JUNE 7, 2021 – Every Boomer guy I know has the same story. As a kid, he collected baseball cards and built a stable of stars but now has only a vague notion as to what happened to the collection, including superstars like Mantle and Maris. Today they’d be worth millions—or at least a few hundred—dollars. Details vary from case to case, but the result is the same: the cards went poof! in the winds of time.
Often, though, the mom had something to do with vanished cards. “I think my mom gave them away,” I hear, or “My mom threw ’em out when my parents moved,” or “Mom sold them at a garage sale after I left for college.”
I too have no idea what happened to my collection, which also included guys like Mantle and Maris, Koufax and Drysdale. The last I saw of them, my “cards worth millions” were in a shoebox in the closet of my bedroom in my parents’ house. Eventually, my dad took over the room for his various writing and photography projects. During a visit one day, I peeked into the closet and saw only Dad’s stuff neatly organized.
After my parents succumbed to very old age, I cleaned out their commodious house—or rather, warehouse. Like Heinrich Schliemann sifting through the seven cities of Troy, I dug painstakingly through 60 years of strata accumulated by my parents. No nook or cranny, trunk or box; no shelf, no drawer, no backroom cabinet, no secret hiding place went unexamined. And no baseball cards were uncovered.
Surely Dad would’ve saved them when he cleaned out my closet. That leaves Mom as the primary suspect.
Fast forward. While strolling recently down our sidewalk, I encountered neighbor Joe—my age or thereabouts. We hadn’t chatted in some time, so on this occasion we yakked about one thing, then another. Somehow baseball cards came up, and Joe told me his story—a doozy.
“My dad was a big-time baseball fan,” said Joe. “He also played softball at a very high level; even made the Softball Hall of Fame. Growing up in the Thirties, he collected baseball cards and had sets of all the greats of that era—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey . . .”
So far, so . . . great. Then came the “OMG” part:
“One summer day when I was eight and my brother was five, we dug into my dad’s collection for the sole purpose of pinning them to our bikes to make noise around the neighborhood.”
“Oh, no!” I said, slack-jawed.
“Yeah, but eventually we got bored with that, so we pinned them up on a clothesline, hauled out our BB-guns and used the cards for target practice. ‘I know!’ I said to my brother. ‘Let’s aim for this guy’s hat’ or ‘Let’s shoot this guy in the glove!’ Pretty soon, we’d shredded the Babe—all five versions of him.”
I asked the obvious question.
“My dad got over it,” said Joe.
Some dad . . . and a blameless mom.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
