Of baseball cards and moms: Way to go, Flo!

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I loved my mom.

She was always loving, always supportive, always there for me. There wasn’t anything more I could have asked of her.

Well, maybe one thing. One small thing.

I wish she would have followed the example of Flo Bernstein.

Flo is an 87-year-old resident of the Mountaingate area who was awakened a few nights ago by the fire around Getty Center. Urged to flee her home, she grabbed some shoes, some insurance papers and four boxes of her son’s baseball cards. We wrote about her on this blog.

I too had baseball cards, one huge box containing about 7,000 of them. That was back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. That was when I had rookie cards -- later to become the most prized possession of all, who knew? -- of Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

Those cards weren’t in any order. Often, they weren’t even in great shape. I would flip them against walls or doors in competition with my friends to see who could get the closest. We would put a stack of cards into a pile with winner take all.

I kept them in our garage. One day, I came home from school to discover that they were gone. My mother had put them out with the trash.

Years later, I would see ads in books or cards displayed in windows with huge price tags. This Mantle card or that Mays or Koufax or Maury Wills was worth four or, in a few rare cases, even five figures.

I had that one, I’d tell myself, and that one, and that one.

My mother had already passed away. I know if she had been alive, she would have agonized over what she had done, and I certainly didn’t want that. To her, like to many mothers of that era, those cards were just childish possessions that would eventually be thrown out anyway. So why fill the garage with them?

As an adult, I understand that.

Flo had the advantage of living long enough to see how valuable those cards have become. And she responded. Way to go, Flo.

-- Steve Springer