Someday All This Will Be Yours-- Except the Yaz Card
by Gary Drevitch
By all accounts, collecting things is a dying hobby, with few young people today interested in stockpiling stamps or shoeboxing baseball cards. Of the 37 million Americans who identified themselves as collectors in 2000, just 11% were under the age of 36. This is partly because there no longer appears to be any money in it for the average collector: The bottom has fallen out of the resale market for traditional boys’ collectibles like comic books and sports cards. Also, producers have flooded the market with ever-more-elaborate and expensive holographic designs, turning off aspiring young collectors. But perhaps the fault really lies with we Dads.
You now who you are. You collected baseball cards for years as a kid, but several years ago, you sold off all of your “common” (not valuable) cards, holding onto only your best pieces—rookie cards of future Hall of Famers, Red Sox legends, and other stars and oddities—all of which now sit securely inside plastic sheets at the top of the closet.
I know you because I am you. I was thrilled when my six-year-old son, Fellow, began taking a serious—OK, borderline obsessive—interest in my old cards this fall, and I promised him that all of my cards would be his one day. Relatives and
friends found out about his interest just before his birthday and their gifts helped him build a collection of a few hundred new cards in a matter of months. But what he really wanted was my collection—right now. My mid-70s Carl Yastrzemski card became his white whale. But I would have none of it.
Unintentionally, a mercenary model of obsessive preservation was the only model for collecting I had given him. Although I assured him that it was OK with me if he stored his own cards any way he saw fit, even if rubber bands, he insists on putting each in a plastic sheet inside one of his binders. When he and his best friend get together to trade their cards, they always check with their dads first to make sure they aren’t trading away anything that might have value someday. And though we try to resist, both of us fathers sometimes advise against certain trades, though we know that very few of the cards they constantly handle today will have much value tomorrow.
One morning, as my wife walked Fellow to school, she asked him about his baseball cards. “Is it a lot of fun collecting baseball cards?” she asked him. She told me that he turned to her with shock and said, “No, mommy! Collecting baseball cards is work! It’s a lot of hard work!” And I had to tell her that I was sorry about that.
Gary Drevitch is a former assigning editor at Teen People, Parade Publications, and Scholastic. He’s also a dad with three young kids. A veteran producer of educational content for McGraw-Hill, Scholastic Inc., and Time Inc., he’s written several non-fiction books for children.
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