THE BOOK OF ME WRITTEN BY YOU: HOBBIES

I'm taking  part in a meme started by Julie Goucher of Anglers Rest. Using
prompts from "The Book of Me, Written By You" I'm leaving my memories
of my life for present and future relatives. This week's prompt is

    This week's prompt is - Hobbies

    Childhood hobbies & collections
    Did you share a "passion" with a family member or friend?
    Tell us about it - How, why, where
    Do you still have any old hobbies - the ones that have been with you since childhood?
    Do you still have those childhood collections?

When I was young, starting about the time I was 8 years old,  I was a collector.  We had
moved to the Dorchester area of Boston and baseball cards were a big deal in the neighborhood.  They were a heck of a lot cheaper back then, only 5 cents a pack of about
10 cards and a stick of bubblegum. I kept mine in a shoebox and would take them out to
trade them with Barry Solomon or play the "flip" game. This was played by leaning a
card up against a stairstep, then stepping back a few feet to "flip" other cards at it to knock
it down. If you succeeded, you won that card and any of the others laying around it on the step. The main thing was to never use a valuable card if you could help it because you
could use it. So I'd use the "extra cards" in my collection. If I had 6 Joe Nuxhall baseball cards. I'd use them first. I always had a lot of Nuxhalls, and some of them ended up bent on my bike wheel so the spokes would hit it and make noise as I pedaled.

Around the same time  I began buying comic books, which, like baseball cards, were much cheaper back then (10  cents a comic book). I had a newspaper route back then and I discovered my paper bag, when emptied of the day's newspapers, was a great way to sneak comic books and baseball cards into the house. I collected comics well into my twenties (long after my paperboy days were over) until I decided I could afford to buy comics, or I could afford to buy books, but I couldn't afford to do both. So I sold off my collection.

Of course, by then, my collection had also been culled a bit when I was a teenager by some of it being thrown out by my mother who was tieed of the books cluttering my room. I once brought home a comic book price guide to show her how valuable some of the comics she'd thrown out had become.She looked it over, then reminded me she wouldn't have thrown them out if I'd been neater with them.

My third hobby back then was stamp collecting. I can't recall exactly who started me off
with it but I kept at that into my thirties, visiting stamp shows at the mall and driving
up to Quincy to shop at a small hobby shop off Quincy Center. For some reason I lost
interest in it all back in my thirties. I think it had to do with my work schedule and with
my becoming interested in photography. I bought myself a Canon AE1 Camera and then
a telephoto lens and filters, then drove around looking for things to photograph. But
again, as I grew older that became something I'd only do occasionally.

My lifelong hobby has been reading. I am an avid reader of sf, fantasy, history, and
mysteries, and still have books that I bought in college 44 years ago as part of my
collection.  An outgrowth of that was writing my own stories, some of which were
published in Darkover fanzines back in the 1980s. When I was online gaming in the
late 1990's and early 2000's I wrote stories about my characters.

Now that I'm a grumpy old fart retiree, I still read, and I take photos  with my Canon
Powershot digital camera. Thanks to my sister who fund it when I last moved, I still
have my stamp album from years ago.

But my main hobby these days is genealogy, part of which is this blog!