Has it already been 25 years since I started college AND became a true serious (set) collector?

Estil

Wow, where does the time go? It was around this time 25 years ago that I not only started college at the University of Kentucky, but also got my start as a true serious collector. What do I mean by that exactly? Well growing up I got my first baseball card packs as a nine year old (1989 Donruss and Topps to be exact) and then got back into it in 1993 and liked getting the $2 Topps jumbo packs my local convenience store had that gave you five gold cards per pack and in 1994 I especially liked the Fleer and Ultra packs as you got an insert in every pack. Sadly I could only afford get a few packs from time to time. Even when I did get my first part time job in high school in the late 90s (local Wendys) I saved most of that money to prepare for college...such as taking classes at the local community college that at the time were affiliated with UK so they counted the same as the ones at UK proper...it was like UK had a farm system in a way!

Anyhow, when I started college I again got a after school/Saturday job at the local Student Center, then Commons Market the next three years after that. And it just so happened there was an amazing baseball card store (which is still open today called Baseball Card Warehouse) where I got my first ever complete sets! Now as you all know, I am very very much the nostalgic type so naturally I started with my child years (late 80s) and got 1987 and 1989 Topps factory sets...I wanted a 1988 factory set too but he only had a hand collated one). And since I was born in 1980, naturally I wanted to first get all the 1980s sets! I mean you hear all the time about people being 80s nostagic for other things so why not baseball cards?

And then shortly after I managed to get a nice group of early 90s sets and wanted to at least get all the Topps sets from the 90s. And then as the years went by (I do have other hobbies such as video games that I collected more in the last two years I was in college rather than cards and my mood typically rotates every year or two as to whether I'm more into cards or games or coins or whatnot) I even managed to get things like 70s sets and even early-mid 90s insert sets! So naturally one of the first master sets I ever got was (surprise!) the 1994 Fleer set I enjoyed getting packs for back in the day. Sadly I never got the chance to make much money (I was a grocery clerk at a local Kroger in the mid-late 2000s and then in 2011 I had to go on SSDI) but over the course of a quarter century it does add up! My current projects are 1971 and 1972 Topps (I haven't yet gotten the latter though) and the early/mid 90s inserts. I sadly don't get much to splurge with (I never did in my whole life) so I can only hope (God willing) I still have time (I'm 44) somewhat on my side in terms of what I want to achieve in terms of my collections.

Later on I might make a short list of the sets I have so far and I might even list some of my "greatest hits" in terms of topics I've made on here being all really excited getting (in most cases) a really rare but surprisingly affordable set!