CARDS

Don’t Bend My Corners . . .

Hi folks! Chris Daltry of What Cheer? here. I wanted to tell the story of Don’t Bend My Corners Sports Cards, something I recently launched after many years of selling records, vintage and collectibles. But selling sports cards was actually my first ever entrepreneurial venture, started in the early 1980s as a kid who wanted to find a way of coming up with money to fuel my own hobby of collecting baseball cards – I figured out that I could sell or trade my doubles (triples, quadruples…) and be able to afford to buy more and more cards. This started around 1982 when my family lived in Clover, South Carolina which was close to Charlotte, NC where I started having my dad drive me to sports card shows I’d found out about somehow or another. I’d take my extras and find dealers who’d swap with me. Not long after that, my family moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia where I doubled down on my buying, selling and trading cards, and soon opened my own card “shop” in the basement of my parent’s house where neighborhood kids would come to buy, sell and trade with me. For new packs I’d get my mom to take me to something called the Price Club, where they sold wholesale lots of groceries, candy, etc. – including full cases of boxes of sports card wax packs at wholesale prices, and since our neighborhood wasn’t within easy walking distance of actual stores that sold packs of cards, other kids would buy them from me. I had a pretty good thing going! After a few years there our family relocated to Richmond, VA where I started setting up at card shows. I’d even registered “Don’t Bend My Corners” as a business name with the city. My collection and inventory grew and grew, and my connections with actual players and teams increased when I was hired by the Richmond Braves minor league baseball team as a bat boy. You should’ve seen how many cracked bats and other random baseball related things I’d amassed – but as I got older I traded in my card collecting for a guitar and eventually sold off everything I’d collected. Decades went by and I started to buy and sell cards again through my shop What Cheer Records + Vintage in Providence, Rhode Island. We closed the physical store in 2017 after facing relocating the shop (for the 2nd time) and rents that had gotten out of control. But we’re selling online now, through eBay, Etsy and Discogs (for records / music stuff). These days I deal in cards for the love of it, just as I did as a kid. I don’t have any interest in professionally graded kind of bologna – just cards, cardboard heroes. Let me know if there’s something you see us post you’re interested in, or if there’s something you’re looking for, as we have accumulated quite a few. It might take me some time to get them all organized and searchable, as I’m doing this on the side, as vinyl records are our biggest sellers, but I’m here and happy to have brought Don’t Bend My Corners back to life!