Baseball Cards by Paul Kalkstein 

First Place (Tie), Adult Non-Fiction

Born in Brooklyn, my father claimed the Dodgers ("Dem Bums") as part of his birthright. In time, I, his eldest son, was infected with the same passion. Although we lived in South Jersey, where the fans supported the Phillies, and a few the As, who had yet to decamp to Kansas City, I managed to follow the Dodgers by listening to Vin Scully on the radio. When I moved to the top floor of our house, I rigged a complicated antenna to an old TV to bring in the Dodger games on Channel 9 from New York.

Sometimes Dad would take me up the Turnpike to Ebbets Field, with a steak dinner at Peter Luger beforehand. Life never got better than on those trips. Then there was the excitement of the World Series–the heartbreaking losses to the hated Yankees in 1952 and 1953, and the delirium of the 1955 championship. But in 1957 Walter O'Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles, breaking hearts and ending my love for baseball.

But before that tragedy, like many of my contemporaries, I collected baseball cards. Of course, my treasures were the cards depicting the Dodger greats: Snider, Hodges, Campanella, Robinson, Koufax, but I knew the value of a Mickey Mantle card. Trading cards of value to others–Mays, Kluzewski, Rizzuto–but not to me allowed me to add to my collection of Dodgers. My aim was to add to my collection every member of that great 1955 team.

Meanwhile, there was much else to do with baseball cards in addition to trading and collecting them. They were a kind of currency among the fifth and sixth grade boys. In the schoolyard we would hold a card high between  thumb and middle finger, and flip it against the flip of a classmate, while calling, in turn, "evens" or "odds." If the player's picture, or the reverse side with statistics, both landed up , it was even and the caller either collected the other fellow's card or lost his own.

In my neighborhood a boy discovered that if he attached a card to the frame of his bike with a clothespin so that it protruded into the spokes of his rear wheel, he could sound a bit like a motorcycle as he rode around. Soon all of us were doing that.

In order to participate fully in trading, gambling, and other uses of baseball cards, I needed a big supply. Cards came with bubble gum, not very good Topps bubble gum, so that after a while we would jettison the gum. For a penny you got a pack with one card and one thin rectangle of gum; for a nickel you got 10 cards but just one piece of gum. But if you saved your money, you could buy a whole box of cards, and so we saved our money and did so. Our town was flush with baseball cards.

It was not easy to fill out my collection of the champion 1955 Dodgers. There were plenty of Duke Snider cards, but the Topps people had not made many of Sandy Amoros or George "Shotgun" Shuba. Still, the cards did exist, and eventually I completed my set. By the time the set was completed, I had duplicates of most of the cards, and I decided to go for two.

I put my two complete sets in a box and cached it in a cubby hole part way up the stairs to my room. Soon other activities crowded baseball cards from my perspective. I was playing sports for real, and eventually there were girls, and then cars. For years I never gave the cards a thought.

When I went away to college, my parents moved and sold our house. When all the furniture was gone, I wandered through the echoing house, and for some reason thought of the baseball cards I had put away. The cubby hole was empty. I asked my mother, "Where did you put my cards?"

"I threw them away."

"Do you know how much those cards are worth today?" I screamed.

"Yes, nothing, they went in the trash."

Mom was always a great one for throwing things out. I knew that. And I was a great one for being sloppy with my belongings, and I knew that, too. Years later, I consulted Dean's Cards and found that my sets were each worth $2216, not the fortune I had anticipated back then. I'm sure glad I forgave my mother.