WS Chronicle

By David Winship

When Willie Mays died last week, I went to my collection of baseball cards and pulled five cards from his San Francisco Giants career. Baseball cards were always a way to connect with childhood heroes and we had them all over the country in the ‘50s and ‘60s. My older brother and I collected the cards, sealed in their familiar packs with the strip of bubble gum. As I recall, there were five cards to a pack. 

When I pulled the Willie Mays’ cards, I also revealed his teammates on the ’61 Giants. These included Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey and rookie Matty Alou.

We had different ways of using the cards back then. One was in building a collection. Often this involved trading cards to our friends, creating a perceived value in who had the best record or highest average or had made the best play that week. A second use, which carried the card’s usefulness beyond the game of baseball, was to clothespin the card to the back fork of the bicycle’s rear wheel. With the card clipped to this arm and extending into the spokes of the wheel, the resulting flapping at a high rate of speed created the sound like a motorcycle. 

The reason that I was able to have all the teams from the years of 1956 – 1965, which included some years when the Giants were in New York, was that the baseball card collection had been stored away by our mother. For the decades following when my brother and I had both left home in the ‘60s, we often asked our parents where the cards were and received no answer. We’d left them behind, like many children do when leaving home, in a box under a bed. We knew that our mother, who kept most everything, would not have thrown them out. 

Periodically when we were home visiting, we would look around the house and venture into the attic, which was a daunting repository of everything including college papers, empty luggage, and tax records and receipts from 1950, the first year we lived in the house. But we could never find them. We finally accepted that they were lost, but couldn’t understand how.

In 2021, I moved back into my old home place. While gathering up the boxes of tax records for shredding, there behind the boxes was one box that, instead of the year of the receipts on the top, said “Baseball Cards” in our mother’s distinctive writing. Sometime in the 1970s, she’d taken the cards from where they were left, boxed them, and had Dad put them in the attic. Then, she forgot about them.

The cards were as we had left them, partially sorted by teams, numbering about 4,000. As I unpacked them, visions of wealth began to run through my head, imagining heard-of auctions where rare cards were going for five figures, even more!

I took a few of them to the local sports-card shop, expecting that cards like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and the like would be valuable. Instead, I found that the cards were well under $100 each. It certainly was disappointing, but it brought back memories from over 60 years ago. 

As a youth, I played Little League, but I did not make the cut for Pony League. In high school I lent my skills and abilities as manager of the baseball team, toting equipment and keeping score. In my last year at Tennessee High School in Bristol, the team won the state championship, a first for the school. The camaraderie of the team continued through reunions in the decades following. Members of the team recently received word that the team would be inducted into the inaugural class of a Hall of Fame being established at the school.

Back then baseball was more than a game; it was a way of life. Our heroes were on the mound, the batter’s box, on the base paths, and in the field. Willie Mays is one of those heroes. Thanks for the memories.

David Winship is a retired public school educator, poet, writer and letterpress printer who lives in Bristol, Tennessee. He is a member of Winston-Salem Writers.