free market behavior and so the burden of not getting ripped off is on the kids in the neighborhood to understand what is going on. And some of us did okay in the climate, some didn’t it was little kid Wall Street but on K Street. I don’t know if that’s why the cons started up or not, but eventually it got beyond trying to sales pitch an up-trade and became scams.

See back in 1987 baseball cards came in wax packs, well someone had shown to Bryan that one could reseal the wax packs with a warm lightbulb. Thus started the trading of “unopened” packs for valued single cards. Although I learned about what was going on eventually, it was presented as funny “prank” and we were kids so the scams sort of perpetuated out from there. It set a bad precedent, because once everyone got wind of what was going on, like I said, ha ha, it was a silly prank and you all got duped. But nothing was returned, the profits made off the plot stayed. The consequences taught us that it was up to both parties to understand what they were getting into.

So now we have a lesson taught to us all that getting tricked is okay to do for profit. Thus, I hatched a plan to get back what I felt was owed from the previous “pranks”. We were kids, it wasn’t hard to setup a scenario, mine was that my nephew Justin, who was around 5 or 6 at the time, who lived in Woodland a neighboring city, had received a box of cards from an older gentleman giving up the hobby (I think some of this story was true by the way) and that in this collection he had scored some of the highly prized cards from.

 The 1984 set of cards, which seemed to us kids like a set from a long time past, was considered one of the marquee years at the time. Mainly for two cards, 1985 Topps Mark McGwire and the 1984 Donruss Don Mattingly. The latter was going to be the lynchpin this whole idea was about to revolve around. As proof of this haul, since my nephew had come into some old cards, I brought a couple by to show off and thus a bidding war began for the cards they all really wanted. Including that prized card.

image 68 One of the cards of the great get back scheme, was either the 1984 Donruss or Topps Don Mattingly Rookie card which at the time was priced in the triple digits.

While my initial malice was used to put egg on the face of Bryan who beyond the resealing pack scam had been upping that style of interaction with us kids, the con grew out of hand. While it makes sense now, at the time I didn’t figure acquiring trade items for me that he would start bringing in other kids to trade him and sort of partner up for some magic share of these holy grail cards they had never actually seen. So as one might gather, eventually everything spiraled out of control and parents became involved. This would eventually end that little neighborhood hang out group.

Here is a controversial but somewhat accurate take on why. That adage we had all been learning at the time “Let the buyer beware” that Bryan was teaching us so well with his “pranks”. Well those only apply to when the scammer scams. When he realized he had gotten worked, as I stated parents became involved. So kids stocks lesson two came out, if someone can’t be trusted to trade fairly, they also can’t be trusted to play by their own rules. After this I hardly dealt with him and the trading of cards again, maybe once or twice over the next couple years, most notable unloading a Ken Griffey Jr. card that I still don’t really care about for a truckload of oddities I don’t have anymore.

The summer of wax pack scams though ended up shooting my card collecting though into a more solitary hobby after that. By this time I didn’t really go to the gold and silver exchange anymore for cards, it was across town and was an ordeal to get to, luckily a baseball card hobby shop opened down L street a few blocks from the house. This allowed me, when I had free time, to ride my little BMX bike down the street and sort through “common” boxes for the missing pieces to my sets. The store had a two common cards for one common trade policy out of their commons box. Commons where the players that cards were valued under a quarter or something like that. The guys none of the traders cared about. So I would just lug my duplicates down there, go through and pull my missing numbers and then drop the stuff I had too much of.

 

Christmases for the next few years would also weigh heavily into the baseball card obsession. In retrospect however, baseball card sets make kind of lame gifts since you don’t do anything with them. But without fail every Christmas from either 87 or 88 through about 1991 there was at least one box under the tree that looked and felt like a couple bricks, but was actually just a set of cards.

The first year I got the 1987 topps sealed set

After that I would get at least one set a year for a while. Most notably I would get the complete set of score I think every year from 1988 through 1992.

This would leave an extensive set of sealed sets on top of my works in progress. I thought I had a decent picture of this, but all I can find is one blurry picture from on top of my desk in the mid-1990s showing off some of the sets.

Beyond set collecting, baseball cards really sparked a love of the game in the late 1980s.

By late 1988 early 1989 baseball cards and baseball were becoming the most important thing. Packs ran around 50 cents apiece for the more common stuff, so a box of 36 packs with tax was around twenty bucks. Which pricey for a little guy at the time, was something I could collect the money for. Add to that my paper route I would get in 1989, I could just buy boxes and crack packs and sort for days. Thus, I would have tons of duplicates to trade 2 for 1 at the card stores.

Before the paper route I would do a lot of aluminum can collecting. Recycling paid for a lot of early sports cards. It was also in 1987 that I expanded into football cards. While they would never be as intense with me as baseball cards, for a small time in the winter of 1987 I tried to get a full set of Topps 1987 football as well.

1987 Toops football will always be memorable. It’s a pretty solid set, and I had quite a few cards I really liked from it, from the traded Steve Young card, to my main prize the Randall Cunningham, who at the time was my favorite. It was during this mad attempt to get the whole set that I bought a large amount of packs one afternoon at Longs. Coming home past the loading docks area for Safeway which was in the same shopping center I decided it might be clever to pull out what recycling I could from their trash to get more cards.

I don’t remember how the following happened, it was one of those one thing lead to another incidents but I managed to have one of the beer bottles in the bag of recyclables spill out into my Longs bag full of opened football cards, soaking some of the cards. I don’t remember all of the ones that got hit, save for Jim Kelly whom I think took the biggest hit.

I was so upset that my new pristine cards got messed up and that I would have to then take the rest of the afternoon setting the cards out and drying them off. For years the 1987 Topps football card box always did have a faint smell of miller beer.

I would become more than just a set collector. As we see with the football set, I liked some players more than other. I started a binder of “favorite players” and actively tried to get all their cards, like mini sets. Thanks to cable television and WGN a large portion of the binder was Chicago Cubs players, whose games would air almost every day during the season on TV. This was a point in life when Harry Carrey became one of the comfort sounds for what baseball sounds like. The binder was full of Wade Boggs, Mark McGwire, Darryl Strawberry and then Cubs players Ryne Sandberg, Greg Maddux, Andre Dawson and the only player to get his own binder, Mark Grace.

image 69 Mark Grace 1988 Rated Rookie card and the Sport Illustrated Mark Grace poster I had hanging in on my wall for half my childhood.

I don’t remember exactly why he became my marquee player. But in 1988 I started hoarding as many of his cards as I could. That summer I was lucky enough as a California kid to come across a newspaper article while going back east to visit my sister about Grace taking over for long time cubs first baseman Leon Durham and added that clipping to my collection. I would continue on with the Mark Grace binder through eighth grade. In fact the binder’s whereabouts would eventually become a mystery. I never sold them as any part of purging my collection, yet the binder seems to be nowhere. I have as an adult worked on rebuilding the binder since it was a major part of my hobby for four years.

Then the 1989 season for the Cubs went really well. While we were all the way in California, the Cubs did on occasion have to come out west and play the San Francisco Giants. Back in 1988 Dad and I had figured out a good rhythm with getting cheap bleacher seats to go to Oakland A’s games. We went to a good handful since Baseball insists on having something like 86 home games a year. The A’s were also the crown of the American league at that time, although I think a lot of the time I wanted to go when they played the Boston Red Sox, which was my American League favorite. That was a weird love that stemmed from having to watch the 1986 series while being babysat and just not enjoying the New York Mets.

In 1989 the Cubs were doing so well we went out to Candlestick Park to see them. Now the reason we did A’s games was because one, they were cheaper, and two, they were easier to get to. One could simply drive to a BART station, ride the train to the Oakland Coliseum stop and then walk right in the stadium. Thus, ridding one of the traffic issues of going to a sporting event, saving the money on parking and so on. The Giants played in Candlestick Park out in South San Francisco, which means a long drive over the bridge, through the city, paying for parking and higher seat costs. This was fine when the 49ers played, they after all only had 8 home games a year, and Dad and I spaced those trips out over years. It wasn’t the best for Baseball though, but I got an exception made to go watch Greg Maddux pitch against them once in 89 (July 1st, 1989).

Though 1988 and 1989 though Dad and I would attempt a fair amount of games, like I said mainly at the Coliseum. I was a big fan of the bleachers and showing up to get baseballs during batting practice. If I am not mistaken, I think bench seats in the bleachers for weekday games were something like 5 bucks a pop back then. So a drive to Walnut Creek, then a BART to the Coliseum wasn’t that much more and gave a father and son some time to catch fly balls pelted over the fences before the game started.

Now the Cubs would fall short of the world series in 1989, losing to those same Giants in the playoffs. But I was still collecting cards, so on October 17th right before the world series game three was set to begin I jumped on my bike to ride down to the card store to watch and sort through their common cards. Down the street though I got dizzy pumping my bike as hard as I could. I figured I just needed a rest, stopped my BMX, and put my foot down. I continued with an uneasy seasick-like feeling, it seemed like the world was afloat on top the ocean.

But as quickly as that sensation came it left. I got my foot back up on my pedal and biked the mile down the street to the card store. When I got to the card store, I was met with everyone fixated on the T.V. Turned out I wasn’t dizzy, I just felt the same earthquake that just hit the World Series which was being played in San Francisco that day. I watched the live footage that evening and started my sorting through the commons boxes for the missing pieces of my sets.

I would continue with Baseball and its cards through 7th grade. What ended up being my last real baseball card hurrah was when my parents bought a couple boxes for me to open on my birthday on February 3rd, 1991. I opened them with a friend that had come over to stay the night, Jason R. That year Donruss would introduce the chase insert card, a super rare card that one would find in a pack only once every few boxes. This itself would be a signal of dark times coming ahead for the hobby. But I was hitting my waning period with Baseball anyway. I would play Babe Ruth league ball that spring and win the city championship and then go out from baseball there. Retiring from playing, collecting and to a major extent watching or going to games.

I feel like the boxes of Fleer 1991 where some of the last I opened, and I remember years later selling my Donruss special insert card. I don’t actually remember what I sold it to get, being essentially the first chase card I ever pulled from something I probably should have held onto it, but I figure I probably traded it in for cash to get a video game or PC thing later on in my teens.

Going back in time, Almost immediately after starting to collect baseball cards I started drawing my own baseball cards around the modern cards designs. Replacing real players with a fictional baseball world where I and some of my friends played for various professional teams. I made tons of these cards for varying story lines. I believe in 1988 I got so into this that I started making cards and then wrapping them in paper to make wax pack like substitutes. Then started selling them for probably 25 cents apiece to other kids in the class.

Of course, the idea was they were hoping to get their own card that looked like a black and white version of a real baseball card. However, since I made the packs and sorted them randomly, I think the novelty wore off when they just got other kids in the packs.

This became more than just selling packs to kids in the class though and is covered in greater detail in the ART section of this site.

 

Baseball though I held out longer on than soccer. One reason I was able to be drawn into baseball cards was that I played youth sports, all of them. Back in the 80s there was one for every season it felt like. Soccer in the fall, Basketball in Winter and then Baseball in the Spring. Well with kids having almost too much energy and being the youngest in the family my mother knew this. So as soon as she could I was enlisted into those sports at a young age. Having an affinity towards game play I latched onto most of it pretty quickly.

Soccer was the first to come up back in kindergarten. Soccer is also the simplest to understand and do as a knee-high brat, you just kick a ball. So early on it was more my game of choice than the others. So, in some ways it was unsurprisingly the first to get retired from as well. I guess what this is to say is that as my interest in playing the sports diminished so did my passion to hobby them. We have wondered way out of 1987 by this point too, so let’s end this tangent here.

I think this picture above is from 1987. I think. Let me explain. There is a weird space of time in the 1980s where Dad and I went on what seems like about four day trips without Mom revolving around Dad moving a work truck to, most notably, the Monterey bay area.

This is a hard thing to pinpoint the exact amount of times, areas we went to and why. The above picture is the only photographic evidence of any of it. Which I will get too. Now specifically I know one of the trips was to Watsonville, California. We were delivering I think charitable goods that the thrift store was donating out of its donations to some effort in the area. Dad was saddled with the responsibility of driving a decently size box truck to the location and delivering the goods. I got taken along for the ride.

I cannot find pictures of the rig from the 1980s, but it was the same concept with the pictures above. The trucks were I guess slightly larger than Uhauls, but not big-rigs, that people loaded up and then could carry around donations from location to location. Dad, who at the time I think was the sales floor manager, for one reason or another was making these deliveries. My guess is that a management team member had to be there to verify the drop offs, so he just became a temporary truck driver too. I think he enjoyed that part of it, Dad did like trucks.

Anyway I remember the Watsonville trip mainly for the truck and my own greed.

I wanted that guy who was mixed in with all the donations. I don’t know why I picked him, but somehow, he became my reward for going on this trip with Dad. I don’t remember what I named him or anything, I just remember the frog and that being the motivating factor to go with Dad. Now I probably took the frog from another kid, which I just didn’t think about at that age, I was just in love with him.

This trip though I think was excruciating to defend nine-year-old me a bit. I think there was some issue with the trucks hydraulics that turned the day trip into an overnight trip. So Dad was probably being reasonable to appease me with one of the hundreds of donated plushies.

Now it might have been on this trip, or another one soon after, but somehow doing these jaunts down to the area got either me asking, or Dad thinking of stopping at the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk. Maybe both. By now we had cable and I was watching a lot of T.V. and the Santa Cruz boardwalk add was stuck in my head, as it will be for the rest of my life. So, I might have asked to see it when I realized we were going through the area. Either way, Dad and I stopped there at least twice. One of the times we really did make a day of the whole thing. And that is where the picture comes from.

So, you can buy essentially kid passes that let the youngins, I was at the time, ride unlimited rides all day long. I know this, because as an adult I remember an almost asleep Harper zipping around on some ride at nine o’ clock during a family trip in the 10s to the boardwalk. I nearly three decades prior was enjoying the same thing.

I did the basics, the big wooden roller coaster and so on, but beyond that Dad and I hit up a location that was making puzzles out of images on site. So, Dad and I posed for the picture, Dad had them add the Hi Mom! Statement and we got a beautiful yellow puzzle made:

That’s not the puzzle of course. Mom had the puzzle up in their bedroom until the remodel in 1991, after that I don’t know where the thing went. I was lucky to find the dot-matrix print off of the image they used to print the puzzle with. It was an odd souvenir that Dad gave to Mom to maybe make up for not going on these trips with us, not sure. I am not sure to some extent why Mom didn’t come. If I recall all the trips were on the weekends so she should have been able too.

Anyway, Mom missed two or three boardwalk trips and got a yellow puzzle with me and Dad on it instead. I also ended up with a frog, the order of which all these things is a little fuzzy to me. I guess if I get real desperate I can see if there is any record of live events at the beach. Because one of these trips features Nickelodeon’s Fun House live on the beach. The show, according to the somewhat fallible internet says it started in fall of 1988, so it goes to reason all of these events happened between 87 through 88. I think I even remember watching something years ago talking about how the show Fun House started off with some non-televised test shows in areas like the beach board walk.

This goes along with a weird space in my history where we start seeing less and less photos taken and a lot of the memorabilia from the era seems to be gone. I didn’t expect to find this item, and froggy of course was lost in the great stuffed animal rainstorm years later.