Beau Thompson is closing in on a magic number when it comes to baseball cards of Chicago Cubs players.
“I’ve been collecting cards now for over 30 years and as of now I have 997,286 and I’m going to crack one million on April 5 of this year,” said Thompson, of Madison, Wisconsin, on Saturday morning at the Premier Card Show at the Kane County Fairgrounds in St. Charles. “It’s going to happen at Wrigley Field because I’ve planned it out.”
More than 100 vendors were on hand at the event offering to buy, sell or trade cards representing a variety of sports teams, along with selling other memorabilia. For Thompson, though, the Cubs reign supreme.
He said he has attended a number of trading card shows and that “it would take a couple truckloads to get all my cards here.”
“I plan to keep these as long as I can and I’m not sure what I’ll do with them when I get older,” he said. “My oldest Cub card dates back to 1887 and I have a few. I never thought I’d go this deep. I started the project in December of 2017 and I had bought collections and bulk buys. I always set the Cubs card aside. A total of a million is a nice milestone.”
Partners Mike Oberheim and John Craig, both from Rockford, put on the event, and said that physical trading cards remain popular, even in a digital age.
“There definitely has been a resurgence in interest during and after COVID,” Oberheim said. “That’s when I got back into it – after taking a couple of decades off, and then I got back into cards.”
He said the shows draw “a wide mix of people from kids and parents to older people that have been collecting for years.”
“The kids, parents, grandparents, it’s a very diverse group,” he said. “As far as the most popular sports card today, it’s kind of season dependent. Right now, it’s baseball and it switches more to football in the fall and then the NBA. Baseball, though, has always been the king of cards.”
Evan Wojtyla, 12, of South Elgin came as the show opened Saturday armed with a plastic storage case of cards and said he “was looking to trade for a Michael Jordan and some other cards as well as a prospect for the Baltimore Orioles.”
“I’ve been collecting cards for about four years and my dad got us into it,” he said. “I’ve got about 2,000 cards. My favorite is baseball. Looking down the road I might sell a few to help pay for college and the rest I’ll probably hold on to and trade when I’m older.”
Evan’s dad Rob Wojtyla said he started collecting cards “in the ’90s when the stuff wasn’t as good as it is now.”
“I got back into this around COVID again, and when you’re kind of getting into your adulthood and starting a job you make a little better living and I wanted to recreate my childhood a little bit,” he said. “Now my son is getting into sports so then we started getting into the market in 2019 after we found a local card shop in South Elgin.”
Ray Richter of Genoa brought his sons Blake, 10, and Brett, 6, to the show and said “all of us are into cards.”
“I’ve infected my sons with this disease,” Richter said with a laugh. “The boys like doing it just like I liked doing it. They took my old cards and started collecting and doing it themselves. The kids are very responsible – they keep ‘em, don’t bend ‘em, they know who’s good and who’s bad.”
Lindsey Lind of Elgin came to the trading card show with her son Connor and said “he came here to buy and sell – both.”
“He’s super excited to find some good deals and heard there were some $1 card bins so he wants to try and find some things,” Lind said. “My son is 13 and as far as collecting goes I hate the cards all around my house but I think that he’s learning how to negotiate and the value of things and actually talking to human beings because that’s kind of lacking these days.”
Lind also praised the benefits of a tangible, holdable item like trading cards in today’s digital world.
“It’s like vinyl records,” she said. “I like the retro part of it and there is the responsibility of taking care of the cards.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.