Being a dad is fun and rewarding in so many ways; too many to list here, certainly. But this weekend, I taught my son a simple game from my baseball-card obsessed youth and watching him eat it up, I discovered another reason.
Growing up in the '70s, there was nothing we prized as much as baseball cards. I remember my mom buying them for us as early as 1972 and we had cards from '71, too, though memories of actually acquiring those is lost in the mist of history.
We bought packs -- not sets. The fun was in the mystery and drama of what you'd find inside the wax paper, covered in the dusty sugar from the stick of gum that was brittle and cracked like plastic. Sometimes we'd buy the 25-cent pack in clear plastic (you could see the top and bottom cards before buying) and when mom was feeling real generous we'd get a three-pack long clear rack pack for 39 and later 49 cents. Then you could spy six of the cards you'd be getting!
A couple times we saved our money to make a major card purchase and then we bought a display box full of wax packs and spent the day opening them, sorting the cards and chewing some of the gum and tossing the rest. For the same price we probably could have bought a complete set of the year's cards, but what fun was that?
There would be no doubles to trade and attach to flap in the spokes of your bike, no thrill of the hunt for the last few elusive cards you needed. Buying a set was no fun at all.
We spent a lot of time with our cards. We sorted them, we traded them, we brought them -- illicitly, of course (with the threat of confiscation ever looming) -- to school to flip out in the yard at lunch, we read the stats and the great little blurbs on the back.
There were wordy ones like Ken Singleton's 1972 card: "With hitting tips from former NL slugger Ralph Kiner in Fla. Instr. Loop, 1971, Ken hopes to improve on his statistics this year. The powerful switch hitter was leading IL in Batting when called up by Mets, 6-24-70, & hit 1st big league Homer 2 days later at Montreal."
And there were ones like the blurb on the back of Felix Millan's 1976 card: "Felix set Met mark for Hits, 1975."
Let me state here clearly that when we were kids baseball cards was a shorter term to describe Topps baseball cards. Maybe it's because we were growing up in Brooklyn, Topps' birthplace and hometown at the time.
Sure, Fleer and others made cards, too, but I can't remember ever seeing any of those in shops or in my friends' rubber band-wrapped stacks of cards wrapped. The same goes for Topps football, basketball and hockey cards. I may have acquired a few of those along the way, but those cards were, to me, like those sports: poor substitutes for America's pastime, and we had little time for them.
Anyway, this is a long intro to this weekend, when my son and I picked up his modest stack of baseball cards -- a hodgepodge of examples from 2008, 2009 and 2010 -- and I taught him to flip. It's something he doesn't seem likely to learn from his neighborhood friends, none of which seems interested in baseball cards ... at least not yet.
We played the basic two-player version. One player flips a card. The second player flips. If the second player matches the first card (heads or tails) he gets them both. If he doesn't the first player sweeps them up.
There are all kinds of other versions we played, including using team names or playing with multiple players, but we just did the basics this time 'round. He struggled a bit with getting a good flip but who cares? He had fun, I had fun. And I felt like I was imparting a small iota of dad-like wisdom.
He looked thrilled to learn and play a new game and I was transported back to being a kid; back to a time when I couldn't possibly have imagined I'd someday be flipping cards with my son.
Even now, I'm writing this blog because I'm thinking about later, when I'm back home and we're on the living room floor, flipping cards again.
Old habits die hard. I hope my son discovers that, too, when he teaches his kid how to flip baseball cards.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
