Awhile back someone, sorry I don’t remember which blog, posted
about picking up some cards that had gum stains on them. When I was a kid in
the early 1980s a gum stain on a card was a mark of death, it was destined for
the spokes of your bike or to be drawn on and defaced, nobody wanted them.
Now Topps makes it a variant of the base card in their
Heritage releases, like we need more parallels, but in collectors who collected
when the gum stain was a bad thing now sees it in a different light. It now transports
us back to flipping cards against the wall in elementary school and leaves us
wondering how many 1980 Rickey Henderson and 1981 Joe Montana rookie cards were
tossed in the trash over a stain.
I caved, I had to find a Griffey gum stain for my
collection, which is kind of difficult because by the time his cards
began showing up gum in packs was quickly becoming a thing of the past but I did find
a 1989 Bowman rookie card with that mark. I have picked up a couple of Griffey
damaged and error cards over the years, things like this make each card unique.
