When is your first job your best job?
When you are 13 years old and you are running a baseball card store.
Now that I am getting a bit grey I think about it often. I had odd jobs before, washing cars and even slinging gift wrap and cheese door to door (you see daughter back in the day, this Amazon Prime thing wasn’t really a thing and people actually came to your door and … oh never mind go watch Netflix). Although the gift wrap was all about winning prizes in elementary school, but it still felt like a job. Learning how to get past that first “no” or “no thank you” – Learning how to reference connections: “I think you know my dad” – “Oh sure we do come on in what are you selling?!”
But a real job, a job you had to sign paperwork for and put #’s down on paper and stuff and actually get a check and take it to the bank (you see daughter back in the day we didn’t have these things called ATM’s and you had to go and talk to this human called a “teller” to cash your check and so … oh never mind just go play animal jam on your ipad).
And the best part about the job … was that they wouldn’t give it to me. They had the sign in the window and everything “HELP WANTED” and I was like heck this is great because I need a summer job and there aren’t any more rocks I can move in the yard [we had long since moved from that big house into a much smaller one].
And they took one look at me and said “How old are you dude.”
13!
Chuckles and guffaws broke out. I don’t blame them – I was a little nerdy beanpole. But I sure as shit knew baseball cards.
You will have to take a test. Ok no problem – I think I got 2 wrong out of 20. The stumper was who was the other guy on Jerry Koosman’s 1968 rookie card. I should have known it … great question:
But I nailed almost every other question. They still didn’t want to give me the job. They gave me a bunch of crappy red flyers (the store had just opened) and said put your initials on the back of the flyer and then hand them out and we will give you a cut of each purchase that comes in (you see daughter back in the day we didn’t have this amazon affiliate referral program and you actually had to give people flyers and coupons and …. oh nevermind).
So of course I promptly gave them to my friends and family members and gave them each a few bucks to go buy packs of baseball cards that I would have bought anyway. Because of course this was my dream job and I didn’t mind salting a few sales.
I kept going in and buying cards and getting more flyers and asking about the job, and they of course kept stalling. Until one day the true nerd in me finally came through.
In the card world there were the superstar cards, and then there were just “blanks.” Some random utility short-stop for the Seattle Mariners had a baseball card just like Ken Griffey did. And so when you bought packs all the cards of the non superstars were just blanks and mostly a waste – Unless you wanted to try and make a full set. There were anywhere from 600 to 800 cards in a set back then, no idea where its at now or if blanks are even a thing anymore.
But the set I was in love with was Topps Stadium Club from 1991. Upper Deck had debuted in 1989 with the famous Griffey card, and other companies saw a market for a more “premium” type of card that they could charge more for and didn’t involve sticks of gum and a 
bunch of cheap looking cards.
These Topps Stadium Club ’91 cards were beautiful things. Beautiful cards, beautiful photography, gold foil, I fell in love with them the first time I saw them.
So I decided this would be the first full set I would make, no matter how long it took me. Plus this was the prime of some of my favorite rookies (Jeff Bagwell, and yes Phil Plantier – more on him later).
So naturally if you want to complete the set you have to figure out which “blanks” you are missing and go get them and painstakingly check them off your “missing list” one at a time. But after long enough you have a pretty good idea of which numbers on the back you are missing.
And naturally since Topps Stadium Club was a hot series the Baseball Card Heaven store [yes that was actually the name of the shop] has a box of blanks for Topps Stadium Club and another 100 or boxes of other series.
10 Cents a piece was normally the standard rate. So on one of my many trips to the store I decided to stop begging for the job for 5 minutes and try and work on my blank list for my set I was working on with the scratch paper I had written down all of the missing numbers on.
“Where are the Topps Stadium Club Blanks”
Over there in the corner.
Jackpot – Except one problem – They were all out of order. These were 800 count long white cardboard boxes full of blanks – But in no numerical order at all – All over the map.
“Hey these are all out of order!?”
And Larry shrugged back with a look like “why the fuck would we waste time putting these things in order for some ten cent cards. We have Michael Jordan rookie cards we are trying to sell.”
It was a powerful shrug …
But I saw my opening:
I will order all these boxes of blanks for you starting with the Topps Stadium Club.
“For how much?”
For a dollar a box.
“Deal,” Larry said. In the same way that you would say yes to a deal where your younger brother offered to clean your room every day for a week for a nickel.
All told I think there were over 125 800 card boxes. So how long would re-ordering all of those boxes take at a dollar a box?
About 4 months.
But it was a start. I stood at the counter almost every day using my patented re-ordering system and worked through every one of those boxes [and yes of course I took most of the money in store credit including the blanks I needed for my set which I could now easily find.]
More importantly they couldn’t get rid of me. Every time a customer came in with a question about a rookie card, or what packs to buy, or my favorite question of “what would make a good birthday gift,” I always had a good answer (start with their favorite team or player). I would help out with customers, advise on trades, and just was just generally always there. They saw I knew my stuff, even for a nerdy 13 year old. When I finally finished my last box they offered me the job at a whopping $5.25 an hour. By 14 I was the store manager – I think I got all the way up to 6 bucks an hour with that promotion.
I learned a lot in that dream job. A lot about sales and customers. But more about life. Lessons about the kids who would shoplift packs from the local supermarket and sell me the good cards for cash, and then the manager of the supermarket who came in one day and asked me to stop buying them. I learned about affairs, since Larry turned out to be a ladies man, and when Larry mumbled “oh shit” and wen’t and hid in the back that the guy with the gold chains was not coming in the store pissed off that the price of the rookie card he bought had gone down. I learned about addictions, like video games I played with the owner (wing commander was pretty sweet) and fast food that I rode my bike to buy for him.
I learned about cons for autographed memorabilia, cons about insurance when Hurricane Andrew hit, and cons from my “friends” when one of them stole a micky mantle card when I was working. At that point both Larry and Dennis the fast food eating, video game playing, phone sex listening boss were long gone, so the new owners didn’t feel too bad about giving me the boot, because they didn’t see my 4 months of hard labor sorting all those boxes of cards.
I think it was still the best job I ever had. I delivered pizza’s and sold shoes and started my own businesses after that, but it was still the best. Raw, unfiltered capitalism at its highest form, where I knew more than anyone else about the cards in the store, but learned more about people and true retail sales from Larry, the slick body-building maestro with the big biceps.
But most importantly I probably learned about myself. That I was the tortoise and not the hare. That I was the guy who ground it out and got my foot in the door and took some totally random 1 dollar a box paying gig to get the job I always wanted.
A couple years earlier I was on the swim team. I had to be the slowest swimmer in the history of the sport, although I collected and impressive haul of 7th and 8th place ribbons. I always enjoyed swimming, but damn I was slow.
But every year they had a contest, some silly idea where you had 20 Saturday mornings in the Summer and every date you just swam for an hour, and they counted the laps and added them all up across all the dates, and I won the damn thing two years in a row. Slowest guy on the team, but over time, I would just add up all those laps. It was hard to stop me once I got going.
The tortoise and not the hare.
Almost all of my baseball cards are long gone now. But if you ever need help sorting some blanks that someone left in the basement, just give me a holler, because the tortoise is still here. It would probably just be another little slice of Baseball Card heaven.
-SDM
Simpletition - Shawn D. Madden 