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I first collected cards in 1970. They weren't the best looking (they had a really ugly gray border), but hey, you go with what you got! Of course I collected the Senators cards. I had a bunch of the Senators set out with a rubber band around them (of course!). I'd buy the cards at a local 7-11. I remember after a while thinking I kept getting the same (unwanted) cards from that store, so I started biking to a different store on the other side of town because I was sure they had better cards. Pretty sure they didn't - though to be honest, back then Topps did put the cards out in different releases, so every month or so during the season they'd do a new "release" and the cards would be different from the ones they printed the month before. Getting those 6th series cards was always the challenge, because not that many stores would order baseball cards in the August timeframe since baseball was winding down.
But my favorite cards are the 1971s - the ones with the black borders. I find them so attractive, and I think it's striking look. I still love those cards today but man is it obvious they didn't much care for quality control back then - they just glued the pictures onto cardboard and cut the sheet into cards. You'd find all sorts of uneven borders. Plus those black cards are so prone to chipping - the printed sheet would sometimes come unglued at the corners and flake off. And when that happened, you'd often see the white of the backside of the paper. So it was super difficult to find those black borders in great condition.
I started re-collecting that set in the 90s. I remember going to a baseball card show once and looking at one of those 1970s cards I really wanted. I shined it in the light and could tell someone had used a magic marker to re-blacken the borders. I hate people!
71 was the year the Senators moved to Texas and became the Texas Rangers. That pretty much set me off of collecting cards so I stopped after 71, until I picked it back up when baseball cards exploded in the late 80s.
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