newjerseynewsroom.com

But do they still have my baseball cards?

BY ANGELA DAIDONE

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Most of us have memories of childhood events that will stay with us until old age. The day you got your first Barbie doll or when you scored the winning basket in the recreation league championship game. I have lots of those days in my memory bank, too, one of which came flooding back when I saw the item about the nuns who sold a baseball card to raise money for their ministries.

Here's the back story: A group of Roman Catholic nuns in Baltimore auctioned off a century-old Honus Wagner card last month for desperately needed funds. The card was in poor condition, the report said, but the winning bidder Doug Walton of Knoxville, Tenn., didn't come up with the $220,000.

So a New Jersey doctor came to the rescue and now has one of the world's most valuable baseball cards. Nicholas DePace, a cardiologist from Haddonfield, N.J., stepped in Monday to buy the card. The major sports memorabilia collector told The Philadelphia Inquirer he's hoping to launch a museum in Collingswood, N.J., or Philadelphia.

I just may have to check it out.

Here's the flashback: When I was in the fourth grade of a Catholic school in Lodi, Sister Mary Something-or-Other caught me "flipping" baseball cards with the boys in the back of the classroom. Okay, maybe I should have waited until lunchtime or recess but I was just so darned good at it that I couldn't resist the challenge when she stepped into the hallway.

I had just tossed 40 or so straight "heads" when Sister returned and promptly demanded my cards. What I didn't realize, however, was the pile of crisp cards was not my flipping deck with extras of no-name players but my super-duper show-off stash — with guys like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and Brooks Robinson. Ugh. The nuns had my prized collection because I made a stupid mistake and grabbed the wrong bunch.

All the pleading and crying didn't help. It was my tough luck, Sister told me, ruler in hand. (This was the 1960s, remember.) Indeed, it was my tough luck. At the time, no one knew how valuable those cards would become. In the heyday of the 1980s, baseball card and memorabilia collecting really took off. And as recently as 2008, a report showed that investing in vintage cards out-performed many stock portfolios.

I never saw that bunch of cards again.

So, as a former Catholic-school girl, the story about the Baltimore nuns and their baseball card collection conjures up a burning question in my mind: Now that they've unloaded their Honus Wagner card, do they have my 1964 Brooks Robinson card — the year he had a .317 batting average, .521 slugging percentage, had 194 hits and 118 RBI and was voted the American League MVP? If so, I'll gladly flip them for it.