Showing posts with label LCS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LCS. Show all posts

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Dime-Boxing at Valley Sports Cards

The day before Thanksgiving I was going to travel from my house in Ventura County down to my in-laws house in Orange County.  However, it seemed like everyone else in the state had the same idea.  The freeways were PACKED.  I would either have to suck it up and sit in traffic going through LA, or find some way to kill time until the roads were less busy.  Kill time?  How about a card shop!


Valley Sports Cards in Tarzana is technically my "Local" card shop since there aren't any closer, but even on a good day, it's still 30 minutes away, so I don't get there often.  I think it had been about a year and a half since my last trip there.  However, it's right off the 101, so it made a perfect pit stop while I waited out my fellow travelers.
This is not a big shop...and part of their space is used-up by their picture framing business, but one thing that I knew they had in abundance last time I was there was DIME BOXES, and that was my goal when I walked in.   As I entered the shop, the place where the dime boxes had been before was now a basketball cards display.  Not to fear, the dime boxes had been relocated to the back corner.  There were probably twenty of the 3,200-count boxes packed to the gills with baseball, football, basketball, and some assorted sports (hockey, golf, MMA, etc.).  

So was I able to kill time here?  Yep.  Three hours.  The end result of that was 225 dime-box cards, plus a few from the quarter and dollar boxes.  Take a look:


There is my stack of cards that I was keeping for myself....that's not the whole 225, since many of them were to trade away.


As part of my quest to collect guys with great mustaches, I felt I had to go for these Craig Stadler cards.  Ian Woosnam had some neat plaid pants, so I grabbed that one, too.

Here are some vintage Kickers and Punters that were no-brainers for ten cents.
A few other vintage goodies.  There were six Chuck Muncie cards in a row in one of the boxes.  He and I essentially wear the same style of glasses.  So I knew I would need to grab my spectacle-buddy.

Here's three for my "Spoiled Wide Receivers" collection.

And three more for my PC...Kurt Warner and Troy Davis (Iowa State alum).

Two of the 3,200-count boxes were full of old Allen and Ginter commons, going back to 2006-2012.  As you can see from the middle, I grabbed a big stack of them, and am showing some of my favorites here.  I FINALLY got my paws on the Revolving Door card -- which is probably my favorite Ginter card ever.  I had never seen the Groundhog card before, but could not resist a face like that.

Here's a sampling of the Royals that I picked up.  I loved the Gaylord Perry in a KC uniform, and another copy of the Sluggerrr card (even though I had it already).

I mentioned that several of the dime boxes were basketball.  I only collect a FEW basketball players...mostly Kyle Korver and guys who went to Iowa State.  Because of this, I wasn't going to waste my time on the basketball boxes.  However, as I was putting away one of the football boxes, my arm brushed across the top of a row of basketball, and it opened up to this card:
That's a rookie of my favorite Cyclone player from my early youth.  That I didn't have.  In a dime box I didn't want to look through.   :-)  It's just so freakin' cool to me.

Here's several stacks of miscellaneous cards I pulled out for other traders and friends/relatives of mine.  The Carolina Panthers stack is large enough to cast its own shadow. 

After the dimeboxes were done, I looked through the quarter and dollar boxes.  Here were two of my favorite pulls from there.  The George Brett was only a quarter for a Panini Black Friday exclusive from last year.  I'll take that!  The Bo Jackson was a little weird...mostly because I had never seen one, so was asking myself WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THIS CARD?  Apparently "Ames" was a discount/department store in the Northeast, and this card was part of a boxed set that was made exclusively for them.  I didn't know if a dollar was a good price for it, but if I have learned anything from "American Pickers" it's that the time to buy something unusual is when you see it!
Mike and Frank approve of me buying the Bo.
As they were getting ready to close up the store (yes...I was closing them down), I noticed they had boxes behind the counter of various years from the '50s, '60s, and '70s.  I figured this would be a good chance to make a dent in my "vintage Royals" (only going back to 1969...is that vintage?) needs, and asked for the '69 box.  I was able to quickly pull out 12 that I needed before the clock struck 7:00 PM:

All of those, plus some more quarter-box stuff I didn't show, plus a discount for paying cash means I got everything for $30 even.  I was a happy camper!  And by the time I left, traffic was smooth sailing all the way down to the OC.  :-)

What say you -- have you ever stopped at a card shop to avoid traffic?  What about to avoid your family?  :-)


Tuesday, January 3, 2012

LCS Review - Pal's Sports Cards - Andover, MN


I was in Minnesota on vacation visiting some family late in October, and decided to kill some time by hitting one of the Local Card Shops there.  The shop we hit was:
Pal's Sports Cards
14025 Round Lake Boulevard
Andover, MN 55304

This is in the NW Twin Cities area...just outside of Coon Rapids.  I wasn't expecting much beyond lots of Twins and Vikings stuff (which they had), but when I got in there, I was pleasantly surprised.


First impressions...it was clean, neat, and organized.  It wasn't a pit like some LCS are.  They had the standard glass display cases of higher-end product and a wall of wax (above).  There were small cocktail-style tables where you could leave the stuff you were buying while you sifted through the other boxes.  Baseball, Football, and Basketball were all in abundance.  I'm guessing they had hockey, too, but I honestly didn't check.

What really got me excited was their "low-end" stuff.  They had a "dime box" for each team, as well as "quarter boxes" for recent hall-of-famers.  Additionally, they had lots of miscellaneous cards sorted by set for the set-collectors out there.  I stocked up on a bunch of Royals I still needed on the cheap, and grabbed some George Bretts out of the HOF box.  They also had vintage and recent "high-end" singles, but I passed on most of those. 


Above are some more of their displays.  The woman above owns the shop with her husband.  She was very nice so we chatted for a few minutes when she was ringing me up.  I asked her how business was going, and she said they had been open for about a year and the shop was covering overhead.  They don't sell on ebay, but they sell on Sportlots.com.

Collecting supplies were abundant and very reasonably priced.  I bought a small box to take all my purchases home on the plane.  Locals -- hit this place up for boxes, top-loaders, etc. 

Right before I left, my eyes caught a little basket with this in it:

It's just a brown lunch bag for 50 cents.  "Grab-Bag" style.  I picked it up and it felt sort of heavy.  There was something in a top-loader in there, so I guessed there was one good card and a load of old commons.  But for 50 cents I couldn't pass it up!!  That's cheaper than any retail pack.

You'll have to wait until tomorrow....I'll post what was in there.  It was fun!  :-)

Recommendation:  Anyone in Minneapolis / St. Paul should head up there and give this place a look.  It should be easy to find something you'd like.
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