Night Owl Cards

I'm writing this late because I fell into the trigonometry trap left by my daughter. Never again. So, as I write, the Royals are leading the A's 3-2, but that could all change and everything that I write from here on out may be obsolete in an hour or two. Oh, well. How often do I get to write about the Royals? The best thing about Kansas City playing a playoff game is it evokes memories of what I call my first collecting era. That era runs basically from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Or, in other words, the same period of time that the Royals were winning playoff games and playing in the World Series. My glory card years were their glory years period. So I wanted to show some Royals card favorites from that period -- I kept it to 1976-85 since that is when K.C. began and ended its postseason run -- in recognition of this feat from what has always been one of my favorite teams. The trouble is, I've actually shown a lot of Royals cards from this time period a...

This was the end of the line for me and Baseball Cards magazine. It would be the last issue I would have delivered to my home and one of the last issues I would ever read (those later issues from the late '80s and then the Beckett spawn are completely foreign to me). I would move off to college two months after the date on the front here. My interest in baseball cards was waning. The period between 1986-88 is a dark one in my collecting journey even as it was one of the best times of my life (what does that say about baseball cards?) In fact, I'm not even sure how closely I looked at this particular issue. So let's look at it closely now, shall we? I apologize in advance for some of the crooked scans. My scanner doesn't like working with anything that has any degree of thickness. Ah, the Q&A section. Once again, this is where collectors wrote in, mostly in hopes of getting rich quick off of the error that they spotted in 1982 Fleer. The question "...

(The vacation season is here! Two more days of crap and then work becomes this thing that you merely visit in between doing whatever the hell you want! Here's to all of that. And baseball cards. This is Cardboard Appreciation. The 119th in a series): The only thing that I can visualize specifically about my girlfriend in 1985 are her boots. They were those elven boots that were popular with young women at the time. Flat, black boots that fell well short of mid-calf. She wore them all the time. I also remember that she wore a lot of grayscale clothes. Blacks and whites and, of course, grays. It wasn't because she was dour or anything. In fact she was very positive and upbeat. The best way I can describe her is she was like Punky Brewster, if Punky was 17 years old (I guess that would make her a budding Soleil Moon Frye ). She was a whimsical, spur-of-the-moment type. We worked in the same department store, and I remember one time when we were chatting and a woman came...