Baseball cards bring back memories of youth

By David Winship When Willie Mays died last week, I went to my collection of baseball cards and pulled five cards from his San Francisco Giants career. Baseball cards were always a way to connect with childhood heroes and we had them all over the country in the ‘50s and ‘60s. My older brother and I collected the cards, sealed in their familiar packs with the strip of bubble gum. As I recall, there were five cards to a pack.  When I pulled the Willie Mays’ cards, I also revealed his teammates on the ’61 Giants. These included Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey and rookie Matty Alou. We had different ways of using the cards back then. One was in building a collection. Often this involved trading cards to our friends, creating a perceived value in who had the best record or highest average or had made the best play that week. A second use, which carried the card’s usefulness beyond the game of baseball, was to clothespin the card to the back fork of the bicycle’s rear wheel. With the card clipped to this arm and extending into the spokes of the wheel, the resulting flapping at a high rate...