If You Build It, They Will Come

 Non-sport cards have always been weird to me.  I think it was when I was younger, and there would be packs of cards from some TV show that just wasn't any good and I wondered who these cards were for. Not me!   Guess who those card were for.  For me!  Well, if there is an Iowa Connection of course.  I'll get to the Hollywood cards in a different post, but here are the non-sport, non-Hollywood checklist that I have built up.  Up top is Hebert Hoover, former President of the United States.  You have the infamous (Buffalo Bill), the historical (Wright Brothers) and a mixture of them the rest of the way.  Safe to say the easiest way to get cardboard made of you is to be a politician from the last 20 years or so as more political sets are being made.   The biggest additions this year however come from the 2021 Famous Americans set. I went through that checklist and researched everyone (find Wikipedia page, search "Iowa") to see if ...

 So my trajectory to being an insane collector of all Iowa Connections probably started off the same as many of you who started collecting in the late 80s and early 90s.  Cards were plentiful (not junk to me!), and opportunity abounded for anyone interested.  You could buy packs at the local drug store (Osco was my local one), card shops and at the local card show.   Opening a pack of cards is fun, but there had to a point to it.  For some, it was the pursuit of value.  Buying a pack for 50 cents and selling/trading your way to a dollar.  Building a collection was my way, which I suppose is value in its own too. An easy was to start was with the set builds.  You had checklists and would fill your binders with the empty spots available for those missing cards.  I wasn't much of a set builder, I had no interest in gathering the Kevin Seitzers and Flipper Andersons of the world.   I was a player collector, and my player of choice ...