General Forum

1968 Orlando Cepeda was the card that got me hooked. One of my best friends Dad had grown up as Dal Maxvill's best friend. Dal was the Cardinal shortstop and would visit our town to see him ocassionally in the off season. My friends and I would all be excited to see a real big league player in person. The Cardinals were our team because of this and Cepeda was my favorite player. I remember having to give up quite a bit in a trade for his card because I wanted it so badly. I still enjoy opening a pack of cards today as much as I did then. Funny how some things never change.

In 1998, during the heated summer months as McGwire and Sosa started chasing Maris. I started watching baseball. I begged my mom to take me to a new card shop I had seen in town. Found this card looking through the box of singles, and was hooked.

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/1212/cid/176362/1998-SkyBox-E-X2001-72-Kevin-Brown

I think the acetate did it for me at age 12.  I own this complete set now, and it's still in my top three favorite sets of all time. Have the original Kevin Brown my mom bought me framed on my wall. 

I couldn't possibly tell you the first card I ever owned or even touched, but it was baseball. My dad would show me cards, but he never let me touch them until I was older. I remember seeing 1986 Topps baseball cards. The first pack he let me open (but not keep the cards) was 1987 Topps. Then he started letting me pick out packs of 1988 Topps cards when I turned 10. I've been hooked since then except for 2 short breaks for financial reasons (even though I still looked at my cards a lot in those breaks). In 1989, I started getting NBA cards too. In 1990, I added NFL cards. In 1991, I added NASCAR cards. I picked up other random cards during those years as well. So I was collecting many sports and non-sports cards. In 1999, I decided I needed to scale back and find a direction. I stopped buying everything but MLB and NFL. I got back into buying NASCAR cards in 2005. I still mostly just collect those 3 sports now with a few random non-sports cards here and there. I also still have some keepers in my NBA collection.

1988 Topps Wade Boggs. My friend's Dad was a HUGE collector and I went with them to a small show. I bought a pack of 1988 Topps and got the Boggs. When his Dad told me "thats's a good one", I thought I had won the lottery. My friends and I picked our favorite players (Boggs, Mattingly, Puckett, Ripken) and we were hooked. 

Mine would be a 1960 Carl Yaz topps Rc I found in a walmart parking lot in 1989. I didnt collect cards then so I h=gave it to a friend of mine who did. He sold the card for 75.00 at a card shop and tried to give me 1/2 the money. I told him I gave you the card it was yours to do with it. Then I started collecting ever since.

I never had a card that started it all for me but one card that distinctly remember pulling is a 1978-79 Topps Jack Sikma. Now the card that brought me back to the hobby was the 1992-93 Stadium Club Shaq rookie.

There wasn't one card, but I spent the summer going to my aunt's everyday in 1982 while my mom was at work.  My aunt would give me 50 cents (I think) and I would walk down the the Short Stop and buy 30 card cello packs of 1982 Fleer.   I still have an irrational love for that set.

When I saw the Rod Carew card (I wouldn't see the 82 Topps IA cards for a few years) I became a Carew fan.

Top card of the top pack of a 1978 Topps cello three pack.

1978 Topps #500 All-Star George Foster card with the most amazing star line from the previous year of anyone in the previous 20 years.  I was hooked and I still have that well loved and worn card.

Maybe not this exact card, but I remember having this one very vividly. I remember displaying a few of the cards I had from the 3 or 4 packs I had opened at that point in my room. I remember making a little piece of paper to put in front of this card with "Lowest lifetime batting average" (he had a .170 average at this point). I don't remember what other cards I had from those early packs, but I'm pretty sure this was my first Phillies card:

So, not really a single card that statrted it all, but a set. I started collecting these pretty late in the year in 1978, and I would occasionally find packs in stores into 1979, and thought that was really cool. I think a couple stores gave us a discount because they weren't "this year's" cards. When 1979 hit, that's when the floodgates opened. I actually had enough cards from packs to compile 2 sets with a couple thousand extras. (I finally bought a 1978 set in 1981 or 1982 from the card shop that I had started doing work for.) So, 1978 and 1979 Topps baseball sets hold some good memories.

The card that started it for me was a card I did not own until I was in my 40's.  I started collecting in 1983 and was trying to complete the set one pack at a time.  I bought, sorted, and traded all year but never came up with the Wade Boggs card.  By the time the year was over I needed that one plus 7 others for the set.  As the years went on I found all of the cards except the Wade Boggs.  Whenever I would find one at a show, I could not justify passing up the several other cheaper cards I could get rather that ponying up for the Wade Boggs Rookie Card.

That card started my obsession for completing sets, and the frustrations that can go with it.

When I got back into collecting one of my first purchases was this card.