By Jeffrey Carl
Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.
Did you ever collect cards? For many people, the thought of cards brings to mind afternoons after school, old sports heroes, and those horrible slabs of pink gum that tasted like masking tape that came in each pack of Topps baseball cards. The packs came with 10 or 12 dull-finished cardboard cards wrapped in wax paper with some stale gum and maybe a sticker of the San Diego Chicken if you were lucky, all for the princely sum of 35 cents. You wrapped them up in rubber bands, occasionally used them as collateral for loans of video-game tokens and didn’t really give them a whole lot of thought.
Well, cards are a whole different world now. Baseball cards sit alongside NASCAR, Star Trek, Batman, and Looney Toons cards. There are oversized cards and gold cards and cards with holograms on them that come in silver foil-lined packs for $2.50 a pop. There are cards of mass murderers and suspects in the John F. Kennedy asassination, and there are cards of the Beatles and the Pro Bowlers’ Hall of Fame. And – alas – they don’t come with stale gum anymore.
You can see what trading cards have blossomed into at Mike Parham’s Collector’s Attic store in Oak Grove, on Route 3. The small shop is packed with cards, from $1.50 packs of cards that move in and out of the store at a rate of 350 per week, to older, rare cards like a Mickey Mantle card from 1962 that sells for $475. There are cards and miniature NASCAR models, collecting supplies and comic books, and even a life-sized cut-out promotional display of supermodel/awfulactress Kathy Ireland.
Mike Parham has a down-to-earth reason for why he opened the store: “I was tired of the ride to Fredericksburg after work on Fridays to buy cards,” he says. Parham only began collecting cards approximately two years ago, and it developed into a passion and then a part-time profession, when he isn’t selling life insurance.
Parham loves collecting the cards as well as selling them, but he’s not too sentimental about his collection – “As far as I’m concerned, everything here is for sale,” he says. His favorites are basketball cards and his store is primarily devoted to sports cards, but there is no clear winner in terms of which sell the most. “The popular cards change with the season,” he says.
Right now he is busy collecting a rare sub-set of this year’s Upper Deck basketball cards that come in the packs available now – you can buy a pack for a couple of dollars that might – if you’re lucky – contain a rare superstar card worth a couple hundred dollars. And then you might get pack after pack of the New Jersey Nets’ towel boys and hot dog vendors. It’s a gamble as an investment, but to the collectors, the joy of collecting is worth the price alone.
Trading cards have been around since at least the 1890s, originally collector’s cards printed by cigar companies. Perhaps the most famous trading card of all time is a card of Hall-of-Fame baseballer Honus Wagner from 1906. Wagner did not approve of tobacco, and he ordered the company to stop producing the cards. Only a few were made, and today their value exceeds $50,000.
Indeed, trading cards have been a part of American childhood for generations. As a zany youngster in a small town in Washington State, I was one of the Baseball Card Lords of Fourth Grade. I competed with several rival card kingpins, who lived in another housing development, for control over the card-trading rights to our hapless fellow students – which was pretty much the fourth grade equivalent of the U.S. and Soviet Union competing for client states.
The other great Baseball Card Lords once made a fatal mistake and allowed me to buy a coveted Mike Schmidt card from a card store before they could get to it. This was pretty much the fourth grade equivalent of my parents having gotten me a nuclear weapon for Christmas.
It was time for me to make my move to establish supremacy, and events conspired in my favor. My parents decided to take a one-week vacation – the only one they ever took, in fact, which probably had a lot to do with their being too frightened to leave me alone in the house again.
As soon as my grandparents arrived to take care of my younger brother and me, my parents left and I set to work converting my father’s den into a den of iniquity and rabid card-trading. Cardboard changed hands in sheet and waves as my grandparents were impressed into service bringing Kool-Aid to my guests and working as bicycle-parking valets whilst I cut deals the likes of which had never been seen before, at least in our neighborhood. People often speak of ruthless businessmen as “willing to sell their own grandmother.” I was almost willing to trade her for a Topps ‘73 Tom Seaver and a Fleer ‘61 Ted Williams Commemorative Series card.
When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I had swindled and savvied my way to become “Mr. Baseball Cards” of Ellsworth Elementary’s fouth-grade class. My grandparents, on the other hand, were much the worse for wear; as was my father’s den, which had suffered a week of rapid-fire card hustling and Atari-playing; and my little brother, whom some of my friends had taken out and used as a goalpost for soccer. But for a few years, baseball cards were a tremendous part of my life and my friends’ lives – just as important as soccer and video games, in fact. But not quite as important as watching “Star Blazers” after school.
Eventually, though, I found myself spending less and less time chasing after rare baseball cards that I couldn’t find and spending more and more time chasing after cute girls who wouldn’t go out with me. Somewhere in my parents’ old house there probably lies a secret cache of cards that would probably be worth several thousand dollars today, had it not been for the fact that I – just like everybody else I knew – kept my cards wrapped together with rubber bands, which squeezes in the middle and devalues the cards. Easy come, easy go, I guess.
Industry analysts say that the trading card business has hit its peak and is now in a relative decline. Saturation of the market with too many kinds of cards and overpricing has drained even the biggest allowances.
In the late 1970s, the trading card market was fairly compact and was dominated by one company, Topps Chewing Gum. They produced baseball, football, and basketball cards, and were distributed in dime stores, convenience stores, and Little League clubhouses all around the U.S. and in Canada by its branch there, O-Pee-Chee.
But in the early 1980s, cards took a step up when two other large producers of cards, Fleer and Donruss, entered the game. The increased competition took mainstream trading cards into new areas: hockey, soccer, Olympics cards in 1984, movie cards, and special sets for the “more serious” collectors. The promise of “special” cards that were rarer and consequently more valuable led collectors to buy more cards, and the manufacturers gladly complied.
The trend continued, and in the past five years, the card business has become bigger business than it had ever been before. More people with more money to spend came to collect cards, and the cards became more diverse, more impressive, and more expensive. There are numerous major manufacturers, and new card sets come out almost weekly. It remains to be seen whether the expansion of the card industry, closely paralleling the fast-growing comic-book industry, has choked itself out.
But all of this big-business concern doesn’t bother Parham or his customers at the shop. For collectors, trading cards are a labor of love. Over the weekend, Parham is on his way to a giant trading card show in Wilmington, N.C., to sell some of his cards, buy new ones, and trade others.
Parham plans to continue with his moonlighting in the card business. “I try to get all satisfied customers,” he says. “People seem to like it, and they keep coming back.” He says that he may begin carrying more comic books next year, or expand with a bigger collection for sale. Who can say what’s in the cards for Mike Parham and Collector’s Attic?