When we were kids, why didn’t anyone tell us…?

I used to collect baseball cards. I had hundreds of them. This was the late 1950s to early 1960s, when I was between the approximate ages of, say, 7 to 12.  I used to trek down the hill from my house on Overhill Road to Tichnell’s service station and buy them by the pack – probably five or six cards along with a big slab of Topps bubble gum. I chewed a lot of gum in those days, and I have the teeth to prove it.

I kept my baseball cards in cigar boxes that I probably got from CV News after they had sold all of the cigars. I had box after box of cards, not including the ones I pinned to the forks of my bicycle so they would make motorcycle noises rattling against the spokes as the wheel spun around.

My favorite player.

I can’t tell you what rookie cards I might have had, but a lot of great players came up to the majors during that period, so I’m sure I had a few. I probably also had cards for some Hall of Famers like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial, and some older stars who were near the end of their careers.  

When I was 13, I started high school and I’m pretty sure I had stopped collecting cards by then, but they were stored away somewhere in my parents’ house. Over time, they just disappeared.

No one told me back then that one day, a market would open up for vintage baseball cards and that some of them would be worth a lot of money – tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. None of us had a clue this would happen back in 1962, but today I shudder to think how much money went into a landfill the day my parents threw my baseball cards away. Hell, I’d bet even the vintage cigar boxes would be worth a few bucks on eBay.

My bike resembled this one.

It wasn’t just about the baseball cards, either. I also had a very sleek-looking 3-speed Royce Union English racing bicycle – black with gold trim – that was the best bike in my neighborhood at the time. I rode it all over town before I could drive a car. I don’t know where or when it went away, either, but I’d go get it in a heartbeat if I thought it was still in existence.

I had an American Flyer O-gauge electric train with a crossroad section, a couple of switches and enough track to make a large figure 8. It had a black locomotive and attached coal tender, a couple of cabooses and several freight, tank and flat cars, as I recall. It came with small red capsules you could insert into the chimney of the locomotive to make smoke. Years later, my mother found a box in her attic that contained a few of the cars in various states of disrepair and a few pieces of track. The engine, however, is probably sitting next to my baseball cards in the Fairmont city dump.   

This was my train, as I recall.

I also lost track of my father’s leather flight jacket from his time on a B-29 during World War II, as well as manuals he brought home showing how to assemble and fire his two 50-caliber Browning machine guns from his turret on the left side of the plane, and how to aim and shoot above and in front of moving targets while his plane was in the air. I think I miss my father’s jacket the most of all.

The original, 1959.

While I was collecting cardboard photos of baseball heroes, my wife was collecting dolls, including the original Barbie, Ken and Midge, that are worth thousands of dollars today, depending on condition. Her 1959 Barbie was the original, with a blonde ponytail and a black striped bathing suit. It’s estimated to be worth $8,000 today, although one in mint condition reportedly sold at auction for $27,450. She also had the original Barbie convertible.

In addition, she owned the original Chatty Cathy and Thumbelina dolls. Chatty Cathy was a "talking" doll manufactured by Mattel. When you pulled a string, she said things like, “Let’s play house,” “Please change my dress” and “I love you.” Thumbelina could wiggle around to mimic the movement of real babies.

Sadly, these dolls have all gone to, well, wherever a little girl’s dolls go when the little girl grows up.

Several years ago, my wife got caught up in the Beanie Baby craze, in part, I think, because she regretted losing her vintage dolls. After spending hundreds of dollars on Beanies large and small, we discovered that no one wants to buy them any more, so we gave some of them away and stored several others in plastic containers in our garage.

Every now and then, we think about giving them to someone or donating them somewhere, but for some reason I can’t help thinking that we should hold onto them for a few more years to see if they become valuable again. I mean, I’m no hoarder, but they’re stored in a safe place and they’re not in the way, and after decades of throwing valuable collectibles away, it seems like some things need to be retained. Maybe hoarding is the way to go.

After all, back in 1962, they were just penny baseball cards printed on cheap cardboard and stored in old cigar boxes that smelled like bubble gum. Who knew?