Thirties Baseball by Robert W. Creamer
We also used the street to play games with bubblegum cards, which is what we called baseball cards. My generation knew nothing at all about baseball cards until 1933, when the Goudey Gum Company began issuing them with their gum. You paid one cent for a flat packet wrapped in wax paper; inside were three sticks of bubblegum and a baseball card. The gum was important – I doubt we'd have paid a penny for the card alone – but the cards were desirable, no question about that. They became our passion. We carried them in our pockets, used them to play games with, tossed them for distance, tossed them for accuracy, flipped them in turn, and captured our opponent's card if ours landed on his. We drew baseball diamonds on the street and played baseball games with the cards. We used little pieces of wood (often the used stick from an ice cream bar) to hit pebbles from home plate onto spaces in the field marked single, double, triple, home run, out, double play and so forth. We placed the cards of the fielding team in position on the diamond, and as each player on the hitting team came to bat we put his card at home plate to show who was up, and then moved it around the bases as he advanced. When an occasional automobile came by we'd scramble to the side of the street, and sometimes the auto would run over the cards. We didn't mind. We thought it was funny. A marred card didn't matter much. We wrote on them, or crossed out the name of the team if a player was traded in real life. I imagine a baseball card collector today would wince at the thought of those "mint state" cards of the early 1930s being abused that way, but we didn't think of it as abuse. The cards were fun, something to play with for an hour or so. They stimulated our interest in baseball and we loved them, and we put rubber bands around them and kept them in a shoe box or in bureau drawer. But they weren't sacred. They weren't an investment as they are today. Baseball was not where the money was.