The Collector

As a kid, I collected things.  Of course, Philadelphia was the best possible place to be a kid collector.  Lots of kids across the country collected coins "back then", but we had The Mint - the ultimate coin shopping store. My Uncle Charlie turned me on to coin collecting when he gave me some partially filled "books" of pennies.  He had one book with spots for all of the indian head pennies in it, and the flying eagle pennies that were used a few years before the indian heads came out.  It was probably half full.  What a great start to collecting!  My Uncle Herb introduced me to proof sets, which I would order, and still do, from the mint every year. 

Lots of kids collected stamps.  We probably all started by just being excited to get as many stamps as we could.  My Aunt Helen would always send me an envelope of stamps she'd pulled off of a summer's worth of postcards that she'd gotten from friends who were traveling around the world.  I think most of my friends decided to focus on US stamps, since the entire world made too many to keep track of.  I also collected stamps from the UN - again a place that was just a train ride away - where we would occasionally go stamp shopping.  I thought one of the best Philly perks for young stamp collectors was the Philatelic counter at Wanamakers.  You could buy nice albums there, get new pages every year, and the guy behind the counter actually talked to kids.   (For the record, stamps are things that you would lick and put onto a letter.  The US doesn't make stamps any more as far as I'm concerned.)

I collected cards.  It seems like baseball cards were probably first to appear, followed by football cards.  Then there was a card explosion!  Too many to keep track of!  I have cards dating back to the 1950's that were probably worth something at one time, but that time has come and gone.  Good thing.  I remember having the Micky Mantle card, the Roger Marris card, all the greats of the time, and I also remember trading them all away (for Phillies cards, of course!  It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I'll share with you some of the bubble gum cards/trading cards that I used to collect and of course still have.  Again, there was no better place to collect than in Philadelphia.  Fleer, the company who made a number of sports and non-sports trading cards, was headquartered in Philadelphia, as was Bowman Gum, who made cards through 1956 before selling out to The Topps Company.  Topps did have a plant in Dureya, PA (near Scranton), with headquarters in Manhattan.  To give you some idea of why the Philadelphia area was a great place for a kid to grow up - when the Beatles became hot, Topps put out several sets of Beatles cards.  There were three black and white series (each containing about 60 cards), and a color series (64) cards, which all came out in 1964.  I remember this well because I went to visit a school mate, Alan, one day, and his mother, who apparently worked for Topps, gave me a complete set of color Beatles cards!  A complete set!  She just handed them to me like they weren't the coolest things in the entire world.  Life for a kid collector in Philadelphia was excellent!

Here are some cards representative of those in my collection:

Fronts and backs of some of my 1961 Topps Baseball Cards
I traded away everything except for Phillies Cards!

The top card is from the First Topps Beatles Series, card number 44.
The second is from the color series, card number 28.
The third is from a series devoted to James Bond movies.

The backs of the three cards shown above are shown here
Early Beatle Cards just had numbers on the back
Color Beatles cards had fun information

A football card from 1962
A "Space Card"
A card from the series on the Civil War

The backs of these cards
All the stats you'd want on a football team
Space facts - sorry, it was glued into a book!
Information on the backs of all of the civil war
cards were like little newspaper headlines

Spook Stories had photos from movies

and TV shows (with joke captions)

A set of cards was dedicate to one TV show,

the Outer Limits

There were even cards dedicated to

Gomer Pyle

mostly with scenes from the TV show

Gomer Pyle USMC

Card backs

Some had jokes

Some had information on the

front picture

Some had dialog to go with

the still

There was no shortage of great card series to collect, and this trend continues today.  However, it was a special time in the 60's when card manufacturers first ventured beyond sports cards.  And it happened right here in Philadelphia, of course.

© 2012 John Allison
Note Added:  I can't believe that I didn't comment on how collecting changed my life!  Let me do that here:

I was very, very lucky because early in life I learned to pay attention to the things around me and to try and integrate new facts into how I thought about how the world worked.  Honestly!

It all goes back to collecting stamps, probably.  Some stamps were just, to me, too cool, but to collect them, you need to look at them, read them, get them in your head, so you can explain which one you might want next.  You want to look at them.  Little works of art they were.

More and more it started happening.  "What is the name of the queen who sent Columbus on his exploration?"  a teacher asked.  Well a set of stamps from 1892, the Columbian Exposition stamps,  had a $1 stamp showing Queen Isabella "pledging her jewels" it said.   From stamps, I knew something!  It felt good, and it happened over and over.

My personal favorite of US stamps was the Project Mercury stamp - a space capsule over the earth - a 4 cent stamp printed in 1963.  When a question came up in science about space travel, I knew the date.  I knew the project name.  I had information.  Others didn't.  Suddenly it felt like I wasn't so dumb anymore.

I was interviewing to be an assistant professor at MSU and someone asked me if I understood what it meant to be at a land grant college.  I hadn't touched my stamps for years but I remembered a green 3 cent stamp from 1955 celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the first land grant colleges - Michigan State and Penn State.  I could make an intelligent comment.  I knew dates and places.  It was because of all the hours I spent with my collections, enjoying them.

Aunt and uncles (and sometimes their friends) occasionally would bring coins back for me from vacations overseas.  The coins from England were confusing but heavy and cool.  They started out with a system of shillings, soverigns, and guineas.  In 1971 they introduced the new pence (100 new pence = 1 pound).  I read about it all in a coin magazine (being a good little nerd), and I had some new and some old.

I actually had the opportunity to travel to England a few times.  When I was there, many new and old coins were in circulation, which really confused tourists.  I understood, so nobody in my group would buy anything without consulting with me.  I liked it.  

I've also been able to answer questions about where money was minted because I had spent so much time looking at US coins with mint marks  (no mark for Philadelphia, D for Denver, S for San Francisco (SF?) and CC for Carson City).

So I had a very special context in approaching college.  Some classes were more relevant than others, but I got used to listening,  retaining, trying to remember.  I took lots of notes, read through them at the end of the day, and knew stuff.  Preparing for tests wasn't so hard.  It felt good.  Knowing facts felt good, and I had many free opportunities to learn things through my collections.  I still haven't used any of the information in my brain that I learned from my Gomer Pyle USMC cards, but you just never know!  My time will come.

© 2012 John Allison