Everybody has a starting point in their hockey card collecting career and like one's first kiss it is usually burned into your memory never to be forgotten.
I just happened to hit the hockey card fad in 1970-71, the beginning of a decade, in my opinion, of the most beautiful cards ever marketed by O-Pee-Chee and Topps.
As a ten year old boy in Canada and living in the hometown of one of the NHL's great goaltenders, Roger Crozier, we had all we needed to fuel the imagination of our young, hockey crazy, little minds.
Now collecting hockey cards was not the same back in those days as it has become today. First of all we didn't need to go to the bank for a loan to buy a pack, you could buy them at the local drugstore for a nickel a pack.
The tough part was that all the boys in school bought from the same drugstore so at times there was quite a shortage for new pack cards.
We didn't have hockey card binders with archival plastic pages to store our cardboard treasures in, instead we had "stacks" of maybe a hundred or more cards being held together by rubber bands which in the modern era is a big no-no. It is also one of the most common flaws you'll find in a card from the 70's besides the famous O/C cards. And the most popular method of storing cards when not being played with was, you guessed it, the shoebox. And finally, the hardest thing on a boys cards was, hands down, Mom! Over the years Moms had to have obliterated thousands and thousands of carboard heroes by simply "cleaning your room".
Most of us in those days really didn't collect hockey cards as a means to finish a particular series but rather a means to see who could accumulate the most cards on any given day.
By playing several different games with the cards themselves, usually in the washroom at recess, such as "knock-down", "closest to the wall" or "cover up", one could easily double or triple the amount of cards he showed up with originally. The one with the biggest stack at the end of the day was considered the winner.
Of course you would have to constantly be on the look-out for the recess teacher because if you were caught playing cards you faced loosing your treasures, never to be seen again. I sometimes wonder how many teachers actually subsidized their retirements from confiscated hockey cards!
Now, there was the odd one who chose to collect the superstars of the era such as Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe or Bobby Orr and would sometimes trade 20-30 cards for a player of superstar status. But I'm sure those kids were few and far between.
As I recall collecting was not very difficult in the 70's as there was only one brand of cards, which in Canada was O-Pee-Chee and Topps in the US. Of course other industries tried their hand at distributing cards in Canada during the 1970's with some of them being Esso gas stations, which distributed their very popular NHL Power Player cards with a fill up at their stations in Canada during the winter months of 1970-71, supermarket chains such as Loblaws issued a 324 player set of sticker stamps in 1973-74 and even Colgate toothpaste used NHL related materials to promote their goods. This being a lesson learned from the 1960's when Shirriff Foods added a round plastic coin shaped picture of NHL players to their jello and pudding mixes on store shelves.
The insert cards or promo items that were included in the card packs in those days were not at all considered collectible. They were usually discarded or used for whatever purpose they were designed for. I remember one insert in particular that was a ring with a team logo on it that could be punched out of the cardboard and worn on the finger. I don't remember many being worn at the time and very few were considered trading material. However, the few that did manage to survive are worth a premium in todays collectible market.
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