Back in My Day You Got Trading Cards With Your Snack Cakes...

This does turn into a post about cards-bear with me, okay? I really like where I live. I like my house a lot and I like where. I have posted about the creek and really big garage. It’s technically a 2 car garage (it has 2 doors) but it has another cars worth of space that doesn’t have door access. The first thing I did to it was put in a studio/practice space with drums, speakers and a PA set up and guitars sitting on fancy stands that my friend Arn used to market and manufacture. The second thing I did was fill it with all kinds of junk. I am a pack rat and I am also lazy. If my wife asks me to clean something in the house I generally just move it to the garage. This summer one of my life goals came true and it actually relates to my garage. I got a pool table. We had one in the basement of my childhood home. As an “adult” I had always dreamed of having one. I am not a “pool shark” or anything. Actually I am pretty horrible at the game, but I enjoy playing it. As I have gotten older I have been less interested in spending time in bars, but I still like to shoot pool. Anyway, this summer I found one cheap. Life goal achieved! I think I have used once since I got it, but I still love it. Anyway, when I got it I had a 3-car-garage worth of junk in my garage. I was already using one bay for the studio slash practice space, but when the pool table moved in everything was crammed into the door less area. I probably should have gone through it and got rid of most of it, but a pool table was on its way and I didn’t have time to be sensible. Anyway, while I was searching for tools and car fixing stuff today I had to dig and dig through and under various boxes of crap. There were mountains of old magazines and newspapers that I am sure I will read SOMEDAY. I knocked over one of those mountains and some cards spilled out of an old Sports Illustrated magazine. They were Drake’s box panel cards, two of them, from 1986. Where there is smoke there is fire and where there are two Drake’s panels, there are probably more, but time wasn’t on my side today. I grabbed these two with me before heading to work. Back in 1986 I was a full-fledged baseball card addict. Back then your main options for getting your fix were Topps, Donruss and Fleer. That was it. There weren’t any short prints either so it was actually possible to finish a set and in 1986 I finished all 3 of them pretty quickly and I needed a fix. I wasn’t a junk food kid and I didn’t live in a junk food house. Coffee cakes occasionally found their way to my house on a special occasion, but Ring Dings and Yodels were never in my house. Ever. I was against all odds, but I really wanted the cards that lived on these boxes of snack cakes. I devised a plan. I scrounged up about 10 bucks to the store and came away with 4 boxes of assorted snake cakes. I brought said snack cakes home and carefully freed them from their boxes and put them into a Tupperware container. I gave the empty boxes to my Mom to take with her to work where they had a really sharp paper cutter. The Tupperware containing the snacks went to school with me. I sold them for 50 cents a pop and sold out by lunch time and ended up with a pretty decent profit. The profits were reinvested into more boxes. This went on until I finished the 37 card set. Actually it went on until the store stopped selling boxes with cards on them, but I did manage to finish the set and still came away with some extra money, too. I think I ended up eating a Yodel at some point, but I wasn’t too impressed. That story might not have been from 1986, actually it was probably 1983 or ’84, but the cards I found today were from 1986. There are two panels here for you viewing pleasure. A two-card panel showing hitters Tim Raines and George Brett-who were both coming off of spectacular years in 1985 and the other was a 3-card-panel showing off Doc Gooden ( 24-4 1.53), Tom Browning (20-9) and Fernando Valenzuela (17-10). Seeing these really brought me back and I just had to share. I can’t believe these survived this long and I wonder how many more panels I might have. My 37-card set was trimmed down to individual cards and put in a binder, but I left my dupes in panels for more trading opportunities. Speaking of which, these are out there for the first person to claim them. Oh and the hitters card isn’t actually as off-center as the scanner indicates. I haven't seen Drakes Cakes in a really long time. I assume they are still in business as they have a website. Do they still make cards? That is what I want to know...What I would also like to know is did anyone else collect these as a kid? If so, did you finish the set and how did you do it? I must know! I love this hobby! Troll out.