Written on 3-7-26.
It’s a Saturday, and Belinda and I have done our “chores,” so it’s quiet time. She went down to deliver a shirt to the camper, but she hasn’t come back yet. I bet she took a nap in there. It’s a cool day (50º for the high), and I bet it’s cozy warm in there.
I have taken a foray into eBay recently. I have listed my less desirable (to me) Star Wars items and sold some stuff. Let me check the app. I have listed 20, and I have sold four. Not bad. This is all due to the 2026 Star Wars trading card project. I have purchased several things (too many) to build up and protect that collection, so I felt a need to sell some stuff to equalize. I have over $1,000.00 to go, so I had better list and sell more items. I can do it. I haven’t really gotten to the good stuff yet, and I am just learning.
Belinda and I talk about this often. I was scarred a bit by...
what Mom and Dad left behind. It was a lot. I don’t think they did it on purpose; it just got away from them. I know Dad wanted to get rid of more stuff, but Mom would hold on to things…and not let go. Or, she would say often, “I’ll get to that later.”She never did.
Belinda spoke to someone similar to Jess’s age who said, “I will just let my kids deal with all of that stuff.”
We both think that is a cruel sentiment, so I am dealing with it now…while I’m alive.
I am going to kill two ants with one large boot stomp here. I’ve wanted to give a written history of my Star Wars trading cards for a while. I can cut and paste this section of my golf journal and put it in with my collection. Here it goes…
The first time I knew of Star Wars, it was already in theaters. We took a trip out to see my Dad’s cousin, Kevin, and his family in Philadelphia. They had a TV going in the background in their kitchen, and I remembered seeing a commercial promoting the film that included Luke and Leia swinging across the chasm. I wanted to go see it so badly, but we weren’t allowed to see PG movies yet. Or, at least I wasn’t, because I was ten when it first came out. Mom and Dad wanted me to wait until I was 12. That must have been the summer of 1977 when it came out in May of that year.
I finally got to see it, but I don’t remember when or where. It must have been out for over a year by that time. Thankfully, it was so popular that it stayed in the theaters. I don’t even know if I was 12 yet. We didn’t see it multiple times like many people did. I longed to see more pictures from the movie; I was so fascinated by it. It was a perfect movie for a young boy. George Lucas made it for kids mostly. When I did see it, there was so much to take in and it went by way too fast. I wanted to slow it down and understand it better. It was so unique, different from any other movie I had ever seen.
Here is an example of that. Inside the Star Wars original soundtrack dual album cover, I saw a picture in the top left corner that showed the Millennium Falcon trapped in the Death Star hangar. I saw that before I saw the movie, and I thought it was a tramway of some sort. I didn’t know it was the cockpit of a spaceship, a very famous starship now. I could see it as something that picked up passengers and went along a rail of some sort. See what I mean? I didn’t even know what the Millennium Falcon was!
These cards were the perfect, inexpensive solution for that! I could read about the movie on the back of the cards and examine all the characters, ships, and creatures on the front. I found them at a local drug store. It was not far from our home, so I would walk or ride my bike there.
It was located on the very busy Sheridan Boulevard, but we got there by using the back streets like our street, Benton, or Ames. We just had to be careful crossing Florida which was perpendicular to Sheridan, because it had enough traffic to warrant paying attention. The drug store is now a Metro by T-Mobile store, but the address is the same: 1385 South Sheridan Boulevard. It was a Payday Loans before that, and who knows what else.
Mike Sanchez was a good friend and neighbor who lived across the street. He was younger than I was but not by much, and he and I would go buy cards and then make trades. I distinctly remember opening up our fresh wax packs in one of their upstairs bedrooms that was furniture-less. They were the only family that had two stories on Benton Street. We would spread them out on the mottled carpet to discover what we had bought. It was always fun to get new cards!
My biggest mistake (with my mother’s help) was taking the cards that I loved so much and putting them in a sticky photo album. Oh, what I know now that I wish I would have known then. I don’t blame Mom. She wanted to help me preserve them; it was her suggestion. These albums had cellophane overlays that would hold the photos down on a slightly sticky background. The sticky part had stripes that ran across horizontally. When I realized what I had done years later, I carefully removed each card, but the damage had been done. Each card had a stripe pattern across the back. Ugh!
When you see these cards, you’ll know the ones with the stripes across the back are the ones that mean the most to me. Those were the first ones I owned. The red series, series 2, are also more valuable to me. Those were the first ones I remember buying. I found some of the blue, series 1 cards later, and some of them somehow escaped the sticky fate that my red ones did not. However, the subsequent series, especially the yellow (series 3) and green (series 4) have the same stripes. They look like the pinstriped jeans I used to wear in high school. The orange and final series was mostly saved from the stripes somehow. Only some of those have those distinct stripes. Maybe I ran out of albums?
Until next time...
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