Childhood sports cards, hockey marbles worth cash

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/07/2024 (623 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have discovered the toy box my father built for me back in 1970 holds a small fortune — and not a cache of forgotten green paper dollar bills.

I realized this after exploring a sports card show during a recent trip to Manitoba’s capital. I was a neophyte to this event compared to the diehard collectors I bumped into around various tables, where collectors looked to trade or purchase from those in attendance.

This was also confirmed after visiting a few card/comic book stores in Winnipeg. I observed cards I own in the display cases with hefty price tags attached.

Card collecting is not the exclusive domain of males either. I observed ladies with a keen eye for a bargain. They know their stuff, as did the majority of the card collectors in search of that elusive Willie Mays rookie card following his recent death or a CFL card featuring Montreal Alouettes flanker Terry Evanshen, now 80 who was named rookie-of-the-year in 1965, which I already own.

These sports cards have been in my possession for more than five decades as well as dust-covered cards featuring Montreal Canadien Hall of Famer Yvan “Roadrunner” Cournoyer — my favourite NHL player as a kid — and former Montreal Expo players like pitcher Bill Stoneman, second baseman Ron Hunt, and his teammate Rusty Staub.

My prized collection also includes a series of cards from 1968, which you would have found under the lid of York Peanut Butter.

I also have Post cereals hockey marbles that came out in the early 1970s while I was in Grade 5 in Comox, B.C. I traded away my Toronto Maple Leaf blue marbles and kept the red Canadiens. I’m only missing my goalie Gump Worsley marble, swiped one day out on the playground where we played marbles. How many kids today can say they play marbles at recess?

I also own a number of Shirriff hockey coins, issued in plastic and metal, which came in the jelly desserts, puddings and pie fillings packages.

Collectors, I learned, will spend money on single cards or entire sets, which are sealed in protective plastic. No bicycle spokes for these cards — those aged 50 and older reading this Sun sports column will acknowledge what I mean.

I recall the card-trading business exploded in the early 90s. Sports cards are now an investment — not to be wasted on the playground by flipping them in a game I once played in elementary school we called “match or dodge.”

The card-collecting craze sent a lot of people rummaging through their bedroom closets looking for that old collection long forgotten as we reached out teenager years. Cards once thought of as worthless — except for the 10 cents you paid for a set of eight and some stale gum — could now rake in a fortune for the owner.

If a card is in “mint” condition you can expect the price to go up. Rookie cards are generally a hot ticket item — you’re banking on the players’ potential. Remember Wayne Gretzky’s rookie card? Own a Sidney Crosby rookie card?

When I perused the many sports cards made available for sale, my dusty collection paled in comparison. But the value of my cards is more because they are old and rare.

I do have a few keepsakes which bring back memories of my youth — remember Stan Mikita of the Chicago Blackhawks or Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings? Both star NHLers in their time are both gone now, but their memories live on in the hockey cards one keeps in their collection. I have their original cards and have been offered a few bucks, but I refuse to part with them.

I also have the full set of thumb-sized hockey stamps issued by ESSO when I was a kid in the 1970s, and you received a set of six when your father filled his tank with gas at that station.

In recent years, both Canada Post and Tim Hortons, have got into the hockey card or hockey stamp game, where avid collectors have expanded their collections.

While I’ve purchased a few Tim Hortons cards while getting a medium dark roast double-double, it was the stamps which garnered my attention and I acquired all of them, and none will be used for the purpose they are meant for on an envelope.

And one special stamp will remain in my collection as I was fortunate to purchase by luck one featuring an autograph on Bobby Orr’s $1.80 stamp.

Alas, my collection is not what it once was thanks to my late mother, who decided hockey, baseball and football cards were better off in the garbage container when we moved from CFB Comox to CFB Kingston, Ont., when I was going into sixth grade. That same move also saw my mother toss out my collection of comic books.

I am not the only one out there who is crying over lost memories, and perhaps, a small fortune.

Money can’t always buy memories and I consider my collection priceless.

» jxavier@brandonsun.com

» X:@julesxavier59