Going, Going, Gone 

The day of reckoning: when a man decides it’s time to sell his boyhood baseball cards.

The newspaper ad caught my eye at an opportune time, in the midst of a decluttering binge: “Buying vintage sports cards.” My collection of baseball, football, and hockey cards filled five shoeboxes on a basement shelf, where they resided neglected and ignored. Here was a chance to declutter and collect a little money for it. 

I dialed the number in the ad and at 2:30 on a recent Friday afternoon walked into a St. Paul storefront hefting my card collection. Kurt, the guy I’d talked to on the phone, sat at a banquet table. Next to him, his partner Bob, the one obviously in charge, said, “Let’s see what you got.”

I placed my load on the table and sat opposite them. Not surprisingly, in the presence of those cards, the conversation waxed nostalgic about sports. Bob, about 15 years older, had a different set of memories than mine. He’d been at Metropolitan Stadium, home of the Twins, during the ’65 World Series. I didn’t get to know the Met and the Twins until the following decade. That was the golden age of sport for me.

I believe there’s a sweet spot in our childhood between the time we learn to read a box score and when we start dating, when we’re old enough to understand the game but young enough for our love of it to be innocent. My card collection covered those years, spanning the ’70s.

Summer days, I’d pedal my Sting-Ray half a mile up County Road 6 to Bill’s Superette. Usually with my older brother. We’d buy a pack of cards for 10 cents apiece. Sometimes two or three if we were flush with money from shining our parents’ shoes or pulling a neighbor’s weeds. Outside the store, we’d perch on a concrete ledge, peel off the wax paper, stuff the brittle slab of gum in our mouths, and shuffle through our new cards. By late summer, the players started to repeat, but there was still a thrill at the discovery of a star we did not yet have — Brooks Robinson! Willie Stargell! Hank Aaron!

Back home, we spent hours organizing the cards, trading them, and inventing elaborate games to play with them arranged across the carpet of our shared bedroom. Whole days passed happily that way. 

As Kurt and Bob sifted through the cards and stacked them in piles, I saw my childhood spread across that banquet table. How many trips to Bill’s Superette did those cards represent? How many afternoons playing with them?

I picked up one of the piles and flipped through it. Players I’d forgotten suddenly flooded me with memories from the first time I’d held their card. It was as though they cast a spell upon me, the way they tugged me back to those days. 

I ticked off the names of stars I came across: Bobby Bonds, Catfish Hunter, Tony Perez, Ron Santo, Carlton Fisk. All good players, Bob agreed, “but nobody’s buying their cards.”

I had no idea what my collection would fetch. Bob explained the value was really in cards from the ’60s, before Topps saturated the market by printing larger batches. I did know my cards weren’t in the prized mint condition of those graded 9 and 10. They were probably more like 3s and 4s, if that. So I wasn’t expecting much. 

When Bob came across a Nolan Ryan rookie card that was somewhat bent and said he’d give me two-fifty or it, I asked, “Two dollars and fifty cents?” 

He clarified, “Two hundred and fifty dollars.” 

That perked my interest, but there were no more big surprises other than a Walter Payton rookie card ($160). Plenty of superstars and Hall of Famers across all three sports, but none of their cards rare. When they’d finished, Bob punched into his calculator the numbers he’d been scribbling in a notebook and offered me $1,200. Cash. I happily accepted the dozen hundred-dollar bills he handed me.

But the thrill was short-lived. By the time I got home, I realized what I’d left behind. I’d traded my memories for the bills folded in my pocket. That’s when I realized what those cards were truly worth. Their value couldn’t be measured by any sum. Those cards had been a portal to my past, able to unlock happy moments of my childhood sure as the smell of cookies baking in the oven. You can’t put a price on that.

John Rosengren is a Minneapolis-based writer and the author of “Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes.” His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post Magazine, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Rosengren’s essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.