Hello....My Name is Mark....and I Am a Packrat

Best I can recall, it began when I was 9 or 10 and I started collecting baseball cards. Every week or so, I'd ride my bike to the 7-Eleven and buy a couple of packs. For a dime each, I got ten cards and that hard flat delicious stick of bubble gum.

My favorite team was the Oakland A's and one of my first memories of sports on TV is of the A's in the playoffs and world series. Sal Bando was my favorite player. He was their 3rd baseman, and I thought he was very cool.

[momentary pause while looking through saved baseball cards, finding Sal Bando, scanning into jpeg, and lo and behold, uploding to blogger]

I have a shoebox stuffed full of baseball cards from the 70's. I once gave them to my little brother, but then took them back a year later. Since leaving home, they've come with me to each place I've lived, which must be near ten different places. I really don't feel too bad about that because they don't take much space, the box stacks nicely, and who knows, they might actually be worth something someday.

That reasoning doesn't work as well for another collection of things that has followed me around through the years. Levi's jeans. 501s, 550s, 505s...straight leg, boot cut, relaxed fit...blue, gray, tan, black. You name it, I still got it. Seriously, there's a stack of 50 pairs of Levi's in my closet. Some date back to my late teenage years, perhaps even to the 70's. Gina begs me to get rid of them, but I can't do it. Maybe someday I'll try to sell them on Ebay.

Where am I going with this...?

It rained all weekend long so I didn't ride outside. I would have hopped on the rollers on Saturday, but my bike room in the garage was a disaster. No room for roller riding. Here's what it looked like:

There are piles of stuff that I dumped out of the car after getting back from Mt. Hood seven months ago, and haven't touched since. But honestly, those items are like archeological yesterday compared to some of the other stuff in the garage. In other words, once I started digging down below the surface of the piles, I started finding older and older stuff, eventually reaching strata with some relics from... you guessed it... the 70's.

Take a look at some of what I found. Some of these things have never been used. Why would I save glasses won in primes for 10 or 15 years? They were probably out of style then, which is why some bike shop(s) donated them to a race! There are various items I was given by teams but never used. It seemed tacky to turn around and sell them. If you look closely, you'll see a pair of Adidas Eddy Merckx shoes with hard leather soles on which you would nail cleats. Someday I may become a retro grouch, so I cannot get rid of those shoes.

I uncovered a collection of parts that show a nice continuous history of the progression from 5-speed clusters through today's 10-speed cassettes. Below you will also see 10 Time pedals and 9 speedplay pedals. BTW, an hour after I took this picture, I found another box of parts with a few more pairs of pedals, brake calipers, and cranks.


Even I am puzzled at times as to why I save so many inner-tubes and tires. I do occasionally patch tubes, but usually I just throw them onto the pile. And most of these tires have plenty of tread left. I'm proud to say that there is nothing from last century in the picture below. That's because a couple of years ago, I tossed a massive quantity of tires I had saved for decades, including some Clement Criterium Seta Extras (green label) that I used as a junior in the, errr, 70's.

But to my mind, the collection of wheels takes the cake for pack-rattieness. And this *does* include some vintage relics, such as my Campy Record hi-flange 36-hole tubular wheels from the 70's. But you know what? Some semi-chrome polish would spiff those things right up and no doubt some collector would be interested in them. I can't throw them away.