Gophers for Mickey

News of the election of Minnesota Twins' greats, Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat to Baseball's Hall of Fame tickled me. About time. Both were part of my treasured baseball card collection. When I was around 12 years old, I received a 25¢ /week allowance. to which I added a buck or two mowing Heggestad's & my grandfather’s lawn. (I didn’t get any extra for mowing our own). Some of my wealth had to go to the Sunday School offering but with the exception of an occasional nickel ice cream cone or a Sugar Daddy from the Dahl House, the rest went to baseball cards.  

Ray & Eva Vrooman

I almost always bought my cards at Vrooman’s Grocery.I believed their supply was fresher and less picked over than Hank’s or the Dahl House, so I only tapped those occasionally to test my theory.  And at Vrooman's, the box of cards was on the counter so you could pick out each package and use perspicacity to pick a winner.   Penny-a-piece for a card and stick of bubble gum. I don’t think McIver’s carried cards. 

Around this time, Topps switched from the single, penny-a-piece cards, each with a chunk of bubble gum, to a nickel 5-pack with just a single slab of gum. A rip-off and a kill-joy. Five pieces of bubble gum at a time worked great to create an imitation of Nellie Fox's chewing tobacco cheek. With the 5-pack you were stuck with the pre-packaged five, invariably 4 utility players & 1 recognizable player. You were left hoping for Rocky Colavito and Roy Campanella and opening Rocky Bridges and Roy McMillan.  Of course, part of the fun of collecting was trading, but no one would give up an all-star unless they had 2.

So my income was just not sufficient to cover the outlay necessary to buy the volume needed to acquire a Mantle or a Mays or a Snider.  

So I let Big Time talk me into a scheme to legally improve my financial well-being. It involved gophers. Not the University football team, rather the 4 legged variety. There were 2 targets: striped gophers and pocket gophers. The bounty on striped gophers was only a dime so it was hardly worth the effort. Pocket gophers on the other hand brought a quarter - a whole week’s allowance. Furthermore, Big Time had wrangled a deal with a farmer south of town to pay another quarter, so 50¢ per head, actually per feet. The county agent didn’t want to deal in gopher carcasses but needed proof, so a quarter was paid for gopher feet. My mother frowned on storing this evidence in the fridge until Saturday night when the county agent would appear in Lowry.

There were startup costs of course,  a gopher trap went for something like 75¢ at Hoplin Nelson hardware and I got no family discount on this purchase.

Big Time taught me the trapping ropes. Pocket gophers form mounds of dirt in farmers’ fields making them a big enough nuisance to warrant the 25¢ outlay. To set the trap you needed to find the tunnel entry along the edge of the mound. We had a steel poker to probe for it. Once found, you had to dig out the area around the tunnel opening and set the trap and anchor the chain and cover the trap over using a piece of wood to keep dirt from clogging the trap.

(I failed to note that Big Time would get me up at 6 AM to bike out to Melvin’s to check traps)

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, you are right. And to this day, I don’t know how I got talked into it. I was altogether too lazy for this to succeed. So I gave my traps to Big Time and I decided that washing my (generous) great uncle’s black Buick once a week was a far better economic arrangement and eventually I got my Mickey Mantle. Unfortunately, when I went off to Augsburg, my mother "disposed" of my card collection. Woe is I.

Copyright ©  2021  Dave Hoplin