Collector's Log: Stardate 198201.30

As I previewed in my Reminiscence post, I came across a little travel book that I had used to jot down my daily activities in 1982.  I will be highlighting entries from it that are card related.  This is the first in a likely long series.

Since the book was from 1979, the days of the week didn't apply, so they are crossed out.

The sample page above is pretty typical of what the whole book is.  I should give you some background on certain things.  The names will be somewhat obscured because this is on the internet.

• "D&K refers to my (former) step brother and sister.  They would come over to visit, but wouldn't necessarily hang out with me and my friends.  I didn't dislike them particularly, but sometimes it was awkward.  D didn't come over much after the first few entries - his disappearance was noted later.
• My main trading friends in the neighborhood were Bill H. (most often referred to as Billy), Mike, Bill S., his brother Marc, Bill C., and Johnny.   There were a lot of Billys in my 'hood.
• The little notations in the corners were my record of the trips we made to the local arcade.  In our case it was at the nearby Putt-Putt golf center.  We could walk from our house and would usually help Bill S. distribute newspapers to the houses in between.  He would sponsor most trips, hence "$5 BS".  That notation didn't appear too much in the book after about March or so.  That was the heaviest that I was ever involved in video games.  I never really owned any of the major home consoles or anything after that.
• "Collectibles" is what I called my player collections at that time.  There weren't quite 50+ of them then, but they slowly built up over time.
• If I talk about a ball game I watched, the circled team won.
• Along with cards, I was into comics, model trains, model cars, and Legos back then.

Some of the things on the sample page:

Star Castle was my favorite video game at the time.  It appears my first experience was on Jan. 29th. 

You fly a spaceship around a centrally located enemy ship that is defended by rotating walls and pixely clusters.  If you fly off the screen, you come back from the opposite side.  This is a major tactical advantage.  If you keep moving and firing as you pass, you can whittle down his defenses and destroy him before he can turn and fire on you.

The player in the video is really good.  Don't think I ever got to this level.  The traffic at Putt-Putt wasn't heavy, and we would go several times a week when the weather was good, so high scores were rather common anyway.

Feb. 3 notes that I "resorted album".

This means I went through my one and only binder at the time and sorted my star cards in it.  I probably had all the vintage cards I owned and maybe my player collections in there at this point as well.  Ultra-Pro wasn't around yet, so there were a couple variations on this binder, but that's all you saw.  This one is still my misc. star card binder.

It also mentions making tags for special cards that I needed for my collectibles.  My friend Mike had several hundred of these business cards with Chessie System train logos on one side that I used to note cards that diverged from the regular order of base Topps sets.  When those ran out, I just cut up index cards.  A few of these are still in my PC binders.

The most significant card related entry is Jan. 30.  A trip to the Hanover, PA card shop.  Looks like I picked up some PC cards of Joe Torre, Claude Osteen (CO), and Jim Fregosi, 1981 football, misc. Redskins, and must have ordered the new Topps set.  Later in the book, it says Mom came home with it.

I'm not sure if the $8.30 is for the cards or the shirt.  Probably the cards, which looked something like this:

Our friend Mike was an exclusively Angels team collector, and his PCs were Jim Fregosi and Nolan Ryan.  I guess I got the Fregosi RC before he did, and apparently Billy blabbed it to him before I could.  Not sure which Torre cards I got, so I just picked out an online image of a few of them together.

February 4 also denotes another video game high score.  One of the first games I remember playing was Scramble.

A simple joystick and two buttons.  Any more than that was too complicated.  I remember now that the saucers always lined up at one level.  Keep it there and you could blast most of them.

GAME OVER.  Thanks for playing.

Next time ~ How many cards did I have in 1982?