BOUNTIFUL — He was 10 years old when an older kid, 12 or 13, took him in his house and showed him his stash. He was mesmerized. He didn’t know such a world existed, much less how quickly he could become absorbed into it. He was instantly hooked. His life changed forever that day.
He’s been collecting baseball cards ever since.
Meet Dave Avila. He’s 70 now, retired, enjoying the golden years in a house with a view on the Bountiful bench. But in many ways he remains the son of a Bingham Canyon miner who discovered in his boyhood a hobby that will last at least as long as he does.
The thing that struck him that summer day in 1959 when the older kid showed him his baseball cards was a card of a big-leaguer from Mexico who played infield for the Milwaukee Braves named Bobby Avila.
Avila wasn’t a name you heard every day. The only Avilas Dave knew was family. His father, Jesus, had made his way from Mexico to work in the Utah mines when he was a young man. He married a local girl named Isabel — that’s Dave’s mom — settled down, and never left.
Who knew? Bobby Avila might have been a relative.
Dave started buying Topps baseball cards, the ones with the bubble gum inside, every chance he got. For a nickel a pack, he’d get them at the store in Lark — the mining town the Avilas moved to from Bingham Canyon when he was 10 — and when he traveled on the team bus to play county recreation baseball he’d buy more cards at drugstores in Sandy and Midvale.
Collecting was as fun as playing baseball, and you could do it even after the sun went down.
Cellphones and video games were distractions that were light years away.
He found that the cards fit perfectly in a Maxfields Candy box. He filed them meticulously, starting with No. 1 in the set and going from there. Security amounted to him telling his little brother when he caught him taking cards out of the box to put in his bike spokes, “If I ever catch you touching my cards again. …”
Predictably, cars, girls and school interrupted Dave’s collecting bug in his teenage and college years. Fortunately, though, unlike a lot of other moms of baby boomers, his mother never threw his card collection out in the interim, so when Dave rediscovered his passion when he was in his mid-20s his collection was still intact and he picked right up where he left off.
In the 1980s he interrupted his career as a data processor and opened his own card store called Baseball Cards America in West Valley City. Then he opened another in the old Cottonwood Mall, followed by yet another in West Jordan.
His hobby had become his business. It helped him buy the view lot in Bountiful he lives in to this day.
He returned to data processing after operating his stores for about a decade. He has only one regret from those years. When Fleer started producing basketball cards in 1986, after a five-year hiatus, he acquired 30 Michael Jordan rookie cards.
He sold 29 of them, for $20 to $30 each.
Today a single mint condition MJ rookie card is worth $26,000.
“Man, I’d have been set,” laments Dave.
The one Michael Jordan card he kept “has a nick in the corner.”
But basketball was never his specialty. His heart always belonged to baseball. So when he retired from his data processing career four years ago, guess what he went back to?
“You know how people worry about how they’re going to spend time in their retirement?” says Dave. “I don’t have that worry.”
In his leisure time, Dave organizes and promotes sports card shows in the Salt Lake Valley. He has one coming up this weekend, June 7-9, at the Valley Fair Mall in West Valley City. Anyone and everyone is invited to attend (for more information see “Sports Card Shows of Salt Lake City, Utah” on Facebook or email Dave at davila12@yahoo.com).
Dave will be front and center at the show, manning one of the 20 or 30 tables, showing off a few thousand of his favorite baseball cards and looking to trade for more. Sixty years later he’s doing the same thing he did when he was 10, and if anything — now that he doesn’t have to worry about what he’s going to do when he grows up — having even more fun.