1981 Topps Stickers : Terrors of the Unknown...or Why the Kool Aid Man Ain't No Joke

 

I remember being crazy for them.

            Crazier than I was for baseball cards at the time. It’s true. Baseball cards came in packs. With gum. And then you either put them in rubber bands (gum bands to you Pittsburgers out there), or stored them in a shoebox. Or you did what I did, which was to simply dump them in a beat-up, old blue suitcase.

            A move I paid dearly for by the way.

            But baseball stickers? Well, they were a different ball game to a seven-year-old like me. They came with purpose. You bought them alongside an album with strict pagination. With uniformed pages. With established 8-player team pages. With an exact spot to place said stickers. I didn’t know about numbers on the back of cards in 1981. I wasn’t hip to collation or set building back then.

            Baseball stickers gave me an order to the collecting life.

            An order that I didn’t even know I needed.

            The stickers were plain.

            But the packaging was striking.

            The album was bright yellow. 

            Topps in black. Baseball in that patriotic red, white and blue. There was a huge picture of George Brett on the cover, swinging his big bat. George Brett identified players that I was getting know, along with names like Schmidt, Rose, Stargell, Reggie, and Rod Carew. Names that I could recognize.

            And the packs?

            Bright blue with the same George Brett image, only in reverse. Like little packets of joy, they came four stickers to a pack. For fifteen cents? I could get fifteen cents. Fifteen cents showed up nearly every week in my house, courtesy of the old man falling asleep on the couch after work. Fifteen cents was negotiable with mom in a corner store, or the G.C. Murphy’s on Butler Street.

            The 1981 Topps sticker album is where I began to learn about statistics. The album opened up with league leader pages. Strikeouts. This thing called .ERA. Batting Average. Thanks to that book I was a kid who knew who lead the league in home runs in 1981.

            It was this guy.

            More than cards, those stickers became my gateway drug to collecting.

            They make me think of Ken Harmony.

            Remember a first friend. Or the first best friend you made in school. Not the kids in the neighborhood. The ones you were lumped in with because your parents chose to move within proximity of each other. I had plenty of those back in 1981. I could write blog posts about the wiffle ball games in concrete, communal backyards of Pittsburgh/Lawrenceville row houses, and the fistfights with Billy Coco.

            Ah, to have one more shot at him!

            That’s not to slag off neighborhood friends.

            I’ve made great friends from living in neighborhoods.

            Still have some today.

            I met Ken Harmony in kindergarten. Catholic kindergarten. We were the morning class. The kids woken up at the crack of dawn to be carted off to St. Mary’s lyceum from the hours of eight until twelve, where we were tortured by the functionality of numbers and letters; all the while given a good indoctrination into the mysteriously silly ways of the Catholic church via song and dance, and stories.

            I was a rebel back then.

            I didn’t sing or dance.

            When the nun rounded us up to do our song and dance number, I abstained. I sat to the side. No cajoling could get me to budge and join the musical crowd. I still remember the song. You’d have to point at the girls in class, and they’d have to point at you. I am your brother/you are my sister/Jesus is our father/and we are one/yes we are one.

            I could go on?

            And what was it with that? You are my sister? I’m your brother? Jesus is our father? Oh yeah? If that was so, then where was Jesus at dinner time? On the weekend? Who was the dude who showed up every evening around six, after working eight hours in a bank? The guy who left free money in the couch cushions for me to go and buy baseball stickers?

            Was he not my father?

            Fucking Catholics.

            But I digress.

            Eventually some of the other boys in class decided to stop singing that whack-a-doo song. They began joining me in my own personal penalty box. Ken Harmony was one of those kids. He was wide-eyed and big-headed. We clicked over Star Wars. We clicked over The Beatles. We clicked over baseball, which in those days, meant we clicked over cards.

            These babies.

            A year later, now in first grade, and pulling a full-day slog; Ken and I would get cards any chance we could get. He lived off Butler Street, which meant he had more access to the various shops along that bustling stretch. Whenever I stayed at Ken’s we’d walk a few blocks to G.C. Murphy’s or to a place called George’s, where we’d buy cards. Or, in 1981, stickers.

            George’s, as I remember it, was one of those old-fashioned type places. Like it was a corner store, but had a counter where you could eat a lunch, have a Coke, or eat some Islay’s ice cream. I remember the place as being bedecked in golden wood. But that might’ve just been the lights. But at the counter is where George had the baseball cards and candy. The packs of Topps, and now Fleer or Donruss, stacked in there with the Milky Ways and Hersey bars I was beginning to crave.

            One day in the spring of 1981, George had a rack set up at the counter.

            It housed a bright yellow album with George Brett on the cover.

            Next to it was a yellow box with a happy kid on it.

            And a long row of those beautiful, blue packs.

            Ken and I were hooked upon sight.

A small digression before I continue with my tale. Did two seven-year-olds, their pockets packed with change, go to a corner/convenience store to buy baseball stickers on their own. Yes. Sometimes. You see, the 1980s were a different time. Kids could walk a few blocks alone or together back then. We weren’t consistently watched or tracked, like kids are now. And we walked alone with the full-knowledge that someone was going to maybe put us in a van, and we’d never be seen from again. That someone was definitely going to put a razor blade in our Halloween candy.

Terror of the unknown was part of the experience of being a child.

And a good many of us made it through the fire.

It became mine and Ken’s goal to complete the 1981 Topps Baseball sticker album. I bought packs when I could. Ken did the same. We put our stickers in together. We updated each other on our own progress at recess. We hid the sticker albums from our teachers. We traded doubles, except our precious Pirates. We hoarded the foil all-star cards. We protected our sticker albums with our lives. We had the time of our lives.

Until Ken’s sister Lauren decided to make cherry Kool-Aid one Saturday afternoon, and it all went to shit.

Did I mention Ken Harmony had a sister?

An older sister?

A tall, blond, eleven-year-old sister who had an infectious laugh, and liked to tease me by rubbing my hair?

We could discuss first crushes here…but I think you get the idea.

Lauren Harmony.

At times I think I stayed over at the Harmony house because of her. I did this even though Lauren made me so shy. So red-faced. I liked to peer into her room when she wasn’t in there. Not like a creepy kid. It was just such a different world from my bedroom, from Ken’s with his Star War sheets and baseball posters. Lauren’s was a lighter room. Airier with a faint flower scent and dolls lining windows and walls.

Her world was a riddle wrapped in a mystery to me.

And Lauren had friends. Other tall eleven-year-old girls with infectious laughs who liked to make seven-year-old boys blush while they were trying to put baseball stickers into albums. The Harmony house was full of those girls. They stayed into the evening. They stayed overnight. Ken and I could hear them giggling in Lauren’s room. We woke up the next morning and stared bleary-eyed at each other over pancakes.

They drank Kool-Aid and ruined my life.

That might be an over-statement.

But let me paint a picture for you.

It’s an idyllic spring afternoon in 1981. I’m at Ken Harmony’s house. Ken and I doing what we usually do, which is combing over our Topps Baseball Sticker Album at his kitchen table, in between bouts of playing with Star Wars figures or hitting the ol’ wiffle ball around in the alley behind his house. Suddenly, there’s a commotion. Then the house is filled with the sound of a small pack of eleven-year-old girls. The kitchen becomes filled with them and their various, flowery scents. They attack unoccupied seats. They attack the fridge. Lauren sees that there is no Kool-Aid left so she begins to make a batch.

            The girls tease Ken and I.

            They rub our hair.

            They make us blush.

            Ken decides he’s had enough, so we leave the kitchen to play Star Wars again.

            We leave behind our Topps Baseball Sticker Albums.

            They might as well have been lambs to the slaughter.

            We hear a thud on the kitchen table. One of the girls shouts, shit. Then there’s hushes. A Quiet commotion that draws Ken and I back into the room. A girl is holding Ken’s sticker album, waving it as if its on fire. There’s a bright red wet spot in one corner. A small damage in comparison to what I see, which is Lauren holding my sticker album, fanning it as one of the other girls begins wiping it down with a paper towel.

            Fuck.

            And fuck this guy.

            Lauren looks pained.

            She looks like she killed my dog.

            When I finally get ahold of my sticker album again, the entire back cover is red. Or pink. Or whatever color cherry-flavored Kool-Aid and bright yellow paper make. Some of the back cover has already rippled. It looks like a pink sea. The back few pages have a little bit of red on them as well. The edges of all of the pages will turn pink.

The album isn’t ruined.

            But it’s less than it was.

            And I sit at the Harmony’s kitchen table crying over that fact, until Ken’s mom comes in to see what is wrong.

            I was inconsolable.

            Of course, Lauren is crestfallen. She’s not a monster. She knows how much Ken and I love those albums. Lauren offers to buy me a new album with her allowance. Mrs. Harmony offers to take me to George’s right then and there to get it. But there is no logical point in that. The book is over half-full with stickers at this time. The Pirate page long complete. Buying a new album would require me starting over. And I wouldn’t start over. I didn’t want to start over.

            You see…I was already going to have to start over.

            It was that very same spring of 1981 that I learned that my family were moving. My old man had taken a job at a small bank in Wellsburg, West Virginia. The town was only forty-five minutes away from Pittsburgh, and he could’ve easily commuted.

But taking the job came with a caveat.

My old man would have to move to Wellsburg, West Virginia. Show that he was willing to become a part of the town. This mean that I was moving. That my family was moving. That we were leaving Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh and Lawrenceville, my row house, my concrete, communal backyard, those fistfights with Billy Coco, The Pirates, The Steelers and my school.

            And Ken.

            I was going to be leaving the very first best friend that I’d ever made. And I know, I know; a forty-five-minute drive seems like nothing now. But to a seven-year-old I might as well have been moving across country. Ken would make new friends. I would make new friends. He’d have new experiences. So would I. Both bad and good. There’d be new places to explore. New neighborhoods. New corner stores that sold packs of Topps Baseball Stickers.

            And I’d end up completing that album.

            On my own.

            Terrors of the unknown, right?

            Maybe that’s why I cried so much over a little bit of Kool-Aid. Because I knew what was coming. I knew that mine and Ken’s time together had an end date. Time had to be perfect. There was no room for cherry Kool-Aid spills and damaged baseball sticker albums. For eleven-year-old girls to look at me sobbing with their empathetic, ashen faces.

            Time was fleeting.

            So was my time collecting Topps stickers.

            I did finish the 1981 album, thanks to a corner store in Wellsburg that my mom walked me and my brother to a few times a week. But, by 1982, I’d begun to figure out how to really collect cards. How sets were built. How to collect teams and players that I liked. Though I did buy 1982 stickers (was kind of hard not to with Topps putting them in packs of cards), it would be my last year buying them. Coincidently enough, I made a brand-new friend while trading baseball sticker at recess.

Calvin DeFlino.

He needed Terry Kennedy to complete his album.

And I had doubles.

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

If you’d like to learn more about Topps Baseball Stickers, you can do so HERE.

NEXT FRIDAY: We’re going to discuss fixed points in time…and why I like Topps Archives so much.