1981 Donruss

Sometimes I like to think about card sets that I love.

            I mean, collecting is supposed to be fun in general, but every collector out there has those sets that stand out for a reason. Maybe it’s the design. Maybe it’s where you were in your collecting life. The first card pack you even opened. The first set you ever built. The first team set that you built. It just that specific year or years of cards that just do it for you.

            These three sets do it for me every single time.

            1987 Topps, Fleer and Donruss, and I’m instantly thirteen-years-old and on my bed going through them on summer nights that were still reasonable enough to be indoors without a fan blowing (for the most part). Those cards paid for (mostly) from the money that I made delivering the morning newspaper. 1987 was probably the highwater mark for me. The year I was most interested. Most invested. 1988 and 1989 were still big too. But the money I made was also going toward cassette tapes and movies, and used VHS tapes of films that I loved. I don’t think I ever loved card collecting like I did in 1987.

            Now, this set/design takes me all of the way back to the beginning.

            1980. I’m six-years-old and I’m at a five and dime (we called it that) with my Grandma on Butler Steet in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. She’s buying lottery ticket and told me that I could get whatever candy I wanted. Reaching for, probably a Milky Way, I spied a pack of 1980 Topps baseball cards. What are these? I probably said to myself. I remember opening them on the street, after we left the store. Going through the cards. Getting my first Pirates card.

            Okay, that’s not the OG from 1980…but when I got back into collecting, I had to have that card again.

            Good card sets can give you good memories.

            But what about those sets that…don’t make you feel so good?

            For me, it’s this one.

            The first time that I saw 1981 Donruss baseball cards, I was seven-years-old in the backseat of my parent’s car, a moving truck idling behind us, getting ready to leave Pittsburgh for Wellsburg, West Virginia; getting ready to leave the only, city, the only streets, the only home, and the only friends that I ever knew. And I was sad. Even though Wellsburg was under an hour away from Pittsburgh, it felt like I might as well be across the world. And why were we moving? Because my old man had taken a job at a bank in Wellsburg…and the one nagging stipulation was that you had to live in the town.

            It was bye-bye Steel City for me…hello farmland.

            The Donruss cards were, of course, given to me by good ol’ Grandma, who could recognize a fellow addict when she saw one. Opening the cards was supposed to be salve on the wound. I was seven and obviously had no clue about the decades of litigation between Topps and Fleer, the busting of Topps’ monopoly on the The Hobby. That Fleer and Donruss had been making non-sports cards for years. But I did know that Donruss were different from what I was used to. I’d already seen and bought 1981 Topps cards. My buddy Chris and I had found them at George’s Pharmacy on Butler Street. Think those old soda fountain pharmacies if you want to picture George’s.

            And I already liked the design.

            I already had a pile of them stored in that blue suitcase that I used to keep my cards in…until a lesson was learned a few years later.

            My Topps sticker book was already over ½ way filled too…and somewhat ruined (at least the back cover) by Chris’ older sister who spilled cherry Kool-Aid on it.

            But I digress.

            And it’s not that 1981 Donruss cards are bad.

The 605-card set is a bit sloppy with duplicates.

The set sequencing is strange.

But there IS a Marquee rookie card in the set.

And Donruss would go on to make some of the best sets of the Junk Wax Era.

The Hobby could USE a Donruss or a Fleer to give Topps a run for its money again.

It’s just that 1981 Donruss cards were just something for a sad and soon-to-be lonely kid to use to take his mind off moving, to pass the time as the familiar landscape of Pittsburgh morphed into the unfamiliar rural landscape of Wellsburg, West Virginia, with its Main Street that still looked like a relic from the 1950s. 1981 Donruss are the set that I think about when I think about an unhappy year. About the principal at my new school refusing to let me be called by my nickname, so I was John instead of Jay in second grade. It was my parents arguing a lot. Neighbors calling the old man a city slicker. A neighbor threatening to shoot our Golden Retriever, Sam, who kept getting loose and getting into his yard. And then the same said neighbor actually shooting Sam in his leg.

1981 Donruss reminds me of a year where my family was so unhappy that, in the end, we had no recourse but to move back to Pittsburgh, not the city, but the suburbs, where I’d, yet again, be the new kid, all at the risk of my old man losing that bank job.

Which he did.

That’s the stuff I think about when I see 1981 Donruss. I guess it could’ve been Topps. Or it could’ve been 1981 Fleer, which I first saw and bought in a general store in Wellsburg, one morning when the old man was driving me to school. It just so happened that 1981 Donruss is what I opened during that car ride, so it bares the weight of that time in my life. This March, I was home visiting my folks and I came upon the 1981 Donruss set on the cheap at a flea market. Those memories actually propelled me to buy the set. To bring it back to Brooklyn and look through it from time to time. To write this. To try and find that seven-year-old kid who was going into the first real unknown of the many unknowns that he was going to face as he got older.

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!