The Cape Cod Haul

1.8K

Bill recalls an amazing collecting hunt while on vacation on Cape Cod. What did he find? Read on!

Vacation is a great time to collect. Whenever I’m away from my normal stomping grounds, I try to check out the local shops. And my recent trip to Cape Cod produced some great finds.

Due to my unhealthy obsession with the Topps Star Wars Card Trader app, I’ve now added physical Star Wars cards to my collecting. (You can see some of the newer releases I’ve collected on the Trade Federation Youtube channel.) And when I discovered a giant flea Market at the Wellfleet Drive-In Theater, I just had to go see what I could find.

There were two vendors selling stuff of interest to me. The first was a card dealer. He had everything from baseball to Yu-Gi-Oh, new…old, loose…packs–you name it. It took all my willpower not to let all the Magic the Gathering (another of my obsessions) distract me from my goal of finding vintage Star Wars cards. Turns out he didn’t really have much. I was hoping to find a long box full of them to sift through, but he only had a few grab bags of retro-styled cards from 2004. The one vintage item he did have was a display box of unopened Return of the Jedi packs from 1983. These were priced at $5 a pop, which seemed pricey to me, so I waited because I only had on me $40 cash. I decided that if I had some money left over I would splurge on the RotJ packs later. The box was nearly full, so I wasn’t worried about missing out.

The second vendor was selling vintage pop culture including toys, comics, lunch boxes, board games, posters; everything a 38-year-old boy could dream of. This guy had original Planet of the Apes movie posters, Transformers lunchboxes; I think he might even have had the Barbie McDonalds, the only Barbie establishment my GI Joes were ever okay with being seen at (Duke could never say no to a burger the size of his back pack). Among the comics I found a bunch of Marvel Star Wars issues. I was hoping to follow in Joe Tavano’s footsteps and find issue #1 , but the closest I got was #5 and #6. I had also heard good things about #38 from Mike McDonald, so when I saw it I grabbed that too. He also had a few Kenner figures, but I did not find any trading cards.

Turns out that while Rick, the owner, didn’t have any Star Wars cards on hand, he did have some at his store in Hyannis, The Atomic Dimestore. He also said that he may have issues #1-4 of the Marvel Comics. A visit to Hyannis immediately climbed to the top of my vacation to-do list that previously included:

• play with daughter on beach
• grill juicy meats
• drink hoppy beer
• repeat for 7 days

I figured I could squeeze in a trip to Hyannis somewhere. Anyway, after buying some comics, I had some money left and decided to head back to the trading card guy. I picked up some Garbage Pail Kids and Pokemon for my nephews, and bought four packs of RotJ cards (one of each wax wrapper picture: Leia, Lando, Baby Ewok, and Threepio) for myself. Sitting here typing this a week later, I still haven’t opened them. I fully intend to but I just need to get over my fear of what that 30-year-old gum is going to look like.

Cards and comics in hand, patient wife and fussy one-year-old in tow I headed back to Skaket Beach to sort through my loot.

A few days later we decided to take a trip to Hyannis, which was about 30 minutes away from where we were staying in Orleans.  Both families packed up our cars and headed out for a day of shopping and arcades.

What is it about arcades? Why is it that in an age post-Skyrim, I can still be distracted for two straight hours dropping coins into a Pac-Man machine? Well I was determined, and wouldn’t let Pac-Man or skee-ball or the carousel keep me from my mission. While the rest played in the arcade, I scooted off to The Atomic Dimestore.

I can’t say enough about how wonderful the Atomic Dimestore is. In fact, if you are ever on Cape Cod, you are required as a RetroZap reader to visit this store (you’re not required, but it would be a lot cooler if you did. – Ed.). It’s worth it just for his wall of 70s and 80s lunchboxes alone. They have carded GI Joe and WWF figures. Kenner vehicles, new in box.  Comics, games, posters, cards, furniture, decorations, you name it.  Tons of pop-culture merchandise from the 50s through the 80s.

It turned out that Rick did not have any of the first four comics, so I was a bit bummed about that, but he did have Star Wars cards. He handed me one of those 800-count long white boxes full of old cards. One half of the box had Dallas cards.  I kid you not, there was a Dallas TV series trading card set. The other half of the box was all Topps The Empire Strikes Back cards.

Heaven.

I still need to do a little research, but I’m pretty sure there were at least some cards from all three 1980 ESB sets including silver and yellow base cards, Star Files, Starcraft, and Space Paintings, but I believe the majority were series three. I spent the better part of an hour sifting and sorting through piles of cardboard nostalgia. While there were hundreds of them, I decided that at fifty cents a piece I would limit myself to forty cards. I focused a bit on the cards that I own in the Card Trader app like the Ralph McQuarrie Space Paintings or the character cards (upon which the hugely popular digital Classic art set is based). Then, I filled it out with some of my favorite base cards and randoms.

Before leaving, I summoned the last of my will power and resisted the urge to spend $55 on a Return of the Jedi lunchbox (the metal blue one with Luke in Jabba’s Palace on the lid) to store my new old cards in.

On my way back to the arcade, I made one more stop: Spinnaker Records on Main Street.  These guys had a modest selection of modern Star Wars collectibles, notably a bunch of “Vintage Collection” figures on the retro Kenner cardbacks. But what drew my attention here were the Primus concert posters, One from Tulsa and one from Phoenix. However, I noticed two of them had the same number, so these were just reprints, and I passed.  But they did have some Star Wars reprints that I was perfectly happy to shell out eight bucks a pop for: Olly Moss’s A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

Like the kid who just spent all his arcade skee-ball tickets on a handful of temporary tattoos and a Superball, I was content to return to the cottage with my pile of loot. Aside from sharing some of my finds with my collector friends on social media, I largely left the haul untouched while I continued my regular routine of beach, followed by BBQ, followed by beer.

Ah vacation. But now that I’m back home, I think it’s time to open up some packs…