As I have entered my early retirement years, I have enjoyed writing about a number of subjects that reside in my memory. In a sense, it’s a modest effort to leave some record of small things that occupied a boy’s life a half-century ago.
Living memories of the 1950s reside in an increasingly smaller number of people these days. Most will not write anything down about their memories, yet some of those memories should be of interest to new generations as time passes.
For a couple of summers, collecting baseball cards was a particularly sweet summertime activity. Where the notion came from, I cannot say, but as with most things that become a serious focus for 10-12 year old boys, the idea seemed to sprout spontaneously throughout my group of friends. Suddenly, on some specific day during the summer, baseball cards were available in the local stores. Once again, the news of their availability spread as if through osmosis within my group of friends.
This particular set of cards was collected while I was living at 3219 Mimosa Park Drive in Richland Hills, Texas. In those days, Richland Hills was the northeast frontier of Ft. Worth, beyond which lay open country until you reached Dallas. Oh, there was a little country settlement somewhere down Highway 183 called Hurst and Bedford, but aside from a Bell Helicopter plant and the Greater Southwest Airport, there wasn’t anything else “out there.”
The house on Mimosa Park Drive was Dad’s first and it was new. He was 30 when we moved there in 1953—I was 8. Dad was just 5-years out of college and had recently been released from the United States Air Force after having been recalled to the service during the Korean War. Recalled? Yes, before the Korean War, he had flown as an Eighth Army Air Force B-17 navigator from his base in England against the Nazi Third Reich—50 times, or about twice the requirement for WWII aircrews and he had a chest full of medals to show for it.
Most of the other fathers on Mimosa Park Drive and throughout all those '50s Richland Hills neighborhoods were also WWII veterans. As kids, we spent a small amount of time comparing our fathers’ war service, often as a means of establishing who’s Dad was the greater war hero, but we quickly dropped that exercise since not many of us really knew much about our fathers’ service or of the war either. With few exceptions, we had all been born in the years just after WWII and all we knew of it was from the Victory at Sea series on TV and a few 1940s black and white movies.
Mimosa Park Drive was loaded with kids, perhaps 20-30 along that one short block. Of course, we were not all friends—some were cool, others were not, and then some were girls, thereby being something different altogether! Those WWII veterans obviously felt they had lost a lot of time during their young years and were working hard to make up for it. The new Richland Elementary School was just down the hill about one block and that would be the gathering point for all the kids in that area for a few years after 1953. It had a nice large playground that we used for football and yes, baseball games. Our sports activities were mostly pickup games where we played whatever game was being played by the professionals at the time, with whoever we could round up to play. In the summer, that meant baseball. The heat didn’t bother us at all—it was all we knew.
We started our summers at the end of the school year by bringing our old comic books to school on the last day and trading with one another. The school set that activity up and it was a
much anticipated day even beyond it being the last school day, usually just before Memorial Day in late May. Trading comic books was great entertainment because that way we went home with a tall stack of “new” comics to keep us busy for the first days of summer. Then Little League baseball kicked off sometime later, and we had the tryouts, then practices, and the games.
Mixed in with all that activity came the news that baseball cards were in the stores. For me the store was a drug store about a mile from our house on Mimosa. My mother worked, so I was on my own until my parents got home each afternoon. Think of that in this day and time, an 8-12 year old kid on his own all the summer—at least until mom and dad got home after work. To get to the drug store I had to ride my bike, a Schwinn Phantom, up Mimosa to Highway 183, maneuver along the soft gravel shoulder on the south side of the highway past the big church with the red roof , then cross the highway to the drug store in the shopping strip on the northwest corner. Those buildings are all still there in 2007.
Topps baseball gum packs were 5¢ each, probably contained about 8-10 cards and a very sweet, big flat piece of pink bubble gum. The gum had been sprinkled with powdered sugar before the pack was sealed, which altogether gave the cards a great smell.
Mickey Mantle was NEVER inside those packs! And the other stars of the day were not often found either—Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays—none of them were common. We didn’t understand anything about Topps releasing their cards by series, so whatever we found in the store packs came from whatever series was being sold at the time. If we were slow in hearing about the cards being available, then we could have easily missed an early series of cards. That left us having to get together to trade for the cards we needed. And if we couldn’t agree on a trade, cash would do—I think I had to pay $1 for the Mickey Mantle card in this set.
Now, if you think about it, a set of 407 cards if assembled with no duplicates, would require the purchase of 40-50 packs of cards. At 5¢ each pack, that would imply a minimum investment of $2 to $2.50 to get a complete set of cards. Of course it didn’t work that way and a good many more packs than 40-50 were required to fill out a set, together with finding those other kids who had spares of the ones you needed. As children of the WWII generation, we were coached to be competitive, both by parents and by our teachers. One facet of that competitive spirit was to stick to it until you had a complete set of cards.
In my home at least, I was also coached to be a collector—my Dad collected stamps for nearly 60-years. The numbers on the Topps cards provided a goal—collect one of each number! If we were thinking we should have focused on Mickey and saved the energy spent on the rest. But that wasn’t how we saw it then. Now and then I would see a few cards from earlier sets. Some Bowmans and some earlier Topps, mostly 1956, but also a few 1953 and 1952. I’m sure these earlier cards came from the older brothers of some of my friends. I don’t recall ever seeing very many of these older cards and I don’t recall ever seeing any Bowman cards for sale at the store.
As to finances, my allowance was $2/month then, I think. Whatever it was, it was not enough, so I had to augment my income. Most summers I did that by cutting lawns at a few houses on Mimosa. The going rate was $2.50 per lawn per week. And since I was about the oldest kid on the street I was able to organize, define, and lead most collective efforts of the neighborhood children. New houses were still being built along Mimosa in 1957 and the debris piles provided a good source of building materials.
One summer I was able to get a good sized sheet of plywood, cannibalize the wheels off an old wagon, and probably with Dad’s help put a low, wide wheeled cart together that could carry about 3 kids. It was steered with a rope tied to either side of a swing arm axle on the front, permitting the driver to steer the cart wherever he or she wished and it wouldn’t turn over. Our driveway had a pretty good downward slope to get the cart rolling. Once in the street, the cart turned right and continued down a gentle hill, then a sweeping left turn down the block toward the school grounds. The whole ride was probably 600’ to 800’ long. Of course at the end of the ride the cart had to be pulled back up the hill. We never worried about traffic—there wasn’t much and we could see up and down the street easily enough. Rides were 5¢ for each kid, or 15¢ if I were able to get 3 of them aboard. They put their nickels in a round tobacco can I had nailed to the front of the cart and cut a coin slot into. Pulling the cart back up the hill was part of the ride as I sold it. If I needed some help with the smaller kids, then I would hire 1 or 2 younger boys to pull the cart back up in exchange for a free ride—and they still pulled the cart back up the hill as part of the deal. I stayed at the top of the hill by my garage, just counting the money and waiting to launch the next ride. The little kids loved that cart ride and when I got it out in the afternoons, there would be a literal stream of kids streaking back and forth to their houses for more nickels. It was a good little business and it paid for a lot of these baseball cards.
Life on Mimosa during the 1950s was idyllic in many respects. The skies were filled with sonic booms as jets streaked overhead breaking the sound barrier. It was only a few years after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier the first time and there seemed to be glee amongst military aviators to break the sound barrier often. It could scare you sometimes if you were focused on something else. Out at Carswell, unknown to most people, the Air Force was flying a B-36 around the area with a nuclear reactor aboard. There was active talk about building a nuclear powered airplane. The early days of the nuclear age were blissfully ignorant of the long term dangers if not carefully controlled. Coming out of WWII we had nothing to fear.
We did not trade baseball cards at school because by the time school started we were playing football and had pretty well satisfied whatever we wanted to do with the baseball cards. However, in those days there were only 8-teams in each major league so the World Series was a big deal. There was no league championship series or anything like that—only the World Series. In those years that meant either the Yankees vs. the Dodgers or the Yankees vs. Milwaukee—Mickey, Yogi, Duke (and later Hank) and the boys. The school would tune in its one TV set to the series in October and the kids (and teachers) could check in on it at lunch time. It was a big treat for those of us who were intensely interested in baseball. A year or two later that same TV set would be tuned in to the first launches of our satellites into space. General Dwight Eisenhower, a bona-fide hero of WWII, was President furthering our sense of stability and having nothing to fear.
The westernmost professional baseball team that 1957 summer was the St. Louis Cardinals, but the only good player they had was Stan Musial. I was a Yankee fan, so for me it was Mickey, Yogi, Whitey, Moose, Elston and the others. The guys to beat were the Dodgers with Duke and the Braves with Hank. We watched baseball on Saturday afternoon TV with Dizzy Dean doing the commentary, singing the Wabash Cannonball and saying over and over again, “he slud into third base.” Dizzy was a terrific personality who called the games with the verve and good humor that someone like John Madden does it today. However, I don’t recall Mickey ever doing anything remarkable when I watched him on TV. A couple of years later, on a summer driving vacation to New England, we visited the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and attended a Yankees game in New York. Mickey didn’t do anything remarkable that night either.
When the weather was bad or it was just too hot outside, we would sometimes get together at my house or at another’s and play baseball games with these cards. We would choose our teams without regard to their actual teams. That way you could have Mickey and Ted Williams on the same team. I think the only restriction was that we had to have players at the positions they actually played rather than just packing the team with big hitters. A single dice would drive the game, with 5’s and 6’s being outs. As I recall, it made for a pretty good afternoon’s entertainment. To the extent you find any wear on these cards, it is from that afternoon activity. Some kids would fix their cards to their bicycles in order to make a chattering noise with the spokes but I always thought too much of my cards to do that. Some of these cards are of rookie stars who went on to have big careers such as Brooks Robinson, Don Drysdale, and Bobby Richardson.
I put a 1958 set together the following summer but something had changed. We kids didn’t get together the same way we did the previous summer. There were other things to occupy time so that 1958 set never was pressed into play. It survived as an essentially new set all these years and sold earlier this year. I bought a few 1959 cards but never got into it like I had in 1957 and 1958.
We moved to the Eastern Hills section of Ft. Worth in 1958 and I started to get involved with another set of activities and friends as I grew up there. These baseball cards went into a box and were only rarely brought out to view in the decades after that. They survived my mother’s clean out of my room after I went away to college at UTAustin—she got rid of my baseball glove, my Schwinn Phantom, and a bunch of other stuff during that clean out, but thankfully, the baseball cards survived. They also survived a family move to California and have been with me ever since during moves to New York, Colorado, back to Texas, Louisiana, and back to New York again. I was separated from them only once when I went to Vietnam in 1968.
I hope you enjoy the cards and the story—it was fun to write and it brought back some great memories. They come from a very special time.
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