Insight: Start of a Lifetime Passion

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Time truly is the great equalizer and has taught me to be persistent in chasing my dreams.

Ed Pierce still needs 45 cards to complete his collection of
1962 Topps baseball cards. COURTESY PHOTO

Back in June 1963, I was 9 years old and had just finished fourth grade at a Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic school in Rochester, New York. One morning, I was out riding my bike when my friend Philip Marsh, who lived three doors down from me, waved at me from his garage and said he wanted to show me his collection of baseball cards.

I knew what baseball was having watched a few games on television and played on a Little League team, but I had never held a baseball card in my hands prior to that. Philip had a shoebox filled with 1962 cards and said his father worked for a department store and had brought some cards home for him.

As I looked at some of the cards in the shoebox, I was fascinated by the player photographs, the statistics on the back side of the cards and a small cartoon containing a fact about each player in the set. Philip told me that these cards were from last season and new packs of 1963 cards were now being sold for a nickel in nearby stores.

He said that he was more of a football fan than of baseball and asked his father to bring him some 1963 football cards once they were issued. I saw an opportunity and asked Philip if he would be interested in trading me the shoebox of cards for a stack of Adventure Comics that I had collected.

Adventure Comics were my favorite, and I had been given a subscription as a gift for my 7th birthday. A new Adventure Comic Book with the “Legion of Super Heroes” would arrive every month in our family’s mailbox rolled up in a brown paper wrapper.

By the time I proposed the trade, I had a stack of 12 or 13 Adventure Comics in my closet to offer Philip and to my surprise, he accepted the deal. I went home, got the comic books, and swapped them for the 1962 baseball cards.

My mother was not happy I had done that. She told me because the cards were owned previously, the shoebox could contain insects, and she wouldn’t let me keep them in my bedroom. At first, she didn’t want them in our house, but my father somehow got her to agree to let me store them in the basement.

He would set up a card table for me in the basement, and I would sit there for hours examining each card and writing down each card’s number in my Big Chief writing tablet. I discovered that not all the 598 cards issued by the Topps Chewing Gum Company in the 1962 set were in that shoebox, but I did have more than 400 of them.

That summer turned into fall and in September 1963, I returned to school for fifth grade. Several of my classmates also collected baseball cards and I was able to trade some duplicate cards in the shoebox with them for cards I did not have.

I was able to obtain the rookie card of Milwaukee Braves outfielder Howie Bedell that way and was thrilled to make another deal with a classmate to give up two of the three Casey Stengel cards in the shoebox for a Darrell Johnson card. The classmate was a huge fan of the New York Mets and wanted the Stengel cards as he was the first manager of the Mets in their inaugural year of 1962. Getting that Darrell Johnson card was quite an accomplishment for me as he had been named as the manager of Rochester’s minor league baseball team for the 1964 season.

In March 1964 though, my baseball card collection sustained serious damage from which 62 years later I am still recovering. Fifth grade report cards were sent home for review by my parents, and my mother took one look at the “C” grade I had received in mathematics and became outraged. 

She grabbed me by the ear and took me down the stairs to the basement. She picked up my shoebox of 1962 baseball cards and removed around 250 cards and placed them in the washtub near the washing machine. She doused them with lighter fluid, struck a match, and made me watch as the cards burned. She told me I gave too much time to those baseball cards and didn’t do enough to receive what she considered to be an acceptable grade in math.

It turned out to be the only “C” that I ever received in elementary school on a report card, but in the passing years since, I have spent an enormous amount of time replacing and tracking down the cards I lost that day.

Many of those 1962 cards that I once owned were destroyed but have significantly increased in value over the years. My burned 1962 Mickey Mantle near-mint condition card sells today for anywhere between $3,000 to $4,000.

These days I still collect baseball cards, but I have found that 1962 is a very difficult set to accumulate.

Maybe someday I’ll finish what I started. <