70s Artifact #2: Topps Baseball Cards

When I was a kid, baseball cards weren't merely collectors items—they represented an alternative system of currency for young boys.

Like the use of cigarettes in prison, they were tokens of agreed-upon value in environments—like Marzolff Elementary School and my back yard—where woefully little real money could be found.

Baseball cards were "fungible:" Easily substituted for tater tots or Twizzlers at suprisingly consistent values. An elaborate but uncodified system existed for the valuation of baseball cards that involved age of card, quality of the player, and team. As we lived in Pittsburgh, any player for the Pirates was automatically highly valued.

Most of my "liquid assets" were tied up in baseball cards. Packs could be purchased for a quarter at the grocery store or department store—a cheap way of buying my silence for 15 minutes or so. In the middle of cards was a stick of calcified bubble gum that literally broke into shards when you bit down on it.

If our boyish economy was built on baseball cards, our "means of production" was too often whining to our moms to buy us a pack of cards, an earnings strategy that tended to be frustrated by my mother's perverse stinginess and willfulness. Even then she was a radical rightwinger, advising me instead to "save my allowance."

Laughable.

At the time, my friends were building vast empires of cards they would show off to me when I'd visit their houses, which they usually kept very orderly separated by year and team in shoeboxes. I actually went through the effort of separating mine by team and year and sorting them alphabetically!

In fourth grade, bent on empire but stymied by my mother's bourgeois attitudes, I decided to make my fortune another way: By gambling. There were two forms of baseball gambling, Knocksies and Flipsies.

In Flipsies, two players faced off, the first player dropping a card from chin-height. The card would fall to the floor, gently fluttering as it flipped side to side. The second player would then drop his card, hoping to match heads on heads or tails on tails. If successful, he earned the right to take both cards. If not, the first player claimed the cards.

Knocksies, on the other hand, was more action-oriented. I favored it. Each player lined an equal number of cards against the wall (the number of cards often a matter of testy argument.) Each player would then flick a card with their wrist at the cards, one at a time, claiming all the cards each player knocked down.

Through skill, determination, and luck, I was eventually able to amass a respectable fortune of over 15,000 cards! It helped that in the 80s my newly pinko mother began buying me sets for the entire year for my birthday.

When I moved out of the house, the cards were neatly stacked in the corner of my parent's garage. You can imagine my pain when, years later, when I was living in Oregon, my mother casually mentioned during a phone call that they had had a minor flood.

"Your cards all got ruined," she said, a bit apologetically. At the time, I was posing as a guy who didn't care about, you know, things, man. Still I'm sure the halt in my voice was unmistakeable before saying, "Guess I shouldn't have left them on the floor."

In truth, despite my stoic pose, vast holdings of nostalgia had suddenly gone up in thin air— a devastating bull bear market on memory that left me feeling impoverished for days.