1976: Bad Year To Be A Brohamer Card

In 1976, I was 7 years old and deep in the throws of my formative collecting years. I've told stories here before about collecting cards and the awful things my friends and I would do to cards in those days. Now, before you start to think back TOO far, we were beyond the days of using cards in our bike spokes. In fact, I'm not sure any of my friends did that - that was before our time.

What we did, however, is probably considered much worse, much nastier. Much. Nastier. You see, in 1976, we wanted to be sure that our collections would be preserved for all time. And so, we enshrined our cards not in mere pocket pages (which I suppose were available, but we knew nothing of them) nor in shoe boxes nor any other kind of protective storage. Rather, we chose to glue our cards into spiral notebooks.

Yeah, read that again. We glued our cards into spiral notebooks. The Jack Brohamer I have in my personal collection is one of the few bits of evidence and artifact of those days long gone by. I could have easily replaced this card with a specimen in much better condition. In fact, I probably have other '76 Brohamers in my duplicates boxes. But, that isn't the point.

The point is, in my head anyway, to have this keepsake to reflect on those youthful days before we knew what "collecting" was really about. In the photos below, you can see (especially the card back) the remnants of my brutality. I mean, sure, it was bad enough we glued them in, but, we didn't stop there. When we were ready to trade or flip our cards, we simply peeled them off the lined pages to which they had been so meticulously glued. This made for rendering most of the cards completely useless. In fact, most of the cards would simply separate the fronts from the backs. As you see, that's mostly what happened to poor Brohamer here.

Though I cannot say I am proud of the way we treated our bits of cardboard heroes, I can also say that I do not regret such actions. For you see, we were kids. We weren't caught up in book value and future collectibility studies. No, we were wanted to have our keepsakes mounted in the most permanent thing we had at the time. Those really were simpler days. Not saying they were better, just simpler.