When my dad was stationed at Ft. Lee, VA, I was had a close friend, a fellow elementary school kid, whose father owned a "mom & pop" store in the little town near Petersburg. The son, Rudy, loved the bubblegum sticks that came in the nickel packs of Tops cards.
We would ride our bikes home from school and stop off at his dad's store ... where Rudy would be given packs of the cards, sometimes the remainder of the entire box if his dad were there. Rudy didn't care about the cards ... he wanted the gum. So he gave me all the cards and kept all the gum!
By the end of the summer, I would have the entire collection (Topps would include checklist cards in random packs so one could know what series of cards he was getting). This awesome scheme lasted for 3 years until my dad got orders to Ft. Sam Houston in Texas.
My older brother had begun a collection when he was in grade school, but stopped in 1956 ... just in time for my 3-year bonanza. So I had hundreds of cards ... hundreds .... stashed in an old army footlocker . Dozens of Yankee and Pirate players (teams we both followed and whose games could be picked up on radio in VA). Since Mickey Mantle was my favorite, I had easily 30-40 MM cards from 1952-62 when I stopped collecting them (back then, who could I trade a Mantle for?)
These cards remained in my footlocker in my closet until I went to Ft. Sill, OK for ROTC camp. When I returned, my mom had cleaned out the closet and given all -- yes, ALL -- the cards to a neighborhood kid who used them as props for play.
When the Topps cards became valuable many years later, my brother and I never let my poor mother forget how much money was lost from her "cleanup" of my room. The whole thing was really a heart-warming source of laughter as we aged, although my mom would quite often go into an Italian rant when we brought the topic up.
Ahhh, baseball in the 50's and 60s ... what a glorious time to be a fan. And then came Penn State football.
