Old Baseball Card Nightmare !

When I was a teen, I stored my old baseball cards in plastic sheets into which you had to staple your cards (stapling around the cards, not through them).

Always wanting to do something different with my cards, one day I decided to take all my cards back out of the plastic sheets, to arrange them in teams, or by number, I don't recall. I took scissors and smoothly trimmed the cards out of the sheets . . . until I got to my boffo 1950 Bowman Ted Williams card.

That card was one of some 150-200 cards a work colleague of my dad's had given to me upon learning I collected baseball cards. Anyway, to my sorrow, I accidentally clipped off one of the corners of that big-time card. I recall my reaction decades ago - one of disbelief, and I could feel my face go red and the temperature rise in my face, and I sensed an overall breathlessness I can still conjure up in memory (similar to when your best girl dumps you). God, what a fool was/am I!

Here's the card, which I still have (it's so nice otherwise):

Doesn't my camera suck?!

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Close Encounters of the Jim Beckett Kind

It was a dark and stormy night.

It was an ebony and tempestuous eve.

I first met Dr. James Beckett, of Beckett sportscard Guides fame, in the 70s, long before he became a publishing mogul, when my parents used to take me to sportscards conventions in the Texas Metroplex area. I'm not sure about this, but I believe he sold baseball cards to help pay for his college expenses - and what a collection of choice old baseball cards he had!

Jim and I spoke only little because I was too busy thumbing through his cards, but he seemed real nice and was, I'm sure, glad to have me as a steady baseball cards buyer.

Another encounter . . . Years later I was watching the Family Feud gameshow, and one of the competing families was the Beckett family from, I think, Detroit. As the emcee introduced the family, there was a "Jim" Beckett among them; I thought: "Could that be the Jim Beckett I knew in Texas and who must now have relocated to Detroit?" Sure enough, his family members egged on the emcee to ask Jim what his hobby was, and Jim said that he collected baseball cards.

It's a small world. Those were the good old days for a kid at a card show, with maybe twenty bucks to invest, and parents who encouraged his obsession.

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