I can still remember the ice cream truck coming around our street on Blue Oak when I was young.  And every time I heard it, I would look around for 50 cents so I could race out there to buy a pack of Topps baseball cards. If I had a dollar, I’d surely buy two packs that day.  I’d go through the packs and hope for at least a couple really good cards that I could put in my huge three ring binder.  I’d sit on my bed and organize them and look up their values and think how much they would be worth some day.

I started collecting those in 1987 when I was nine years old and accumulated quite a bit of good cards over a period of 3 or so years.  I probably had more than one binder and even had some basketball cards as well.  I planned to keep those for years and hopefully they would have quite a value someday.  As it turns out, all of those cards were lost.  I’m still not sure exactly how, but I no longer have any of my original cards.  They likely ended up in a box somewhere with one of my parents and perhaps was lost somewhere along the way… I don’t really know.  What I do know is now that I have five boys now, I am truly disappointed that I don’t have them to pass on.

So….. I started researching a couple weeks ago to see if there was perhaps any old baseball card packs that I could pick up from my youth maybe that hadn’t been opened yet.  To my surprise, I did find some people on Ebay that had packs of old baseball cards from 1986-1995 that were completely unopened.  The Topps brand still even had the old stale gum inside.  I spent the money and bought a few packs and the boys and I had a blast opening them.  It was fun to see them excited and it was fun for me also to get to have that experience again even if only for a moment to remember that part of growing up that was so fun.