Baseball Cards

I got my first baseball cards in 1966.  I remember that the bubble gum was real hard and lousy tasting.  The cards were quite interesting, filled with all kinds of numbers and strange abbreviations:  AB, H, ERA, BB, SO, HR, SLG, SB, CS, etc.  The cards did not even have a legend to decipher these strange codes.  What as an 8-year old to do?  Well, I started watching the NBC Game of Week each Saturday.  The game was called by Curt Gowdy with Sandy Koufax and PeeWee Reese.

After a while, some of the codes began to make sense. 

But, what I really remember were the first players' cards I had:  Ken McMullen; Bill Singer; Joel Horlen; and Bill Freehan.  I suspect that some of these were from my brother's packet.  I really got excited when these players' teams were on TV.  I would keep up with them via the daily boxscores even though they weren't on the RedSox.   I did not begin pulling for the RedSox until a year later.

To think that today there is a whole industry devoted to baseball card collections, trading, and autographs.