A couple of weeks ago I visited a local shop that purportedly sold comics and baseball cards. Alas, I learned that was not the case. The owner told me there was no real business for cards over the past several years.
I would say that that’s a shame but the reality is there have been so many other diversions since I was a kid. Imagine growing up in a time before cell phones, before the Internet, before video games. Recently some co-workers were talking about Internet dating and I mentioned that in my day, personal ads in print publications were a big thing. Then I realized that the majority of my colleagues never knew a world without these electronics as a major component of daily life. And I felt old.
But I digress. I guess that’s what happens when you get older. The powers of concentration wane and you start going off on tangents.
I still “collect” baseball cards, although not with the same passion I had as a kid. Now it’s more or less a curiosity thing. As with everything else, there’s a big difference between now and then, especially when it comes to the quality of the photography. I think that’s what makes the “old days” so quaint.
I wasn’t part of the generation that acquired cards as investment properties. I did not keep them in pristine condition. I “played” with them, sorting them in different categories — numerical, position, team, alphabetically, etc. — without a worry of what they could one day mean financially. No thought beyond trucking on down to the candy store to spend my allowance. (Do they even have candy stores any more?)
While doing research for another project, I re-read Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards, which was originally published in 2010. It was an extension of the author’s blog, Cardboard Gods: The Voice of the Mathematically Eliminated which he had started a few years earlier. It’s a very personal book, mostly about growing up in the 1970s and how the players who appeared in various packs took on a significance connected to what the author was going through at home. To be honest, I think the “All-American” part might have been a bit different had someone else had written it 30 years earlier; Wilker’s reminiscences were different than those of a kid growing during the Eisenhower or Kennedy administrations.
I found Cardboard Gods took on a different, deeper meaning now than it had more than a dozen years ago and I wondered if Wilker felt the same. So we talked.
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