My First Baseball Card

30 Jan 2013

 My first baseball card

My first baseball card was a 1957 Curt Simmons (wish I still had it).  One of those mystery memories.  I have always known this was true but as time passed I could not precisely recall the circumstances,  and the year seemed a bit wrong because I was too young in 1957 to collect cards.   But thinking about it has helped me recall the details.  There was a small wooden store across the street from Osborn School; named "The Station" because they had a pair of Standard Oil gas pumps out front.   And I recall going in there one day with my mother (must have been the spring of 1957) and spotting baseball cards for sale.  They were a penny a pack for one card and a piece of gum (there were also Nickel packs with five cards and a big slab of gum).  And my mother bought me a penny pack that day which contained the Curt Simmons card (probably a minor disappointment that it was not a Cleveland Indians player or perhaps I was too young to care).

Floating around the neighborhood in the late fifties were the occasional Red Man Chewing Tobacco card and for that matter the occasional pouch of chewing tobacco.  Chewing tobacco was a big thing back then and a staple of a baseball bull pen.  Not to be left out the Osborn boys indulged ourselves when it was occasionally offered to us on the playground.  I don't recall ever seen a Red Man box with the card inside the wrapper - probably because that promotion ended the summer before I entered kindergarten.  But I did find these two images of a 70 year old unopened Red Man pack.