Growing up in the late 1980s, during the junk wax era, it was hard not to fall in love with collecting trading cards. My first memory was collecting Garbage Pail Kids with my grandmother (it was our little secret). She would buy a pack at the grocery store for us to open and then we would hide them in the hutch at my grandparents’ house. Then in 1987, I fell in love with Topps baseball cards. There was something magical about opening a pack and looking for cards of your favorite player/team and trading with your friends.
It wasn’t until a couple years later, when I began to consider the current and potential future value of my trading card collection. The breaking point was the release of 1989 Upper Deck. It was the first pack of cards that I remember retailing for over $1, well above my budget. The reason for this premium price was Ken Griffey Jr’s rookie card. He was the son of a Major League Baseball All-Star and a teenage phenomenon, deemed to one of the future greats of the game. I couldn’t believe my eyes, when I saw the card in the display case with a price tag of $100. Around this time, I begged my parents to subscribe to Tuff Stuff, a monthly magazine that featured articles about the hobby but more importantly included a price guide for trading cards. Amongst my friends this became our “bible” and we would use it to broker trades with each other or when selling our cards to the local card shop so that we would get “fair” value.
One of the regular columns in the magazine, highlighted athletes that would autograph cards that were sent to them by fans. It included their name and the address with the instructions to write a letter and enclose your card and a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE). The idea of writing to an athlete and getting an autograph sent back was mesmerizing. After some convincing, my parents gave me on book of stamps which contained enough postage to send out ten letters. Within a month, I received my first positive response, and I was hooked. Over the course of the next year, I would write about 50 letters and received most of them back signed.
By the time I was 14, my interest waned, and I stopped purchasing packs and writing autograph requests. It wasn’t until the birth of our first born that I got back into the hobby. Our son was born with a very complex and deadly heart disease that resulted in us spending a considerable amount of time living in a hospital. During this time, one of the things my wife and I did to clear our heads was walk around the Christiana Mall. In the mall, they had a card shop and walking through it brought back so many fond memories of being a child. Not knowing the fate of my son, I needed something to have hope for, and the idea of one day collecting trading cards and sharing that joy with my son was exactly what I needed (it also helped that this card shop supported the hospital that was treating my son).
Shortly after visiting this card shop, I was talking with a colleague at work, who shared his new hobby with me, which involved writing to influential world leaders with one big question on an index card for them to answer and sign their name. I thought this was such a fun idea and it brought back memories of me writing to athletes for their autograph. I began writing some letters again and as the responses came back, I was hooked just as I was as a child. Over the next 7 years, I received back thousands of positive responses.
As my collection grew, I looked for options to protect and authenticate the autographs that I received, so that one day, they would have real value for my son. I choose to use PSA and have been participating in PSA DNA group submissions for several years. The process is simple: you send the cards to PSA, their team of experts reviews the signature to determine if it is real and if so, the card is encapsulated, assigned a certification number and entered into their database. I have been fortunate that 99.99% of my collection has been authenticated.
Later, my wife and I had our second child and while there were no medical complications our son was diagnosed with autism like his older brother. As they grew older, the fell in love with Disney and ever since, I have been adding non-sports cards to our autographed trading card collection. It has been fun to build the collection and I am in the process of curating it down to a more manageable size and upgrading key cards that I hope stay in my family forever.
I plan to use this blog to share my collection and the lessons that I have learned. I hope readers find it enjoyable and that along the way, I can connect with other collectors.
Thank you and happy collecting!