STUPID THINGS I DONE, Part One by Bobby Barresi

The year was 1952, a great summer in Brooklyn for baseball card flipping and stickball in the streets. Our block was populated with mostly Dodger and Yankee fans, and I think all the families on the block were Italian. Me? I was a diehard Giants fan, my father was a Giant fan and I have been one since birth. I spent the entire spring and summer collecting all the New York Giants cards, but had a hard time finding the Willie Mays card. The Topps cards at the time were printed in a series of about 100 cards and were released to stores every two months or so, just to keep us kids interested. My friends had a favorite pastime of ripping up Giants cards in front of me, and laughing in my face, just to bust my balls, and when they ripped up the sacred Willie Mays card, well that was enough. I spent the remainder of the Summer planning my vendetta.

If I had a few pennies in my pocket, I always bought a fresh pack of either the penny pack or rarely, the nickle pack of Topps cards, chew the great tasting bubble gum, and slowly thumb through the cards, and pray for a Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle. Snider cards were found and ripped, with much flair, in front of those rat bastid Dodger fans. But that elusive Mantle was evading me. Summer shifted into Autumn, and I started the first grade.

My daily routine each morning before school, was to go shopping to the corner store, Sam and Archies. My mom would give me fifty cents, for a quart of milk, a loaf of Italian bread, and The Daily News and Daily Mirror. Up the block to 11th. Ave and 66th. Street I go and after buying what was on the list, there was always a few pennies change, so I purchased two penny packs of cards. This was the last series, all in all, a total of 409 Topps cards were needed to complete the 1952 set. I open the first pack, and there it is, #311-Mickey Mantle!! My day, in fact my whole summer was made. Revenge was mine, I'll show those little bastid rats a thing or two, now they will fear me!

The routine in Mrs. Satraino’s class was for every student to stand up and read their homework assignment. I waited my turn, Mickey Mantle card in my shirt pocket. Most of the kids on my block were in my class, so in one fell swoop I would extract my revenge. Like Micheal Corleone in The Godfather, I would settle all family business, in one move.

Finally I get my turn to read, and after doing so , just before I sit down I pull the Mantle out of my pocket, turn to face my class and rip it up, then slam it into the trash pail near the teacher’s desk. The guys were all clenching their fists and about to rush me, when Mrs. Satraino stepped in and ordered us all to our desks, with a few harsh words to me for my act of bravado.

Stupid move? Yeah, that 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle #311 is now worth somewhere in the neighborhood of five to twenty thousand or even more, depending on its condition, but at six years old, who knew?

In a perfect world a boy will grow to be a man, and lessen his stupid moves, unfortunately, that was just the beginning, there were to be some real doozies being laid out in my future.