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30 Years Ago Today...

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ccouch (Chad)

Member
Aug 8, 2008
444
6
Thirty years ago today, Christmas 1983, in my grandparents' coal-stove heated living room in a podunk little coal-mining town in Eastern Kentucky, I received a 1983 Topps Factory Set. It was one of those sets from either the JCPenney or Sears catalog and I had lusted after it for months. Back in that summer, I'd been able to buy three rack packs and had virtually worn those 150 or so cards out. To have the whole set seemed like the ultimate luxury.

That factory set (which came in a standard 800-count white box FWIW) provided me literally hundreds of hours of entertainment over the next few years. If you name any player from that set, I can tell you what the front of the card looks like.

To this day, I still have that exact set. The checklists are marked and there's not a sharp corner in the entire set. But it means as much to me as any other tangible possession from my childhood. Every time I look through it, it is as if I'm transported back to being that wide-eyed 10-year old boy...

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope yours has been as blessed as mine.
 

r2d2

Active member
Aug 24, 2008
2,814
1
Mexico City
Merry Christmas and thanks for sharing the story. Can't think of how different was acquiring a complete set in those times than it is today.
 

rsmath

Active member
Nov 8, 2008
6,086
1
my favorite christmas moments of the 1980's were receiving the traded sets for christmas. Especially vivid is Christmas Day 1986 and opening up the Topps traded set with the Jose Canseco card in that set. And I loved the Topps traded sets in the mid-late 1980'sbecause the print quality seemed much better than the print quality of the regular set -- was it because the traded sets were printed in Ireland or...?
 

SteelBrad

New member
Mar 2, 2013
820
0
Awesome story! I think if you collect cards you have a moment in time like this. Mine was the summer if '87 where baseball cards were interspersed with fireworks.
 

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