Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
Oxford Languages and Google define sentimental value as “the value of something to someone because of personal or emotional associations rather than material worth.” I learned about sentimental value the hard way, many years ago. To fully understand the emotional connection, I must take you back to my grammar school days, to the 5th or 6th grade.
Baseball trading cards had been around for decades, and Topps Chewing Gum Inc. took the idea of trading cards in another direction. This was the 50s, folks, and we had yet to send a living creature into outer space. Space exploration was a fantasy, and Buck Rogers’ space exploration was fiction. Flying Saucers were not real (or were they?). Enter the new “Mars Attacks” bubble gum trading cards, and I was crazy for them. For 5 cents, I could get a few trading cards (I can’t remember how many) and a stale flat piece of bubble gum the size of the cards. There were 54 illustrated cards with pictures of alien monsters that tried to take over our planet. On the back of each card was a narrative portion of the story that matched the image on the other side. There was a 55th card that had a short synopsis of the story on the front and a checklist on the back listing each of the cards in the collection. I was hooked and determined to get the whole collection.
I wasn’t like the majority of my friends that lost interest before even coming close to getting all of them, but I was committed. I chewed a bunch of that nasty gum along the way as I have never been the kind of guy that throws something away. I think I funded the majority of this obsession by collecting empty soda bottles and taking them to the local grocery store to collect the 3 cents per bottle. Two empty soda bottles and I got a pack of cards and a bonus penny. I remember the last card I needed to complete the set. It was card number 6, Burning Navy Ships. I was able to get the last card by trading with my friend, Robert Taylor, who had two of them. I even had the synopsis/checklist card. I cherished this achievement and carried that deck of cards, wrapped in a rubber band. I kept it in my sock drawer as I moved to Chicago, and travelled the world in my 3 years, 8 months, and 9 days of military service. I even managed to still have them in my sock drawer after two divorces and 15 to 20 different apartments and houses.
Then in 1996, Tim Burton released a movie that was true to the story that was on the back of all these cards. Many of the scenes in the movie matched the cards perfectly. I was so impressed. I took the cards out of my sock drawer and showed everybody that the movie was true to the original story that had captured my imagination almost 50 years before the release of the film. It was a great movie too. Chock full of just about every actor that was somebody back then. Jack Nicholson played two different roles in the film. Michael J Fox, Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Tom Jones, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, etc, etc, etc.
I took the deck to a comic bookstore to get it appraised. The guy asked me, “Do you even have the checklist card?” Yes, I do… “Did you check off the list, like most kids did?” Yes, I did… “too bad, if you had left it unmarked, it would be worth so much more”. I think he told me it was worth about $1200. That didn’t matter to me because I wasn’t about to sell it at any price. My new place for the deck was now under the passenger seat in my minivan. I was showing that deck to just about everyone I knew.
During this period, someone broke into my car and stole my DJ CDs. They were all the good ones I used during my DJ moonlighting gigs. I was pretty upset about that, but I would wake up in the middle of the night about a month later with a realization about that break-in. I remembered about my Mars Attacks cards that were under the passenger seat in that car. I jumped out of bed, grabbed a flashlight, and went out to inspect my car. Sure enough, the Mars Attacks cards were gone too. I was upset about losing all my good CDs, but I had plenty more. The cards I had collected in my youth, the first successfully completed collection of anything, and that I had travelled the globe with it safely tucked away in my sock drawer, that was probably irreplaceable now, was gone.
Now I can say I fully understand sentimental value. They were worth more than I paid for them at 5 cents a pack back in the 50s, but I wouldn’t have sold them for 10 times that amount of money. The hardest part was the thought that I would never be able to replace them. Well, there’s a happy ending to this story. I was able to find a reprint deck on the internet for what was a fair price. And the checklist card has not been checked off. I still wouldn’t sell them at any price, they may be reprints but they look the same and still have the same sentimental value to me. The story is still alive and well inside my head. BTW, I keep the new deck in my sock drawer.
