Be Prepared (to Miss the Card Show)

The semi-annual card show in my valley will be held this weekend, but I won't be attending.  As a Boy Scout leader in our community, I'll be taking the boys on an overnight merit badge encampment on Friday night.  I should be there all day on Saturday, wiping out any chance I may have to attend the card show.  Luckily I've had this campout marked on my calendar for a few months and I knew this was going to happen.  The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared" and I'll be the leader and example setter here.  Knowing that I would miss the card show, I sought out another opportunity to pick up a stack of cards on the cheap.

Labor Day in my wife's hometown means Onion Days, the the annual town celebration.  I suppose Onion Days is my hometown celebration, too, since my family has attended the festivities every year since I was born.  My true hometown is too small to have much by way of annual celebration.  Years of attending the parade, carnival, and vendor booths at Onion Days has taught me that I can rely on one particular vendor being at the park: Tom, a older gentleman who used to own a card shop.  Tom is a regular vendor at the card show, too, so I'm familiar with his wares.  When Labor Day rolled around, I came prepared to pick up some new cardboard goodies from the park because I knew I would miss the upcoming show.  Tom's booth usually features complete sets from the 90s, usually priced to sell.  I had my sites set on a set or two.  Even though they were marked "Buy One, Get One Free," I had to pass.  The sets that I had enough cash for didn't interest me all that much, and the sets I did want, I couldn't buy at the time. 

So I dug through his dime box instead.  I don't know if I got there late or what, but the pickings seemed a little sparse.  He had everything divided by sport, put in penny sleeves, and tossed into big boxes about 8 inches deep.  There couldn't have been more than 150 cards in each box, though, despite the size.  It was pretty easy to root through everything he had for 10 cents.  Ultimately, I chose 50, and that will have to suffice as my card show haul.

Throughout this post, I've been taking you through a selection of these cards chronologically, starting with that 1977 Minnie.  Oh yeah, and it's OPC.  Will I take that for a dime?  Yes, I will.  We followed that up with some early 80s NFL stars.  For a Hall of Fame lineman who played in my lifetime, Dierdorf is wholly underrepresented in my collection.  I'll try to remedy that.  We'll skip ahead to the early 90s, represented here by players whose heydays never really overlapped.  Dickerson was a star of the 80s, Sharpe was an early 90s rising star who fell victim to injury, and Bagwell picked up about the time Sharpe left off.  The mid-90s are represented by bright color and gold foil, not to mention three Hall of Fame players.

Shiny is the name of the game at the the end of the 90s.  It spills over a little into the 2000s, but I don't know how to generalize those years.  I suppose part of it is because I don't have as much familiarity with those years.

What's this?  Are we going backwards in time now?  No, it's just the beginning of retro-looking cards that happened in the mid-2000s.  The trend continues today, with A&G and Panini Classics. 

Finally, we have 3 fully modern card designs from the past couple of years.

I may be missing the card show this weekend, but my Boy Scout training taught me to plan ahead, so I was still able to hit up one of the vendors who will most likely be there on Saturday.  Stay tuned next dime as I count down my Top 10 dime box pickups from Labor Day.