In 1972 my parents had sold our home in Glenburn, Maine and we went "camping" for the summer and lived in a truck camper and tent in a gravel pit in Franklin, Maine. Eight of us! My Dad and Mom, myself, younger brother, three younger sisters, one of which was an infant and my cousin who lived with us after his parents had passed as well as our dog and two or three cats. We three boys slept in the tent while my parents and sisters shared the camper. We were within walking distance of a pond where we swam and bathed daily and some nearby railroad tracks where my brother and I would put pennies on the track and watch the train go by. The engineer would blow his whistle for us and wave each morning as he passed. I had my card collection with me in the tent and spent hours organizing them, dividing them by teams and reading the backs. A couple of times the tent began to take on water and I had to rescue them and get them in a drier place. It wasn't until I was much older that I came to the realization that we were homeless that summer.
Topps mixed it up again with a colorful set of cards. The high numbers were hard to come by as football season approached, baseball cards became harder to find in the stores. I had a childhood friend in Cooper, Maine who had a collection of cards too. He bought his cards in Calais which borders St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada and most of the cards he got were O-Pee-Chee. At one point I traded some marbles or something for his collection. Unfortunately he had pasted a lot of them into a scrapbook. Once we moved into another house when school started up, I cut around the cards in the scrapbook and soaked them in warm water to detach them from the paper, a trick I had learned from collecting postage stamps. Most of the cards came off without residue. I would then lay them between two towels on my Mom's ironing board and iron them with my Mom's iron and then set them aside to dry. I still have some of those cards in my collection. They look a little different but I can read them and unless you study them very closely, you'd never know the story behind them. Here are nine cards from my collection all released in 1972.
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1972 O-Pee-Chee #433 Johnny Bench (This is one of the cards I got from my friend in Cooper. This card had yet to be pasted into his scrapbook. Whew!)
1972 Topps #49 Willie Mays
1972 Topps #79 Rookie Stars/Mike Garman/Cecil Cooper RC/Carlton Fisk RC
<IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-4.jpg" HEIGHT=350> <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-5.jpg" HEIGHT=350> <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-6.jpg" HEIGHT=350>
1972 Topps #299 Hank Aaron
1972 Topps #309 Roberto Clemente
1972 Topps #559 Pete Rose
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1972 Topps #595 Nolan Ryan (Nolan is in his Mets uni with an Angels logo airbrushed onto his cap.)
1972 Topps #695 Rod Carew
1972 Topps #761 Rookie Stars/Ben Oglivie RC/Ron Cey RC/Bernie Williams
Topps mixed it up again with a colorful set of cards. The high numbers were hard to come by as football season approached, baseball cards became harder to find in the stores. I had a childhood friend in Cooper, Maine who had a collection of cards too. He bought his cards in Calais which borders St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada and most of the cards he got were O-Pee-Chee. At one point I traded some marbles or something for his collection. Unfortunately he had pasted a lot of them into a scrapbook. Once we moved into another house when school started up, I cut around the cards in the scrapbook and soaked them in warm water to detach them from the paper, a trick I had learned from collecting postage stamps. Most of the cards came off without residue. I would then lay them between two towels on my Mom's ironing board and iron them with my Mom's iron and then set them aside to dry. I still have some of those cards in my collection. They look a little different but I can read them and unless you study them very closely, you'd never know the story behind them. Here are nine cards from my collection all released in 1972.
<IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-1.jpg" HEIGHT=350> <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-2.jpg" HEIGHT=350> <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-3.jpg" HEIGHT=250>
1972 O-Pee-Chee #433 Johnny Bench (This is one of the cards I got from my friend in Cooper. This card had yet to be pasted into his scrapbook. Whew!)
1972 Topps #49 Willie Mays
1972 Topps #79 Rookie Stars/Mike Garman/Cecil Cooper RC/Carlton Fisk RC
<IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-4.jpg" HEIGHT=350> <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-5.jpg" HEIGHT=350> <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-6.jpg" HEIGHT=350>
1972 Topps #299 Hank Aaron
1972 Topps #309 Roberto Clemente
1972 Topps #559 Pete Rose
<IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-7.jpg" HEIGHT=350>Â <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-8.jpg" HEIGHT=350>Â <IMG SRC="http://www.zeprock.com/ZC/72-9.jpg" HEIGHT=250>
1972 Topps #595 Nolan Ryan (Nolan is in his Mets uni with an Angels logo airbrushed onto his cap.)
1972 Topps #695 Rod Carew
1972 Topps #761 Rookie Stars/Ben Oglivie RC/Ron Cey RC/Bernie Williams
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