Night Owl Cards

(I got to view four MLB playoff games yesterday -- college football, what's that? -- and I have to say I was pretty pleased with the results across the board. No chance of that continuing I guess, right? -- OK, well, the Blue Jays are doing their part. Let's move on to Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 357th in a series):   Last weekend I went to the flea market in town. I finally had some time to kill and I don't get over there nearly as much as I should.   This is the place where I found my 1970 Topps Roberto Clemente a few years ago , and that particular card spot in the flea market is still there. While I find cards here and there at other parts of the market -- it's a fairly large place and seems to get bigger all the time -- it's not a cardboard mecca. But that one spot is remarkably consistent.   It always features four rows of cards, what I guess you would call a dollar box. Most of the cards are a dollar, though you'll find some that are more and some...

  It's taken me a little time to get to this package arrival, mostly because it's a lot to go over. That happens sometimes with the sends from Johnny's Trading Spot -- there's so much stuff and a lot of it is not the usual stuff, so some time has to go into the corresponding blog post. For example, this: This is way cool. It's a season highlights record of the 1959 Dodgers' season, their second year in Los Angeles and a World Series championship team.   The record is a collection of highlights with each of the moments narrated as they happen by Vin Scully. Ira Cook does the narrating between highlights. Listening to Scully is always a treat but it's even more interesting here because he's so young and his voice is so different. Yet all of the great descriptions that he was known for are still there and it's amazing he had that kind of command of the language way back then. The record is in terrific shape, not a single skip or pop. But I knew I'd...

I hate it when the teacher's right. I thought I didn't have any answer for Fuji in his latest contest question. He wanted to know what kind of memorabilia we collect besides cards. I don't collect any memorabilia besides cards. I stopped doing that when puberty hit. I have a thing about too much clutter (a gene inherited from my mom). At an early age I discovered the rush one gets when the garbage goes to the curb. Spring cleaning is a special kind of high that too many collectors never experience. So when I was young -- as I've mentioned a few times -- I collected Matchbox cars and stamps and bottle caps and coins and stuffed animals and baseball yearbooks and newspaper comic strips. Yes, I would cut out the daily Peanuts or Blondie or Hagar the Horrible from the paper and stack them up in desk drawer until I decided after four months that this was stupid and tossed them out. But I hadn't done any of that kind of collecting in years. Decades in fact. I j...