Pitchers and catchers are reporting to training camps this week in one of the annual signs of changing seasons. Robins will soon be arriving in large numbers to pull worms from my yard, the urge to deep clean the house is coming back, and I will pull a few mangled pieces of Bo Jackson-themed cardboard from my pocket.
On my birthday each year I place a few hand-selected baseball cards into my wallet. These cards are unprotected in any way and accumulate fairly heavy wear until they are exchanged for new cards one year later. These are referred to as my “wallet cards” and have been constant companions for a series of daily tasks and mini-adventures. The selections for 2024 consisted of a trio of the most recognizable Bo Jackson cards. Here is how they fared after 12 months.
This 1987 Topps aged beautifully, showing all kinds of interesting wear and tear. The corners eroded fairly quickly with the bottom left actually losing a small chunk 8 or 9 months into its term. The usual small creases formed along the borders, though these were augmented with several heavy and full-sized creases running vertically. A small tear developed along one of the small creases on the left border but is all but invisible when smoothed flat. The card became very pliable by the end of the year, tending to roll up along the edges following the contour of my pocket. The most visually interesting effect appeared on the right border. While the entire card surface developed some “snow” as bits of ink wore away, this effect was amplified on the right side due to this area usually peeking out beyond some of the wallet’s other contents. The snow effect blends into the woodgrain border, making it look like the color on that side of the card is fading in comparison to more vibrant areas.
Physically this ’86 Topps Traded card exhibits the same kind of wear as the ’87, though the colors employed inverted much of the way this damage appears. The white snow on the ’87 stands in contrast to the dirt and grime that adhered to this card’s surface. Many of the same creases are present, though they only appear as visible within the dark border along the top. The corner that broke off the 1987 card remains in tact on this copy, though you can see the outline of where this one would eventually break away if subjected to continual wallet-based storage.
The final card was Jackson’s 1990 Score and one thing is for certain: Score used a different card stock than that employed in Topps’ earlier releases. The card just felt different than the others. The corners became as pliable as paper but the bulk of the card remained sturdy. Some of the layers comprising the cardstock began to show signs of separation along one edge. Oddly enough, the card seemed to expand and contract based on how much humidity was in the air. It actually appeared to absorb moisture at times. The surface is probably just as dirty as the others, though the black and white image obscures much of this.
Wallet Cards: Year in Pictures
I guess you could say I am getting the destruction of baseball cards down to a science. Science is a good place to start the year in pictures, so let’s see where these cards went during the previous 12 months.
I spent a morning in the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Hall. One of the first wallet card pictures of 2024 was taken in front of an edmontosaurus skeleton. The tail encroaching on the background from the left belongs to a smaller thescelosaurus and the oddly shaped rock matrices on the right contain numerous fossil leaves.
Speaking of animals coming out of the ground, cicadas were EVERYWHERE last spring. While we normally get a small batch popping up every summer, this year saw the emergence of millions of a different variety. These “red eye parallels” (for you modern card collectors) denote a periodic cicada against the more common green bodied/black eyed annual edition. Periodic broods emerge every 13 or 17 years with people eagerly tracking their progress and mapping locations alongside identifying names. Brood II, consisting of 17-year cicadas, are scheduled to emerge in my area in 2030. Brood XIX, of the 13-year variety, came out in force in 2024 near my house and well to the northeast of where they were expected to emerge in quantity.
One afternoon I heard an odd sound that grew louder by the hour. Bird calls soon joined and I walked outside to see tens of thousands of these inch long insects flitting about in the trees around me. There were so many that they would bump into each other and fall stunned to the ground. Birds were all over the place, grabbing as many as they could and ferrying them back to their nests. Sitting outside in the middle of this insect bombardment I set out a baseball card and let one of the fallen bugs crawl onto it.
What do you do after coming face to face with the 8th plague of ancient Egypt? Play God with nature, obviously. In a misguided attempt at Mother’s Day gift giving we ended up with a bunch of Firefly Petunias. As the picture below shows, they make a pretty decent scaffold for displaying baseball cards.
So what makes these plants so special? Their genes were edited (not cross-bred, actually edited) to include bioluminescent sequences from a species of mushroom. The result is a plant that can provide light at night or whenever the sun is temporarily blotted out, such as the plague that followed the locusts. Here is the same plant after a month of growth. The Bo Jackson card is in there somewhere.
Speaking of modifying living things, I underwent a bit of surgery early in the year. My cards accompanied me into the operating room for a bit of vision correction. It was an odd experience, as the surgeon was hosting a class of aspiring ophthalmologists to view the procedure. I listened to a running play by play of the doctor’s progress while also focusing as intently as I could on the laser being used to perform the work.
What’s the first thing I did after having my eyesight fine tuned by a laser? I decided the correct course of action was to look at an eclipse. I built a pinhole camera and used a card as a backdrop to see the moon partially block out the sun. Check out the image of the early stages of the eclipse just under the Royals logo in the upper left. The whole process was about half an hour and I put the card away before the peak of the event.
The eclipse wasn’t the only natural phenomenon in the sky. Late in the year we encountered a few glancing blows from hurricanes. Travelling back from a work engagement ahead of a storm I pulled over to get a shot of one of the leading edges of a rain band spinning out from a hurricane. The picture doesn’t do justice to just how quickly conditions were shifting or the sharp contrast between those clouds and the sky just a couple miles back down the road.
However, an hour later I was waiting to greet an early dismissal school bus when the storm arrived. We only received rain but Hurricane Helene really did a number on the western part of the state. The James River had a lot of debris coming downstream in the weeks afterward.
Precipitation of another variety cancelled more than just school as the new year arrived. I ventured out into the snow to get a cat bite checked out and decided to drive a bit further to a local baseball card show. The road leading into the event had been well taken care of so I figured there was a good chance of seeing some cardboard on a snowy day.
The show was cancelled so I made my own card show in the snow outside the venue.
Things do not travel in only one direction from the sky. Sometimes things fly, and when they can take you with them they are incredibly fun. Naval Air Station Oceana provided a backdrop to watch all kinds of military aircraft take to the skies over Virginia Beach. Here I have my card posing at the beginning of a lineup of F-18 Hornets.
An air show visit and subsequent flight in 2023 convinced my son to pursue a career in aviation. He and I have since been laying the groundwork for a pilot’s license. I imagine any lulls in posting to CardBoredom are the result of this pursuit.
Such a focus lends itself to hanging around airfields. One such day included witnessing a fly-in from a group of vintage aircraft enthusiasts. This plane landed and tied off right where we were set up for lunch.
Planes are built for travel. While I didn’t step foot onto a commercial aircraft during 2024, that didn’t stop me from touring around on some good ole-fashioned road trips. One of my favorite spots was near Rockfish Gap, Virginia where there is an abandoned railroad tunnel cutting more than 4,000 feet through a mountain. Free from rail traffic for 75 years, the tunnel was recently reinforced and cleaned up for use as a walking trail.
Shown above is my wallet card at the eastern entrance. That speck of light is nearly a mile away and is tall enough to provide 20 feet of clearance above rails set atop an already elevated roadbed. The acoustics are fascinating, particularly when one of the many trains pass 50 feet away through an active tunnel running parallel to this one. Even with no tracks it is a bit unnerving to hear (and feel) an approaching train while you are in the middle of a very dark tunnel.
The beaches of North Carolina are a recurring theme in my family’s summer travels.
The lighthouse at Cape Hatteras was undergoing some restoration work when we arrived. When not covered in scaffolding visitors have the opportunity to climb some seriously winding iron stairs up to the top.
For the first time one of my kids beat me at mini-golf. I’ve always preferred this course in Kill Devil Hills with its sailing ship painted in the colors of Drake’s Golden Hind.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to mash up the baking program Nailed It with one of those terrible home renovation/investment shows? Someone in the Outer Banks apparently did just that. The house we stayed in was “restored” by someone who seems to have spent all of a three day weekend and a $200 Lowes gift card on the project. The deck literally swayed when someone shut a door or took a tentative step on it. After seeing several beams not actually connected to anything of substance and issuing a ban on anyone stepping foot onto the deck of death, I set about seeing what else was going on with this place.
The flooring for example, was comprised of a do-it-yourself laminate which is supposed to “float” over an existing flooring solution. Several windows and one of the doors were not sealed, and the floor literally floated on a puddle in those spots. This is going to lead to serious structural issues and mold. The house didn’t quite get any of the sizes right so the floor would sometimes shift under your feet. This phenomenon could be politely described as less than ideal in the stairwell.
A cross section of the floor covering can be seen on this side view of the stairs. There appears to be a glob of construction adhesive at the leading edge of the step. The picture does not capture how wavy and mobile these steps were. I did not capture an image of the handrail, which drooped from waist high at the top of the stairs to barely clearing my knee at the landing. Perhaps I was distracted by the light fixture illuminating this part of the house. That is an early 1970s-era ceiling fixture mounted horizontally through a hole in the drywall. Measure twice, cut once, and all that.
Not a 90 degree angle anywhere in the house. Kitchen cabinets leaned one way, appliances another. The visual effect was further enhanced by rectangular backsplash tiles that had random widths of grout between them in an attempt to hide just how bad this end of the house was sloping.
Oof. There were many other issues with the building’s condition. I looked into the property’s history and found someone had purchased a tired beach box from the 1970s, “fixed it up,” and likely planted the seeds for its becoming condemned in the process. I wasn’t so mad at the condition of the house as I was at the thought of how inept the owner had to be in order to look at it and say, “yes, this is ready for guests to stay in.” I hope she becomes hopelessly addicted to YouTube box breaks.
Back to tales of better engineering. I spent some time back on the Virginia side of the border in Portsmouth. There is a century old decommissioned lightship bearing the city’s name parked along the waterfront. It was closed when I walked past it but is scheduled to reopen for public tours next month.
Sitting across the Elizabeth River is NASSCO, one of many shipyards in and near Norfolk focused on maintaining the constant stream of US Navy ships being dispatched from Fleet Forces Command. The drydock and ships filling the right side of the picture are blocking a view of Harbor Park, which hosts the Baltimore-affiliated AAA Norfolk Tides. The vessel closest to the image center is the USS Arlington, an amphibious transport docking ship that includes steel reclaimed from the Pentagon after September 11th.
When making my way closer to home a stop in Colonial Williamsburg is always in order. Visitors can pay admission to take tours and walk through many of the area’s historic buildings, though it should be noted the streets are public roads allowing for enjoyable fee-free walks through a fantastic setting. The ambience is enhanced on cooler evenings with the daily lighting of the cressets, a series of small bonfires suspended on poles up and down Duke of Gloucester Street.
The photo above was taken outside of Chowning’s Tavern, the least formal of the numerous resurrected eating establishments in the historic area. Just up the street is a more modern dining scene, including a beer hall lined with pinball machines. I found one with a Foo Fighters theme.
Do you remember learning about Pocahontas and the settlement at Jamestown? Those encounters took place about five miles down the road from this pinball machine. While the original fort is a constant scene of archealogical exploration, a replica has been built nearby in an area less prone to flooding. At Halloween they turn the entire historic area into one giant haunted house (village?) and open it up to trick-or-treaters. Much of the lighting is done with torches, so conditions were not conducive to getting a good picture. I stepped inside one of the better lit structures and grabbed this blurry image.
Celebrating holidays in an incongruous manner is always fun. Halloween at Jamestown? Check. Mardi Gras with a crawdad playing the drums at Busch Gardens? Oh yeah.
There’s something about Mardi Gras that awakens my appetite from winter hibernation. Maybe its just all the dietary prohibitions I hear about immediately afterwards. The end result is always me going overboard with lots of meat and fried foods.
I also stumbled across a burger place from childhood. For those of you from anywhere outside the mid-Atlantic region, I need to preface by saying this restaurant is not what it looks like. Whataburger to most people is a chain of more than 1,000 fast food restaurants based out of San Antonio. The one shown below is one of a half dozen or so “What-A-Burgers” operating in Virginia and the Carolinas, a completely different burger chain serving pretty much the same stuff. Both restaurants began in the 1950s and remained unaware of each other’s existence for two decades before engaging in a running legal battle that did not conclude until 2004.
I grew up going to the Newport News, Virginia What-A-Burger location whenever there was a baseball card show at one of the nearby hotels or the local mall. The restaurant has since reduced its number of locations but I managed to stumble across this one in Chesterfield on Christmas Eve. I have to be honest: I pre-gamed my extended family’s holiday dinner with a giant burger tray and fries. Christmas is a time for tradition, and I think I this constitutes a pretty good new one.
This post has been heavy on the pictures with some decidedly better than others. Perhaps it is the lighting. Those who share their collections online know they have no choice but to overtake whatever area of their home has that perfect lighting for photographing cards. Sorry honey, the pictures of the kids and cat need to be put in this monster box. My refractor just pops on this shelf.
I accidentally found such a location but it presents a few logistical issues. It is not in my house, but rather inside a French bistro operating in the historic quarter. My initial goal was to capture a wallet card alongside the carafe labeled “Historic Tap Water” and it came out beautifully. I don’t know what is setting off the lighting so well, but I fear I have no choice but to take all my future cards out for a fancy meal and photography session. If you see a guy breaking down a box of junk wax between courses of salmon rillettes and canard a l’orange, that would be me.
Go take your baseball cards for a walk.
