On Father’s Day — and Baseball Cards

When my dad died suddenly on May 8, my first thought wasn’t “sports trading cards.” It wasn’t my second or third thought either.

In fact, I didn’t even think of the massive card collection my Dad and I had gathered over my pre and early teen years — 1988 to about 1993 — until, on a call with my mom and her financial adviser, one of them, in passing, said: “Did John collect anything?”

Uh, yes. (As I wrote when my father passed away, he collected A LOT of things. Cards, coins, watches, pens, wood-carved statues, knives and eery clown paintings to name a few.)

I didn’t remember exactly how many cards we (and by that I mean my dad) had bought during the early 1990s but I knew it was a lot. Like enough that you could barely fit all the boxes under a queen bed in the guest room of the house I grew up in, which is where they were kept for a looooong time.

So, when my mom and I started to try to figure out how to tackle the gargantuan task of dealing with all my dad left behind, I volunteered to sort through the cards.

(Side note: I initially volunteered to handle the coins too but one look at the number of coins my dad had secreted all over the house rapidly dissuaded me of that idea.)

Which is how I find myself driving back home to Connecticut earlier this month to bring my mom down for a stay in Virginia — and to load up my wife’s SUV with as many trading cards as we could fit.

Which, it turns out, was a TON. My dad had bought every set of baseball cards of every brand from 1976 (the year I was born) through the early 1990s (the years when I started to lose interest in the whole “cards” thing.)

He had basketball cards from 1986 to 1993 — including 2 of these Michael Jordan cards. He had football cards (a 1989 Barry Sanders Score rookie), hockey cards (too bad Eric Lindros didn’t turn into the next Gretzky because we have 1,000 of his rookie cards) and even Desert Storm cards from 1991. (Yes, these exist. I’ve got a Kuwait card for anyone who’s in the market.)

My mom and I lugged box after box into the car and made the trip back to Virginia, surprising my wife (and boys) with the sheer number of cards Grandpa had. (We left thousands of cards in Connecticut too.)

When I started to go through the thousands of cards to get some sense for a) what we had and b) what I should do with them, something really wonderful happened.

I started to remember how I would leaf through the Beckett card magazines (and other various trading card publications) every week, circling big shows that were within driving distance of our house in southeastern Connecticut. (This was in the height of the trading card craze and there were always dozens of shows throughout New England every weekend.)

How my dad would always be game to hit not just one show a weekend but often 2 or 3.(This was before cell phones and GPS devices so he and I would map out routes to figure out whether we could get to multiple shows in a somewhat reasonable amount of time.)

How when we would get to a show we would fan out — looking for the best bargains or a hard-to-find set than we had targeted to buy. And then circle back to compare notes.

How he would always spend more than we had planned (and definitely more than he told my mom he would spend) and how I would be both thrilled at his willingness to spoil me and guilty/worried that my mom would be upset.

I loved those times. It was a unique moment in my life. I was 11, 12 and 13 — an only child caught in between thinking it was cool to hang with your parents and, well, not.

Even then my dad and I struggled to connect — I later learned he was battling depression and anxiety caused by the deaths of both of his parents within a 3-month period — but collecting cards was where we always found common ground.

Make no mistake: Some of that connection was based on the fact that my dad was willing to spend hundreds of dollars on cards I wanted.

But, there was more to it than just being a covetous kid. It was a common pursuit for us. I knew every card and every brand. I knew what we had and didn’t. And what we wanted. And how much, theoretically, we should be willing to pay for them.

My dad was the bankroll behind all of my knowledge. But, he enjoyed the pursuit too. The sorting through a massive stack of commons that some dealer had laid out on his table and finding (as I once did) the famous/infamous Billy Ripken 1989 Fleer card. (This was, for 13 year old me, titillating beyond belief.) The thrill of the chase. The joy of tracking down the one card we needed to make a full set.

Most importantly though, my dad did it because he loved me. Loved seeing me happy, enthusiastic and passionate in the car ride home as I would scan through various catalogs to see what sorts of great deals we had pulled off — and to circle shows we should go to the next weekend.

I only realized that last part much later in my life, decades after those shows and years since my dad and I ever even talked seriously about the cards — or much of anything else.

And, if I am being totally honest, I don’t think it really hit me — the “why” behind all those trips to card shows— until I was looking through all of what my dad and I had collected after he died.

My dad was a teacher in a very tough school district in Hartford, Connecticut. His week’s were rough — mentally and, at times, physically. I am sure driving me to 3 card shows on a Saturday or Sunday morning (and sometimes both)was not exactly what he wanted to be doing. At least not every weekend. For years.

But he did it because he loved me and I loved it.

As I looked through all those old cards, that realization hit me full force. These cards were how my dad told me he loved me. This collection — and how we went about collecting it — was a legacy of love that he had left for me.

So, I’m passing that legacy on now. My boys — one of whom is the same age I was when I first started getting into cards — are helping me catalogue Grandpa’s card collection. My dad’s love is being passed down to the next generation.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I miss you.