By Larry Larkin, Sports Correspondent
January 20, 2010 — The law of Supply and Demand can come into effect at most any time. Somebody has something and somebody else wants it. I had my first experience on this matter as an 11-year-old kid. In my case the “want” was a baseball card.
In my neighborhood there were five of us who “ran” together during the school year and over the summer. When we played football or baseball we were sometimes joined by two older brothers. Even with the additional two we all got along. There were no problems or jealously. It was just the opposite in fact. If one of us came up with a new challenge, the rest was ready to join in.
The time all five of us climbed on one bicycle and tried to ride down a hill is just one of the feats we attempted.
The point is at school or at the nearby city park or at scout meetings it was the five of us.
At the time of my tale the only Major League baseball teams west of the Mississippi River was the popular St. Louis Cardinals and the losing Kansas City Athletics.
Two of the guys saved baseball cards that year. One of the guys was named Larry Wayne Ford. His mother’s maiden name was Jackson. His favorite ball players were Whitey Ford of the New York Yankees and Larry Jackson of the Cardinals. Both were pitchers. Larry Wayne would brag he had two uncles playing in the Big Leagues.
Of course he was lying and the rest of us knew he was. Even so he made it sound good.
My main interest at the drug store then was comic books. Movie cowboys or TV cowboy shows, it didn’t matter. The year was 1958 and the Yankees, my favorite team, were headed back to the World Series.
I decided owning baseball cards would be fun. I put the comics on hold. It was too late in the summer to buy new cards at the store, but Larry Wayne had lost interest in his cards.
That year the Topps Crewing Gum company printed a set containing 494 cards. A card and a piece of pink gum cost one cent. Larry Wayne had purchased just over 450 different cards.
Knowing I might be interested, he offered to sell the cards to me for $2. The gum was long gone.
For a kid receiving a weekly 50 cents allowance, this was an important business deal. Even so I accepted.
Now it was Gregory and me with the cards. He didn’t have all that many, but he did have one I was missing. As luck would have it, the card pictured a Yankee. He wasn’t a big star, but I needI had to get it. This is where the “Supply and Demand” comes in.
Greg was willing to sell it to me for only 50 cents.
Wait a minute. This didn’t sound right. I had just obtained 450 cards for $2 and now another whole allowance was needed for one card.
Somewhere today I know Greg is a very successful business executive. He wouldn’t budge on his price. So I brought it.
I later spent countless hours with those cards and the thousands that followed. Even so I never came across that one card without thinking about the two quarters I paid for it.
Recently on the internet an entire set of ‘58 cards was priced at $3,850.
A few years ago I sold all my cards at auction for a faction of that total.
The money aside, I wish I had that one card back. If so I would ask this year’s featured speaker at Claremore’s “Fields of Dreams” banquet to autograph it for me.
You see, that 50-cent card was Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson.
