BASEBALL CARDS — A PORTRAIT OF AMERICAN HISTORY

By David Eisenhower

The first major league baseball game I attended was at Griffith Stadium, Washington DC, on April 9, 1959.

It was the season’s opener and I had been sent to represent my grandfather, President Eisenhower, who was vacationing that week in Augusta, Georgia. I remember it as a perfect day. Photos taken show me standing next to Vice President Nixon, nearby his daughter Julie, my future wife. The weather was warm and partly cloudy. Ball players and managers visited our box seats for handshakes and photos. The stadium was full of excited fans. The Senators beat the Orioles 9-2, sparked by young Harmon Killebrew’s 4th inning homer.

That day, I became a baseball fan for life, and by the end of the week, I was a baseball card collector.

As a first-time collector in mid-April 1959, I was off to a late start. By the time I started buying up wax packs, the Topps First Series was gone from shelves and I had missed out on key cards like Snider, Mays and Mantle. Spending my entire allowance on cards, I was able to trade for the first series and then for select cards in earlier Topps sets.

Later in 1959, my family moved to Gettysburg, Pa. but I kept collecting, acquiring cards, trading, and benefitting from several “farewell gifts” of cards that expanded my collection back to the mid fifties. The 1960 set was assembled over weekends my family spent visiting the White House during my Granddad’s last year in office. I used a large table in the solarium at the very top of the White House. I assembled the 1961 and 1962 sets in my room at home on a corner of the Eisenhower farm in Gettysburg. 

Then I left it all behind as I reluctantly went off to boarding school in September, 1962. My cards went into storage, forgotten, not to be seen again for twenty years.

When  I rediscovered these sets in 1982,  I became a collector again for over a decade,  inspired mainly by the quality of the early Topps cards and  in the hope that Topps — or other companies — would publish cards of similar quality given baseball’s reborn popularity in the 1980s. In time, however, I came to appreciate that what makes the earliest Topps cards special is time-specific.  

This particular collection starts with the third-ever season of Topps cards (1954) and ends with 1962, a nine-year interval of peace, prosperity and optimism, the interval between the end of the Korean War and the beginnings of the Vietnam war. That these were good times for most Americans is reflected in these Topps baseball card sets.  

A striking feature of these sets is the special care taken with every card published and the creative and original set designs for each season. Along with statistics, each card features  high quality portraits, personal information, career or seasonal highlights, and fun cartoons, all attesting to the stature of every major league player of the last decade in which baseball was America’s undisputed No. 1 sport.  

Players are presented as everyday heroes (or heroes-to-be), as family men, as model citizens (often veterans), and as role models. Cards of that era alternately offer glimpses of ‘inside baseball,” or baseball history facts and tips for youngsters who dream of being big leaguers. Notable is the emphasis on team. 

In my opinion, the most pleasing and satisfying way to organize and view these cards is by team. Stars are emphasized in these Topps sets, but the “star” cards of this era shine brightest in a constellations of teammates, of wizened veterans, utility infielders, toiling lefties, rookie prospects and pinch-hitters, all crowned by a “team card” (beginning in 1956) that brought home the point that while baseball has a way of uniquely showcasing individual talents, baseball was (and is) a team sport. 

These Topps sets (1954-1962) also reflect the currents of change afoot in America at large, especially suburbanization and  integration.  Baseball’s demographics rapidly evolve in the fifties. Black stars become plentiful around 1956, but the later and larger sets (1959-1962) include Black prospects, bench players, regulars AND stars, more black stars than at any time in MLB history. Meanwhile, Latin rookies, regulars and stars begin arriving in numbers by 1960.

The geography of the sport expands year by year. “Major League” cities numbered 12  in 1954, all east of the Mississippi. Then comes Kansas City in 1955 followed by the great leap forward to the West Coast and Texas. The images and facts about baseball, about America, and about Americans contained in these cards comprise a veritable people’s history of America, 1954-1962.