Miller said something about going
to the Thrift Drug to see if they had the new 1984 baseball cards.
We’d know each
other maybe six or seven months at that point, through the late summer of 1983
and into the late winter of 1984. Miller and I (along with my brother) played
and watched sports, but we’d yet done anything with cards. I collected. I
assumed Miller collected. Back when I was a kid, I assumed any kid that was
into sports, also had to be into the cardboard collectables that enhanced the
game…at least for me. I’d learn later that this wasn’t always the case. A lot
of guys who played sports thought us card collectors were geeks…until they
thought there was money to be made.
But I never thought to ask Miller if he collected. It didn’t come up. In fact, in early 1984, I don’t know if what I did with cards could even be called collecting. Cards were something I received as small, token gifts, as a parental payoff, or something I wanted but bought randomly up until then. I’d see a pack in a store and get one here or there. I might’ve been bigger into Topps sticker books before I go into cards.
Up until that point I’d never gone on a specific search baseball cards. They’d never been the modus operandi of any small journey I’d been allowed to make on my own.
And, as children,
we did make journeys on our own. This was 1984. Times were different. Times
were always different, when seen though adult eyes. It did feel as though we had
more license and personal autonomy back then. I don’t have children so it’s
never my place to speak about how people raise their children, but I’d been
allowed to take unsupervised walks to convenience stores since the previous
summer of 1983, when I’d been nine. With friends, of course; always in a group.
But sans the older folk. We bought the usual trifles: candy, pop. Maybe no one was putting razor
blades in candy in 1983 and that’s why our parents felt safe letting us venture
off on our own. And, yes, I know the razor blades in candy is a myth.
But a baseball
card journey? This felt epic. Not like
traveling to Mordor and battling Orcs epic, but the walk to the Thrift Drug
with Miller was the furthest that I’d been outside of the Shire, on foot, since
my family had moved to the neighborhood the previous summer. Streets that I’d
traveled by in cars felt different. More tangible. The colors of lawn brighter.
The leaves budding on trees, thick and moist. The sky bluer that it felt when
passing by on four wheels. It was freedom again. I was ready for it.
Miller knew right
where to go to get the cards. I mean I did too because I’d bought packs there
before when with my parents. But there was always more determination when on
your own. Thrift kept the packs of cards on the top shelf of the candy aisle.
Topps, always Topps at the Thrift Drug. And they had them! The new 1984 Topps
cards! They were in green wrappers this year. The REAL one. Fifteen picture
cards and one stick of gum whose hard sugariness I could already taste on my
tongue. A chance card to win a trip to the World Series, that would be tossed
from the pack and blowing in the cold, suburban late winter wind the minute we
stepped outside of the store.
The shelving in the candy aisle was low enough that we didn’t even have to reach on our tip-toes, just a raise of the arm like we were making effortless free throws. Miller went first (it has been his idea, you know). A rustling of the wax packs our soundtrack, because any good pack selector always picked from the bottom. That’s where they kept the star cards and the hometown players, right? We each selected two packs each and paid at the register with the same salty cashier, whom I’d later buy items like snuff all the way up to cigarettes and condoms from. Bless her soul, she never gave me a note of recognition in all of those years.
I don’t remember that specific walk home that day. I was too engrossed in the cards. But let’s assume it was like every other walk home with cards. Magical. Mystical. Full of promise and then maybe an eventual letdown. Me and Miller ripping the wax and tossing it. Sticking the gum and chewing hard on the hard, tiny triangles that it always seemed to break into. Going through the cards. Who’d you get? Who’d you get? Miller wanted some guy named Tony Gwynn.
I wanted Pittsburgh Pirates.
Both of us were too naïve to consider this guy.
Sometimes trades were made right on the spot. I never waited until I got home to open packs. Walking to that Thrift Drug was process I would do again and again from 1984 until 1992.
To this day I
still really like and enjoy 1984 Topps baseball cards. A sister card to 1983,
the 1984 brand had a bold, white border that widens on the left had side to
allow for the team name in bright colors. But it leaves plenty of room for the
player photo. Topps did mostly action shots in 1984, like they did in 1983, a
year I felt that they’d really upped their game in terms of quality. The 1984
brand also featured, like the 1983 cards, a small picture of the player in the
bottom corner of the card. The backs of 1984 Topps were pure red, white and
blue. We were living in the heart of Reagan’s American after all. As a current
collector, 1984 is a state that I’m currently working on and I still get that
sense of excitement whenever I get a card for the set.
Here are two of my favorites from 1984:
Those patriotic card backs I'm talking about:
But, that day, back in the year of 1984, going to buy baseball cards at the Thrift Drug seemed the perfect one to show my collection off to Miller. Collection? Like I said, my “collection” was more like putting the cards I’d either bought or received in rubber bands or tossed randomly into a beat-up blue suitcase. Sometimes not even then. Because I didn’t care for my cards at that age, I’d let the piles mount up messily to the point where I couldn’t close the suitcase. There was overflow. Piles of cards, and I mean messy piles, mounds of cards on a shaky foundation, not stacks, had formed next to the suitcase.
My old man had
been telling me for months to clean them up. Clean them up or else. But it was
an empty threat, right? He’d been telling me to clean up my bedroom for months
too, and that had yet to happen. What? Me Worry? That particular day all I had
were visions of Miller and I huddled over the suitcase, that I fully expected
to be there in all of its chaotic glory, going through the mounds and mounds of
cards that I’d collected. I was excited. It had been weeks since I’d last
looked inside the suitcase. And now I had new cards to add to my fine mess! But
when we got to the basement…the suitcase was gone.
Was I surprised?
Yes…and no. I’d been warned, right? A stone-cold affirmation from my old man
when Miller and I went back upstairs confirmed my loss. My “collection” of
random cards from 1980-1983 was gone. My Willie Stargell cards. My Ed Ott’s.
All of the 1981 Donruss my grandma had bought me when we moved from Pittsburgh
to West Virginia for that one year…gone too. Tossed out with the trash like
they were nothing. All I had left was that short stack of 1984 Topps that I’d
bought that day. I was so shocked that I didn’t even cry. It was hard to be
devasted when you didn’t know what you had in the first place. But I learned.
Since my
collection was gone, we went to Miller’s house and he showed me his card collection.
Miller taught me how to care for my cards. He showed me how he stored them in
shoeboxes. In actual order. By player. By teams. By sets. As I began buying
more packs in 1984, I followed suit. Any reasonable boxes we had in the house,
I used. I kept the cards in good condition. I kept them in my room. In my
closet. Where the old man was surely not to go.
Those two packs of
1984 Topps would be the foundation of a brand-new collection of cards. The
first rebuild of my collection. Or maybe my first real collection, all things
considered. They would form the basis of a collection I’d keep until mid-1993
when I gave them to my younger brother. The high school girls who had ignored
me had suddenly become college women who thought I was cool and worth talking
to. I began collecting books and records. Jack Kerouac was who I searched for
by then. You could keep your Don Mattingly rookie cards.
Still, 1984 was the year that I remember when really got into cards as collectibles; the year that I began to treat them as items to be cared for rather than thrown into a suitcase. Cards were all I wanted. Wax packs, rack packs and cellos, oh my. I began to differentiate from the brands. Got reacquainted with Fleer.
Longed for the Donruss cards we could never find.
I began to develop my own PC of players that I liked and the old timers whom I wished I’d seen play the game. Older kids told us about the American Coin hobby shop in the Monroeville Mall…and we were off to the races. By the summer of 1984 I’d become such a card aficionado that I even ripped off my first kid in a huge trade.
As I got more and
more into cards, I’d sometimes think about that suitcase. Though I bore the old
man no ill will, I do wonder what I would’ve had in there. I’d been buying and
receiving packs since 1980. That suitcase could’ve held a Rickey rookie card, A
Ripken, or the holy trinity of Boggs, Sandberg and Gwynn. Of course, with the
way I treated the cards back then, I’d be lucky if they weren’t in horrible
shape. It would be my luck. The world has enough carnage in it, for me to add
with destroyed versions of priceless baseball cards.
To you kids out there.....take care of your stuff...and listen to mom and dad.
Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.
--JG
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