With old trading cards, old tales come back to life

The best Christmas gifts I received this year turned out to be things I already had. In an effort to be sentimental (and rid her new house of some of my stuff), my mother surprised me with three boxes of racing cards from my childhood.  Each box had hundreds of cards, all from the early ‘90s. The cards are old enough that Richard Petty was still in a driver’s suit and Mark Martin still had a full head of hair. Some of the cards produced laughter, while others evoked memories. But most prompted questions, ones I didn’t have when I was nine. Each one of these 3.5-by-2.5-inch pieces of history had a story -- a story I could now appreciate. So I took them all to Ken Martin. By title, Martin is the senior director of archive management for NASCAR, in charge of finding and utilizing every piece of historical video footage.  In reality, he is the sport’s living encyclopedia.  More

With old trading cards, old tales come back to life

The best Christmas gifts I received this year turned out to be things I already had. In an effort to be sentimental (and rid her new house of some of my stuff), my mother surprised me with three boxes of racing cards from my childhood.  Each box had hundreds of cards, all from the early ‘90s. The cards are old enough that Richard Petty was More