Night Owl Cards

    I was thinking about writing this post within the next month or so, ideally around when I found the first cards of the season. But it's going to be far too busy then and I'm not good at planning posts in advance, so you're reading it now. This year marks the 50th anniversary of me in the hobby, buying baseball cards. In the spring and summer of 1975 I made periodic trips to whatever nearby store sold cards and greedily purchased them. The instances were relatively rare -- I wasn't going to the store every week. I had a meager allowance and had to save up in order to buy a few packs. The occasions were so seldom, I can sort of remember all of them: 1. Walking to a drug store several blocks away in Binghamton, N.Y. (this happened maybe three separate times) 2. Walking to a corner store -- we didn't know the name of it, we called it "the green store". This is where my 1975 mini cards came from, in cello packs, the kind you see above. It was closer than th...

  As the resident "ink-stained wretch" of the card blog world, it's my duty to note history as it pertains to newspapers from time to time. Today, I find myself walking through the newspaper morgue, which is not where they stash the dead bodies of old newspaper men, it is the name for any reference room at a newspaper, where clip files are stored, digital reference computers, reference books, etc. One thing you might find there, if a newspaper has proper respect for the sports section of its paper (so few do), is a copy of the final edition of The National. The National died on this exact day 30 years ago. I have the final copy, sent to me by a generous reader a few years ago. This paper was momentous at the time of its release, for sports fans but especially for sports journalists like myself. I was just starting out in the business at the time of its debut in January 1990 and to see something like this -- a daily publication dedicated to nothing but sports -- was exciti...

I've just gone through what has been the strangest 24 hours of monitoring sports news during my entire work career. I'm sure as a casual fan, it must have been wild to catch updates about this league postponing and that tournament canceling as you went about your day, working or running errands or whatever. Now imagine your job is to stay on top of sports news and to disseminate that news as quickly as possible and that was me. Within 10 minutes of each other last night, the local ECAC college hockey league canceled its playoffs and the NBA suspended its season and my head was spinning. Throw in all the other sports cancellations and delays that you've all heard about, and then add the stuff that we care about only locally -- like state basketball and hockey championships being scrapped -- and it was quite the whirlwind of erasing a whole lot of stuff that had been so important for so long. Maybe none of it really matters, I thought, if we can just cancel everythin...

Memory has been on my mind, even more than usual. For the last seven months my family and I have been dealing with my mother's declining health and memory. Doctors haven't been able to provide a concrete diagnosis and health care workers and assisted living personnel have visited my folks' house so often we should install a turnstile. It's a draining situation for everyone and the demands on people's time and resources are enormous. The baffling part is my mother was an extremely healthy individual for the first 77 years of her life One day, when I was a kid, our sugar cereals disappeared out of the cupboards and my mom began cooking "healthy-alternative" meals. From that point forward, she was an encyclopedia for healthy living. The mental aspect was important to her, too. I'm still turning up crossword puzzle books at my parents' house even though she can't do them anymore. I've been reading articles about restoring mental capa...