Back in the Summer of....89?

 

I hate the summer. 

Probably always have. As a child I felt forced into liking the summer. Coerced. Enticed by the fact that, if I played my academic cards right, there would be no school in the summer. I was a model low B to high C student. I hated school more than summer. Didn’t enjoy it at all. From the first bell to the last, lunch and recess in between, school was torture to me. A misappropriation of my valuable time, almost in the way that work is now. Although work is worse.

Why was school so bad you ask?

I was a fat kid so there was that. I was awkward. I tried to be funny to compensate for being a fat kid, even though I loathed the very kids that I was trying to entertain. I was smart. But not in a normal way. Once, a teacher in grade school was sorting president flash cards and I was standing next to her saying the names of the presidents based on their faces alone. The teacher was intrigued by that feat. I guess the other kids didn’t know presidents upon sight.

They didn’t have this dope-ass book on their shelves.

She was impressed so much that she took me from classroom to classroom and made me do my presidential face recognition act in front of classrooms full of bored kids. I was embarrassed. The kids were apathetic. 

Even the other teachers looked bored. 

Ten bucks if you can tell me who this is?

I’m kidding…I’m not giving you ten bucks.

Also, school took place during my favorite seasons. Autumn. Winter. Why did I have to be locked up in a classroom, picking apart sentences into nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives, during a time when the only weather I ever wanted to be out in was happening. Why was summer…summer? Because the cheap bastard school district (or Catholic parish in my case) wouldn’t spring for AC? To date, I’d rather be outside in 30 degrees than 75. I’d rather travel in December, have my “summer” vacation shivering, rather than trying to seem happy and cheerful in the sun and heat. 

I’m an indoor guy from June-September.

By the way. 

I hate the sun too. 

Give me 55 degrees and overcast.

I’d pay to live long enough to watch to watch the sun burn out of the sky. 

Happiest last eight minutes of my life. 

In the summer of 1989, I was an overweight fifteen-year-old boy who’d just finished his first year at an all-boys Catholic high school. It was not a happy year.  I didn’t particularly like going to high school with just boys. Not that I was ever going to get anywhere with the ladies, but it was good to have them around. And variety is the spice of life.

You can’t fart in a classroom when girls are there.

I mean you can but…

Plus, boys are cruel. A school full of just boys has a Lord of the Flies vibe. Survival of the fittest. Pecking orders. That sort of thing. When you were a fat kid you knew where you stood. Not that I’d change the friends I had in high school for a table full of jocks. I didn’t like the caste system. And I continued not to like it for the remaining three years that I went to said all-boys Catholic high school. I learned to cope. Learned to deal as best I could. I stopped trying to be funny and just went about my day just to get home. I became wallpaper. 

I might've hated hot weather. 

I might’ve hated the sun. 

But I hated that high school more. 

I was going to live the high life in the summer of 1989. No all-boys school until fall. Days were going to be playing wiffle ball with kids that I actually wanted to be around. The neighborhood guys. Phineas. Yes, a friend or two from high school. But without the hassle of other dickheads. There was a family trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame planned. I was going see this guy’s plaque in person.

See Doubleday Field. 

Soak in the myth of the national pastime.

Or maybe that’s in Canton, Ohio now.

I had my new afternoon paper route and was making money. Inherited it from A.J. Fanello of all people. I had my New Edition and Bobby Brown cassette tapes to listen to on my route. I had peace and peace of mind on that route. Time to think. A fifteen-year-old boy needed time alone to think. And do other things.

One of the ladies that I delivered the paper to was a wealthy stay-at-home mom who was maybe thirty. She spent her summers lounging poolside in bikinis while her husband worked. She answered her front door in bikinis. I was fifteen. I didn’t have to worry about whether or not she liked me or thought that I was fat. I was wallpaper to her too. 

Except alone in my bedroom.

I was the man of her dreams there.

There were those summer movies in 1989. Probably the best year for blockbusters, back when I gave two shits about blockbusters. Everything is a blockbuster now. But that’s a blog for another time. But in 1989, Batman was coming out. My favorite superhero of all time was finally getting a movie that didn’t involve Adam West. And it looked good too.

There was Ghostbusters 2.  The Karate Kid 3. Weekend at Bernie’s.  Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Indiana Jones (for some...not for me). UHF for you Weird Al fans (I was). Lethal Weapon 2. Yeah, that one was R-Rated. But this was 1989. No one cared back then. I’d already seen Major League in the movies that same April. 

Of course...there were these.

What summer of my childhood would be complete without baseball cards? 

Yes, baseball cards came out earlier in the year, but the summer was really when I could spend a good deal of my time with them, other than just opening packs and putting them in boxes. With no homework and no school to wake up for, I could look at my cards any time that I wanted. Organizing Pirates cards and star cards. Put team sets together. Make half-assed sets and then abandon them. Except for 1988 when I actually put a Topps set together. I could walk my paper route, thinking about the cards that I wanted to buy at card shows.

Some nights I’d be up until midnight or longer looking at my cards

There was usually a ball game on in the background that I was paying attention to.

There was always a ball game.

Because of injuries, the 1989 Pirates squad had taken a significant step back from the progress they’d made in 1988. They were heading toward a 74-88, 5^th place finish that year. But they still had that core: Bonds, Bonilla, Van Slyke, Drabak, Jose Lind, Spanky and the others. You knew they’d have it back on track by 1990. They’d win the goddamned division. Plus, as a Pirates fan in the 1980s you were used to bad baseball being played. What was one more season? 

I still wanted all of those Bucco cards. 

But there was one guy whose cards I wanted more than any others in 1989. So did a lot of other kids. 

I think you know who I’m talking about.

Ken Griffey Jr. burst into baseball on April 3, 1989, by hitting a double off of the A’s ace Dave Stewart in his very first plate appearance. The Kid was gold with baseball card collectors. We all wanted his stuff. We talked about pulling his stuff from packs. In 1989, I think I bought more Fleer and Donruss packs than I ever had up until that point, trying to get Griffey Jr. rookie cards. My go to brand, Topps, had stupidly left him out of their base card release. I’d have to wait for the year-end Traded set for that one.

If you consider Traded sets real rookies.

I was always more partial to this one.

But I remember pulling my first Griffey Donruss Rated Rookie card. I was going up an escalator in the Monroeville Mall. I bought the pack in a G.C. Murphy’s. Remember that place? It was the first store I’d ever seen Topps Big in 1988. They kept their cards up near a counter. Put packs in large bins. In my excitement I just ripped open the packs I’d bought. I wasn’t expecting the Griffey. But I was. Kinda. Because of my haste and inability to wait until I got home, my dumb ass had to protect that Griffey card the whole rest of the time I was at the mall, and on the long card ride home before I could get it in a sleeve and top loader. 

The Donruss and Fleer Griffey’s were great cards. 

They’re still great cards. 

In fact, I think the Donruss Griffey rookie might be my favorite looking of his debut cards. 

But... 

It’s not this... 

In 1989 (and to this very date), the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card is still the rookie card of his to get. First card of the premier-edition set. It’s iconic. It’s not 1952 Topps Mantle iconic, but for kids collecting during the mass-produced junk wax era, that 1989 Upper Deck Griffey Jr. rookie still holds value. Both sentimental and monetary. I didn’t pull one then. I still don’t own one now. But it’s one card that I really want.

And I had a chance to buy it back then.

Truth be told, I didn’t open a lot of Upper Deck cards in 1989. Because they were of premium quality (better card stock, tamper proof foil pack), they cost more. At fifteen, I was a quantity over quality guy. I probably still am. Why pay 99-cents for a pack of Upper Deck when I could pay half of that for a pack of Topps, Fleer, Donruss, or Score? I’m not alone in that thinking. You read articles from people collecting back then, back when they were kids too, and you heard/read a lot of the same dilemmas with Upper Deck.

But I came across that Griffey.

Raw as they say now.

I was at a flea market. The old City Limits flea market on the outskirts of Pittsburgh’s Penn Hills suburbs. One of the moustache-wearing, stale coffee smelling vendors was selling the Upper Deck Griffey Jr. rookie. For $25. Seems dirt cheap in comparison to what I’ve seen the card go for now ($75 on upwards). But a card fresh from a pack going for $25? In 1989? That seemed absurd to me. A rip-off. You could buy a damned wax box of Upper Deck for $36. Of course, you weren’t guaranteed the Griffey card. Wax boxes back then trafficked in you getting a ton of doubles.

Still.

I had the money on me.

$25 of paper route money right there in my pocket.

Bikini lady money.

            1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. card sitting right there on that schmuck’s table.

            But I was a guy who preferred quantity over quality, right?

            So, I passed on the Griffey.

            I think I bought a bunch of Topps instead.

            I wish I’d bought that card. Maybe it would’ve softened the blow of what was going to happen next. My summer of 1989 was going to take a week-long dark turn. My days of waking up whenever I wanted stolen from me for five consecutive days. No waffles. No wiffle ball. No thoughts of bikini clad suburbanite women. No Days of Our Lives in the middle of the afternoon. No sneaking mint-flavored dip. No looking at my cards whenever I wanted. No nothing.

            I was going back to school.

            Back in February of 1989, I got invited to a select assembly at school. There was maybe a dozen of us boys. We were given a presentation for a week-long retreat that they were calling Catholic Youth Leadership. If I think about it now, a lot of the guys in that assembly were guys that would go on to be our valedictorian. Our class president. Our prom king. You know…so-called leaders. I jerked-off to women on my paper route and blonde newscasters on WPXI, and secretly listened to the New Kids on the Block.

            Not a leader.

            Yet there I was hearing some rando’s speech about his program and how it could help us make a difference in our community. Like I gave a shit about my community. I liked my neighbors about as much as I liked my high school. Still, the assembly got me out of class, I signed up for the thing because I wasn’t really given a choice. My parents were excited for the program when I told them. It was a week in July that seemed forever away. I forgot about it and went on with my life.

            Then that week in July came.

            And my ass was shoved out of a car on a street corner in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh before nine in the morning. I was in a classroom again. Some stuffy non-air-conditioned room in the University of Pittsburgh. There were some guys I went to school with. I avoided them. Kids from other schools who were also hapless victims of their own budding leadership skills. We did exercises. We took notes. We did ice-breakers (fucking hate icebreakers). We did group exercises (fucking hate those too). We listened to songs. We were given lunches that I didn’t want to eat in front of other kids. We killed hours. We were promised a pool party at the end of the week.

            A fucking pool party?

            I didn’t feel like a leader.

            I felt like a goddamned outcast.

            I just wanted to go the hell home.

            I should’ve bought that Griffey.

            As was the case for me back then, I developed a crush on a girl I had no chance with. Which was pretty much all girls for me. Her name was Jenny. She was blonde and petite. Jenny at least humored me by laughing at my attempts at humor. But that wasn’t romance. To a fat kid, that felt like romance. I thought Jenny liked me. I thought about Jenny in the evenings while looking through my cards. How I could make her laugh. Overnight my life became Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.

Until I noticed Jenny making eyes at this guy named Mike. Mike was tall and thin and had a face like a president flash card. He glowed. People gravitated to him. He had the right answers in class. He excelled at icebreakers and group work. I couldn’t blame Jenny. By the end of the week, they were Mike and Jenny. They ate those lunches together. Cuddled at the pool party while I sat dipping my toes in the water, wearing a t-shirt to hide my fat shame.

I hope Mike and Jenny are fat suburbanites with asshole kids.

I hope they work for consulting firms.

Actually, I don’t. I don’t care either way what happened to them. By the end of that ordeal, I was just glad to get back to my normal life. Back to sleeping in and messing with cards. Back to the paper route and my New Edition and Bobby Brown cassettes.

Back to bikini lady too.

I decided I was going to treat myself and get that Griffey. I went back to City Limits, but as is always the case, the Griffey card was gone. Sold to someone smarter. A true leader. After that, it slipped my mind. Or the card was double in price the next time. My interest in The Hobby began to wane as the years crept along. By 1993 I was out of it completely. On to music. On to books.

But the Hall of Fame was nice.

They have a lot of baseball stuff there.

There's also a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card from Score's update set.

 Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

If you want to learn more about Ken Griffey Jr. you can do so HERE and HERE.

 

Joey Shiver (AKA Dub Mentality) has a great article in Beckett on 1989 Fleer cards which you can read right HERE

Theere's a fantastic film about Junk Wax Era baseball cards (and a possible baseball card scandal involving said Upper Deck Griffey Jr Rookie Card) called Jack of All Trades written and co-direcred by Stuart Stone. You can view the trailer for it HERE

Mike Sommer has a great review of the Jack of All Trades film on his Wax Pack Hero blog. 

...Okay enough name-dropping.

NEXT FRIDAY: Another move. A new neighborhood. New Kids. A new school. My problems with times tables. Tadpoles in buckets and Impaled Frogs. Some creepy Lord of the Flies shit. I can only be talking about one thing folks...1982 Topps!!!