andy pafko

My memory is not good, but I can remember when Andy Pafko died.  Well, it was just this week, so I can remember even with memory loss.  I don’t remember Pafko as a player.  He came up in 1943 and retired in 1959.  I would have been nine when he retired and probably have been collecting baseball cards, so I may have had one of his cards.  I don’t remember.

What I do remember, though, is that he was number one in the 1952 Topps series of baseball cards.  I would have been one year old when that card came out and was probably not chewing gum, yet, so I probably didn’t have one.  I know he was number one because my son collected some 1952 Topps cards when he was young and he and I did research on them.  The Pafko card, in good condition, is valuable because I read that kids that collected the 1952 series usually sorted them by card number and put a rubber band around their stack of cards.  Therefore, the edges of the Pafko cards were worn down by the rubber bands coming on and off and many of them fell into poor condition.

I recently wrote about a trip I took back to Alden Street, where I grew up, and I remember I had a corrugated box from the grocery store that was full of baseball cards when I lived there.  I think I used rubber bands, so I probably messed up some of my cards, but I don’t remember stacking them in numeric order.  I think I sorted them by year of issue and team.

It was popular, back on Alden Street in the 1950s, to trade duplicates of cards to other kids and I remember I was always the youngest kid on the block.  I remember going across the street and sitting on the front porch trading cards with some of the big kids.  I specifically remember one day they asked me to go home and get something and just leave my box of cards.  They said they would watch them for me.  When I came back I remember seeing a bunch of Ford Frick cards in my box that weren’t there before I left.  Frick was the Commissioner of Baseball.  I protested but the older kids told me I was wrong—that those Frick cards were in my box and I just didn’t remember. 

Back on Alden Street none of us had much money and I think that sometimes morality can be equated with poverty.  I think the prevailing morality was that no one was going to steal a card from anyone else, but there would be nothing wrong with trading, say, a Ford Frick for an Elston Howard or Mickey Mantle, if the young kid didn’t know better.

It was survival of the fittest and I was not yet fit.  Although the transactional difference at the time amounted to pennies, the actual cost may have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at today’s prices for some of those cards.

We were poor but I had a 20” Huffy bicycle.  I probably had a dime in a good week of discretionary funds and probably spent most of it on candy and baseball cards, but I would take clothespins and baseball cards and make the spokes of the Huffy sound like a motorcycle.  In retrospect, I probably went on a number of $25,000 joyrides, based on today’s prices for those cards.

The most grievous throwing away of money was exactly that—throwing money in the trash.  One of my chores on Alden Street was to take out the trash every night, put it into an old steel 55-gallon barrel and burn it.  When we moved from Alden Street, we had a lot of things that we decided to burn rather than move.  I distinctly remember taking my box of baseball cards and flipping them one-by-one into the fire in the barrel.  After all, I was fourteen years old and too old to play with baseball cards.  If you have the mint condition Andy Pafko card that sold for eighty-some thousand dollars or a Mickey Mantle rookie card that may have eluded the spokes of my bike, I may have helped make you money that day.  If all of us had saved our cards, they would be less rare and less valuable.

No, you don’t need to thank me.  I think there were a number of us who discarded our cards and made the ones that escaped the spokes or the fire that much more valuable.