Souvenirs Tell Stories — Part 11: Baseball Stamp Albums

From 1962 Baseball Stamp Album — Photo by Jim LaBate

Many people have been confined to their homes during the past year due to the COVID 19 situation and the quarantine. As a result, some of us have used that time to clean out the house, to begin to get rid of some of the junk we’ve collected through the years. Fortunately, as we sort through our junk, we sometimes find treasures from long ago, souvenirs that remind us of our youth and take us back to a time of innocence and optimism. Recently, I found my old baseball stamp albums from 1961 and 1962, and those mementos definitely will not go in the trash.

Those stamp albums remind me of the spring seasons of my youth. With the first sign of warm weather, my friends and I would begin to play pitch and catch in the driveway. Then, we’d start to hit wiffle balls in the back yard. Finally, when the nearby fields had dried out enough from the winter’s snow and rain, we would gather as many guys as we could for an actual game with nine players on a side. Our favorite game, the American pastime, had returned.

Another spring ritual that came with the warmer temperatures was collecting baseball cards. For one shiny nickel, we could get five baseball cards and a stick of pink, stale bubblegum. We loved the cards because they included color pictures of our favorite players with statistics and interesting anecdotes on the back. Most of…