Middle School Field Trip 30 Years Later

Middle school really stunk.  I was not a really motivated student, there were a few too many teachers who were really not all that good at what they did, and it was middle school.  Kind of stinks for everyone.  However, my middle school did excel at field trips.

In seventh grade, we went to Springfield, Illinois.

Visited all the Abraham Lincoln stuff.  Apparently you have to actually turn in your homework to have the good luck kick in from rubbing Abe's nose, the good luck does not do math assignments for you.  I am sure that everyone in Springfield loved having a hundred middle schoolers from St. Louis County run amuck in their museums either.

In eighth grade, I got to go to a mall in the middle of the day to play Christmas carols, I was in band,  for people shopping.  It was a weekday.  It was the morning.  There was nobody at the mall.  Just a bunch of middle school kids playing music next to a fountain.

I don't remember much about the music part of the field trip.  I will just borrow this music video about malls.

My wife watches this show, I do not understand all of the running gags, but they make fun of Canadians often.  I need a running gag for this blog, but nothing about Tim Horton's.  

So, the mall is empty.  We are middle schoolers.  The best thing at the food court in this mall was either an A + W Root Beer or a McDonald's Express.  I also believe that those were the only two restaurants in the mall.  Yet, the mall is in the Department Store Museum.  

Hard to believe.  

So, after playing for awhile, and not eating at the food court, what do middle school kids do at a mall while they are on their lunch break?  

Go to Musicland?  

Nah.  My mom only gave me $5 for lunch, no room in the budget for $20 CDs. 

Make fun of the goofy clothes at Structure?  

Please.  Nobody bought clothes from this store.  

We were band kids.   

We went to the toy store.  

The Kay-Bee Toy Store in West County Mall had a card section.  It wasn't the best, not the Ben Franklin in Webster Groves, but it was better than eating at a McDonald's Express.  I had pretty much conquered the 1990 baseball card sets, so I went out on a limb and bought some basketball cards.  Such a great 1990s design.....

Here are two other good cards from my other stack......

and also Bernard King.  

Totally underrated player.  

Great looking 1990s cards out of Skybox.  I believe this was their first basketball card set, but I am not a huge basketball card person.  I might be wrong.  

These cards have been sitting in a miscellaneous box for the past thirty years, along with a whole bunch of other cards from this set.  Miscellaneous being code for junk box of checklists and contest cards that I do not really care about, but I am not going to throw them away either.  

So, in the past thirty years I have not done a lot with basketball cards, but I have dabbled.  

There were some Mizzou cards.  

which I actually wrote about five years ago during a snow day.  

There have also been basketball games that I have picked up by attending NC State games.  

Sorry, no J. Cole card yet.  

I have also picked up some single cards of players I enjoyed watching at NC State.  My favorite is obviously T.J. Warren....

or Tony Buckets.  

All the while, my Skybox cards sat in a box.  So, I recently became interested in my middle school field trip basketball cards again after learning an important factoid about Skybox:

The company started in Durham.  

The story goes like this....

At some point in the late 1980s, some people at Liggett Myers Tobacco Company decided that they needed to master other parts of culture in North Carolina beyond tobacco.  I guess they could have branched out and done something with vinegar based barbecue, race cars driving in circles, but instead they decided to dabble with basketball cards.  Why not?  

The Liggett Myers building in Durham does not actually advertise the fact that they branched out into basketball cards.  Probably why I am just learning about this now.  

They formed Skybox International. 

As a baseball card collector, my mind wandered to my favorite products that were put out under the Skybox label.  Probably my all-time favorite being......

the late 1990s Skybox EX sets.  

Though, the idea of Skybox being in Durham did not really make much sense because I always associated them with Fleer, which is not in Durham.  It's somewhere else.  So, this is the point at which I did a little more digging.  

It turns out that in 1995 Marvel, the comic book people, bought Skybox from Liggett Myers.  They already owned Fleer.  Marvel then merged Fleer and Skybox together into Fleer/Skybox, which is the actually company that made the great looking Edgar Renteria card pictured above.  

Since moving to North Carolina some 14 years ago, I have really enjoyed collecting cards of the local players both past and present.  Just this morning I tweeted out a card of Greg Luzinski because he was on the Durham Bulls 50 years ago.  

Back when I lived in St. Louis, he was just some guy who hit a bunch of home runs for the Phillies and White Sox in the 1970s and 80s.  Wasn't he in a bunch of Miller Lite commericals?  Perspective.  

So those Skybox cards in the miscellaneous box from my middle school field trip suddenly have a cool local connection.  I went and dug them out to scan a few of them for this post.   I have also  decided that I have neglected them long enough.  

I have basketball cards, but have never put a set together.  I decided to find a pair of Skybox basketball boxes.  They are dirt cheap and easy to find.  

Not quite sure where I am going to post the final results of the boxes, but I am excited to follow up on a few packs of cards that were bought thirty years ago, 800 miles away, but were made a few miles away from my house.  Should be fun.