Good thread!
I too have coins, baseball, and football cards, in that order. I have not valued them in decades, but I have no sense that coin collecting is anything like what it was in the mid-to-late 70s/early 80s, when I was actively doing it. Very little of what I had was valuable even then ... I collected mostly common European stuff (was living there) and some Commonwealth nations. A highly treasured find for me would be something like a Scottish shilling of which maybe 1m were minted instead of 30m, and purchasing it from a dealer who didn't know the difference. I had a few bills too; It was a marvel to this 10 yr old to walk around Italy with a 10,000 lire bill in my pocket ... hard to believe it was only worth $6 or $7. Italy had an interesting coin for its public pay phones; they had "half-pipe" grooved channels cut across them - IIRC, 2 on 1 side, 1 on the other. The receiving slot in the phone was similarly shaped. I suspect it helped cut down on the use of slugs.
I always wanted a Roman coin, but never was willing to put up that much allowance $ for one. I always wondered if those things were being manufactured anyway, they were so common in coin shops, and you could get a decent (acknowledged) replica at a museum. My oldest coin was early 19th c. from British Guiana, a half-stiver in highly worn condition. Not worth much, but it was a coin, and it was old. Same for a Confederate $10 bill.
My baseball cards were even more unremarkable. I can't think of a single card that stood out as rare or valuable, and later in life, when I had a card-collecting son of my own, I noticed Topps was reprinting cards from the era, perhaps to a near-indistinguishable standard, torpedoing any age-related value mine had. [I would think they'd have to identify it in some way as non-original, but the fact that they could and did do that made quite an impression on me]. Our local symphony orchestra conductor (emeritus now) is a baseball nut and one time I was talking to him about cards. He regaled me with his best finds, and all I could say in return was that I probably have the most complete collection of .220 hitters and 4.85 ERA pitchers from the 70s he's likely to see.
as an aside, remember the cards with the badly-airbrushed ballcaps? See:
http://1977topps.blogspot.com/2011/1...-mariners.html
I had a lot of these dogs.
Relatively few football cards. They were less interesting - harder to compare stats except at "skill" positions then.
Can't recall if it was more football than baseball but there were a few years, maybe early 70s, where the cards were of different sizes and didn't stack up as nicely.
I don't even know of any coin shops around anymore. Perhaps they're lumped in with gold and diamond dealers, IDK. But certainly not like the kind that existed when I was young.
FWIW I was never of the era to put ballcards in the spokes of my bike, like many people did earlier with what would have been valuable Mickey Mantle cards. Or is that an urban legend?