Happy Birthday To Me

Yup, literally. Today's the day, so I thought it would be fun to run through my favorite teams and post some cards and things from my collection (and ex-collection) today; these are ones I've always liked to look at.

I was obsessed as a kid/tween with the Brooklyn Dodgers. This mostly came about as the result of reading Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer when it was still on the bestseller lists but also because they were my dad's team growing up (he was born in Brooklyn) and he knew a lot about them. After he married my mom, they went to a couple of games at Ebbets Field even. My own team was the Mets, and I became aware of them and baseball in general, around the time I started second grade in, wait for it, 1969. I only bought two packs of cards in that year but I was all in when the 1970's hit the shelves.

So when I entered the hobby in 1981, after only a half-decade away from buying my last cards in 1976 - a neat little bookend to my starting pair as it was only a pack or two - I nabbed two things immediately, (well three but I'm too embarrassed to talk about that error box of '81 Fleer). One was a 25 card lot of 1970 Topps Baseball cards, and while it didn't include this card, I would pick one up in fairly short order:

Jones was my favorite position player on the team and of course, my favorite pitcher was Tom Seaver, but his image from the '70 set has been seen so many times. I'll go with this one, another favorite, from 1972, even though he looks completely wasted in the color inset photo:

The other thing I bought was a 1951 Red Back of Duke Snider:

I actually sold off my complete runs of Topps and Bowman Brooklyn Dodgers cards some time back (regrets, I have a few, including those Jackie cards), but kept a team set of their 1956 Baseball Buttons.  Here they are now; love 'em:

I followed football too as a kid, not as fervently as baseball, but the New York Giants trained for a couple of years at a college near me and during the Summer of 1971 my dad would occasionally run me and a friend or two up there to watch practice, and then turn us loose to grab autographs in the player's parking lot. That part of the experience was eye-opening in several way, not the least of which was hearing several Giants bragging to each other in their cars about their latest amorous exploit. One time we saw a couple of other players chugging down codeine-laced cough syrup to dull their post-practice aches and pains. Interesting stuff for a nine-year old's ears and eyes!

One day, as he waited for us in the lot, my dad got to talking with Spider Lockhart somehow and found out they had a mutual interest in toy trains.  My dad had quite the basement layout and he ended up inviting Spider over to see it.  Amazingly, Lockhart did come over to the house a few days later to check it all out. I have searched all through my late father's things and alas, have not been able to unearth any snapshots he took that day, even though I can still picture one of them.

It's earlier than that, by about four years or so but I love this 1968 Team Card, which is a tough short print from an obscure set. I also don't have any football cards from 1971 at present.

Basketball was both the Knick and Nets.  The Knicks were ascendant in 1969 and I saw them at the Garden a few times during their first Championship season. The Nets, who played even closer to our house at the gloriously disheveled Island Garden, were even more to my liking and I got to see some really down and dirty ABA games there, watching about twenty feet from the court, usually sitting in the equivalent of high school gym bleachers. This was obviously before they moved into the Nassau Coliseum. 

I knew Island Garden was subpar for a pro team  - couldn't have cared less - and the place hosted traveling, smaller, circuses and the like, so it always had a bit of a bouquet to it. I did see a real circus there once, replete with a side show that had a sword swallower, a fat lady and several other things that had been tamed out of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey show by then. The Ringling Brothers show was a fun event at see Madison Square Garden (where visits always included a pre-event hot dog and orangeade at Nedicks in Penn Station) but it was nowhere near as cool as seeing a bearded lady and several freaks on display.

I never saw the 1969 Basketball cards but was a big consumer in 1970.  Here's my favorite all-time Knick:

Julius Erving wasn't a Net yet when I saw him at the Island Garden (his rookie year only, they moved to Nassau Coliseum the following season) , but he was sure there a handful of times, windmilling down the court as a Virginia Squire. It was quite the sight from twenty feet away and I still consider him the greatest player I've ever seen.  But I was a Nets fan, and here's a nice trio sticker that includes their point guard Bill Melchionni from the 1971-72 sticker set Topps included in the packs. ABA players came and went for the most part but Melchionni spent seven years in Nets red and blue:

These stickers have long been a favorite of mine (and are possibly my favorite set of all time). Here's the ABA in one glance:

I wasn't really a hockey fan until the Islanders came along in 1972.  I had half-heartedly followed the Rangers but was not that into the game then (actually, I'm still not that into it, nor basketball anymore). Here we see a Bruin turned Islander via the magic of the expansion draft; one of the bigger names to land on the team:

While I didn't know it as a kid, nine additional Islanders cards were issued by O-Pee-Chee in Canada, which were part of their much larger set. In fact, I had not even heard of O-Pee-Chee, no surprise given my Long Island residency. 1972-73 was the only year I bought Hockey cards and had stopped with Basketball after that as well.  I carried on with Football into 1974 and that was that.

I debated expanding this trip down memory lane to include non-sports cards but after some careful recollection, realized that until Wacky Packages came out in 1973, I only bought sets like the Donruss Fantastic Odd Rods and the wonderful Bob Laughlin-illustrated World Series cards from Fleer (which I guess technically were baseball cards). No Topps non-sports back then for me, my how things have changed.

My mom never threw out my cards (she would never have done so, in fact) but I sold off my childhood collection sometime around the end of the Seventies along with a ton of comic books. It helped fund my first car so I don't regret doing so, especially since I've reacquired most of the cards I collected as a kid since then.

Happy birthday to me!