As a small child I performed various chores around the house in an effort to earn money. My family was blue collar and we weren’t privileged enough to warrant an allowance; we had to work for anything we received.
And in those young years I hated reading school books and such, but I gravitated toward comic books. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the like, were all part of my modest library.
It should be noted that back then, an hourly wage was about $1.00. Comic books were selling for between 5 and 12 cents. My payment for chores amounted to five cents. Fair compensation as slave labor goes.
I would ride my bike to the corner store to eagerly spend my hard earned cash, all the while learning about capitalism and the wage system.
It didn’t take long before I realized my pay was commensurate with my duties and complexity thereof. That valuable lesson gave me the incentive to perform more complex jobs to earn more money. And that led to a bigger cash stash or more comic books. Pretty simple, actually.
Eventually, I grew into professional sports, along with other neighborhood kids, and used my pennies to purchase sports cards rather than comic books.
At that time, baseball and football cards were available, but not hockey, soccer, or Pokemon cards.
We guys would travel as a caravan to the corner store to buy the cards du jure. Baseball cards were bought in the summer, football cards in the fall and winter months.
Returning to one of the gang’s garage we would look over our goodies and compare our luck while attempting to chew on a pink cardboard-like insert supposedly identified as bubble gum. These cards were sold in concealed packages with the gum and four or five cards. It was the secrecy that kept selling the cards in hope of getting a “good one.”
It may be hard to believe, but none of us were aficionados when it came to sports cards or collecting or chewing gum. It didn’t take long before we became bored with our sorting and card trading and decided to move on to other more productive activities like annoying the neighbors.
This is where we would take those “unwanted” and “untraded” cards and place them into our pockets. We would then travel to my backyard to liberate a handful of spring-loaded clothespins.
As a mini-history lesson, clothespins were/are used by people with foresight to hang their freshly-washed laundry in the sun on pieces of rope called “clotheslines” and secured with “clothespins.” This is an early version solar awareness. You’re welcome.
In any case, those pilfered clothespins were used to secure the surplus sports cards to our bicycles. They would be attached to the fender braces with the clothespins and protrude into the spokes. Here’s the cool part.
Still too cool!
When you rode your bike the cards would make a slapping sound that remotely mimicked a motorcycle in critical condition. As a bonus, that noise would irritate the neighbors trying to take naps or quietly read.
Just as an aside, my grandmother always had a deck of cards on hand for playing solitaire. She was always angry because she never won. One day she counted the cards in the deck and discovered she was four short. As it happens, playing cards worked as well as baseball cards for producing noise. Alas I never confessed.
So it was with interest when I read about a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, in pristine condition, had recently sold for the astonishing amount of $5,200.000! That’s a lot of money for a card that originally sold for a nickel.
I quickly became reflective about my possible loss of $5,199,999.95 for using a special baseball card so that I could make a motorcycle-like noise on my bike.
After a fashion I realized it was okay then, and okay now. I had fun.
