Collecting – It’s In The Genes: A Mom Learns That There’s Chemistry in the Cards

Non-Sport Update
Vol. 16, No. 1
February-March, 2005

Jonny, my six year old son, says I don’t understand trading cards. Sadly, I think he may be right. I’ve tried to learn about trading cards. After all, my husband, Jonny’s dad, is Steve Charendoff, founder and President of Rittenhouse Archives Ltd., and an entertainment card mogul (he makes us call him that). I’ve been to card shows. I’ve read Non-Sport Update. But it’s no use. I’m missing something crucial. Something Jonny and his dad share: the trading card collecting gene.

All four of my children like trading cards, but Jonny is a collector of cards in a way that his sisters (Cecelia, eight years old; Olivia, Jonny’s twin; and Ila, almost three) are not. The girls love having card parties whenever Steve brings home a box of cards from some movie or show that they like – Harry Potter or Finding Nemo or Crocodile Hunter. All four kids sit on the floor and tear open pack after pack of cards, which Steve doles out carefully, an equal number to each child, trying to avoid accusations of “it’s not fair, she got more than me.” They examine the cards, match them to the checklist, put the cards in piles and trade with each other. But when the first rush of excitement is over, when the box is empty and the floor is littered with card wrappers, my daughters pile up their cards, put them away, and go on to the next activity.

Not Jonny. He collects and counts his cards. He organizes his cards according to the checklist. He arranges and rearranges his cards carefully, almost lovingly, into binders, just like his father taught him. And once the cards are in binders, they don’t just sit on his shelf gathering dust. Jonny takes real pleasure in having and looking at the cards. He shows them to his friends. He takes them for “sharing” (the new version of “show and tell”) at school – over and over and over again.

Jonny’s desire to collect trading cards is genetic – but not in the boy-girl sense (even though that’s the scenario in my house). His dad is a life-long collector of trading cards who eventually turned his hobby into his career. Jonny is a carbon-copy of Steve. He looks like Steve; he talks like Steve; he walks like Steve. And he inherited many of Steve’s personality traits – especially those linked to the trading card collecting gene.

Jonny is focused. Jonny is intense. Jonny is a little (or perhaps a lot)obsessive-compulsive (and I mean that in only the nicest way). Not in the “clean room, neat drawers, dirty socks in the clothes hamper” sense of obsessive-compulsive (of course not, just my luck.) Jonny is obsessive-compulsive in the meticulous, detail-oriented “everything must done just right” sense. Steve taught him how to arrange his cards in the binders according to the checklist. Jonny is not happy unless every card is in its place.

Early one Thursday morning, the Thursday he planned to take his Crocodile Hunter cards to Kindergarten for sharing, Jonny discovered ten loose cards at the back of the binder. After interrogating his sisters about who had touched his cards (all three pleaded their innocence), he sat down to put the cards back in their proper places.

Kindergarten starts promptly at 8 a.m. If I hit all the traffic lights right, I can make the drive in 22 minutes. At 7:30 a.m. I found him sitting, barefoot, on the playroom rug, hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed, toaster waffle uneaten on the floor beside him. He was checking and rechecking each page of cards. He had five cards in a pile beside him. Our conversation went like this:

“C’mon Jonny, it’s time to get ready for school.” No response. The only sound was the flipping of plastic pages. He put two more cards into their designated sleeves.

“J? Buddy? You’ve got to put your socks and shoes on. We’ve got to go. Now.” Still no response. Cecelia and Olivia came clattering down the stairs, searching for their backpacks and lunchboxes. Steve stuck his head into the playroom, sized up the situation and, with a hasty “’bye,” shepherded the girls out the door to their school. .

“Jonny? Jonathan?” I knelt down, put my hand on his shoulder, and tried to look him in the eye, just like all the parenting books tell you to do. “Hello, Jonathan Aaron?” My son looked at me as if I had just appeared out of thin air.

“Mommy,” he said, “I’ve got to put these cards back in the binder. They need to be in there for sharing.”

“Okay,” I said, with as much patience I could muster. “Okay, but we have to go or you’ll be late. Take everything with you and put the other cards in the binder in the car.”

“No! I have to finish it or it won’t be right.”

Complete meltdown – mine of course. I threatened. I raised my voice. Okay, I yelled. In the end, well, let’s just say no parenting book ever recommended the action I took. I bodily removed my kicking, screaming son and his less than perfect binder of Crocodile Hunter trading cards from the playroom floor and put them in the van, where he spent the ride to school rearranging his cards and kicking the back of my seat. Hard. When we got to school, 10 minutes late, Jonny refused to come out of the coat room until he had rechecked the binder one more time.

“You just don’t understand, Mommy,” he said. No, I guess I don’t. I don’t have the trading card collecting gene.

The trading card collecting gene shows up in other ways, too. Most of the entertainment cards Steve brings home eventually become part of Jonathan’s collection. After a few days or a week, the girls abandon their stacks of cards, stuffing them into dresser drawers, scattering them across the playroom floor, or sharing them with friends. If Jonny were patient, he could get most of these cards for his collection without any real effort.

Jonny is not patient. He is driven, perhaps even a bit ruthless, in his quest toobtain every card in the set. He has sticky fingers and innocent brown eyes.

“But Mommy, I found those cards,” he said, when Olivia accused him of taking some of her Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone cards. “In a pile somewhere. You know, around. Maybe in Livi’s room?” The cards in question were rubber-banded together, in a box, in the back of a dresser drawer, in his sister’s room. But I don’t blame Jonny. He just can’t help himself.

As long as it doesn’t involve stealing, even the non-collectors in our family – those without the trading card collecting gene – can appreciate the beauty of a complete set of cards. Cecelia, who loves everything Harry Potter, is particularly fond of the set of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban cards that Steve put together for her, complete with autographs and costume cards. But none of them is willing to work as hard as Jonny does to get a perfect set.

The trading card collecting gene can also mutate from generation to generation. Steve was an avid collector of sports trading cards. Jonny collects only entertainment trading cards, and he’s very selective about which cards he collects. He collects trading cards related to subjects that really interest him: movies in the Harry Potter series or Shrek, but not Finding Nemo or Monsters, Inc. He flirted briefly with Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards after some of his classmates gave him doubles they had, but he didn’t know the characters, so his interest waned quickly. He preferred his Crocodile Hunter cards.

So now you know my secret. I don’t understand trading cards. I don’t have the trading card collecting gene. And I can’t really predict what kind of kid grows up to become a serious card collector. If I could I’d have a great job as an industry consultant. But, as a Mom, I’m fascinated by my children’s interest in trading cards. I know my husband is happy that all four of his children are excited about trading cards and he’s thrilled that his son is becoming a serious card collector. And if Jonny follows in his dad’s footsteps and becomes an entertainment trading card mogul, well, that would be okay. With both Jonny’s parents.