Day 6: Pickin’ with the Mayor and Vernon and the Pelicans Game

On Day 6, Julia and Brother Peter went back to the beach, Funicello style, while I went off pickin’ with The Mayor and Vernon. We headed south to Myrtle Beach and all places in between including antique stores, flea markets and card shops in search of sports card and memorabilia joy. And Lord did we find it.

The Mayor and Vernon had patronized this particular flea market in the past, so it shouldn’t have surprised me when we turned into the parking lot, yet continued to drive down a gravel road, around to the back, and parked within yards of two booths in particular. One guy usually brings a ton of baseball stuff, but alas, that day had nothing baseball-related.

The guy across from him, however, had cards, magazines, etc. He had a box of cards from the late 50s to the early 70s and I thumbed through and found a few Jim Bouton cards for a few bucks. After reading Ball Four, I became a Bouton fan, so cheap Bouton cards were a no-brainer for me. Then he told me he had another box of old stuff if I wanted to see it and that since I was with The Mayor, he trusted me to sit and look through them while he worked his tables. I would have trusted no one with this box of 1964 Topps joy.

The first four cards were Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, and Roberto Clemente and while they were not in absolute mint condition – some of them were off center and a few corners were not sharp – they were extremely fine specimens of game cardboards. I told him to take them away as they were too rich for my blood. He said, “Wait a minute. Let’s take a look here.” He asked which cards had piqued my interest – I listed the aforementioned cardboards and several others. He quoted a super price of $300 that was still way out of my range even for such beauty in nearly 50-year game cardboard form.

I then shared that info with The Mayor, who then went through the same box of joy in search of treasures. He pulled out about 25 cards, including those in the $300 bundle, and asked for a price on the stack. An astonishing price of $500 for all of them was given and The Mayor made the sale. He got about 20 additional cards in his stack for a mere $200 more than the price I was quoted, but as I’ve learned from The Mayor, the more you buy, the better the price. Now The Mayor has a pickin’ store of his own in Fayetteville where he will sell some of the cards for much more than he paid. But if he sells the sacred four, I’ll have an internal struggle as to whether I will continue to speak to him. I already hate him for this purchase. If he should sell them, he may become dead to me.

After experiencing the deadly sin of envy there, we headed to other places where their owners enjoyed a bit of price gouging until it became supper time. We then needed to meet the rest of the group at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville at Broadway at the Beach in Myrtle Beach. The wait was quite lengthy for a party of our size, but they made it entertaining with one of their servers being taken away by ambulance for an on-the-job injury, the music, guys on stilts fashioning balloon headwear for patrons, and a hurricane live in the place every hour or so. Yes, although cliche, I actually partook of a Cheeseburger in Paradise. The quality did not match the price, which was unfortunate yet expected, but it was grub and grub was what I needed after a day of pickin’.

For the day’s finale, we were headed across the parking lot at Broadway at the Beach to the Myrtle Beach Pelicans game at TicketReturn.com Field, which included postgame fireworks in honor of 237^th anniversary of our nation’s birth. Couldn’t make Uncle Sam wear the Homer the Dragon hat though.

After the Pelicans scored a quick five first-inning runs, it looked like The Home Team Curse of Julia would be dead for good and then bad things happened. The Salem Red Sox got four of those runs back in the top of the second and tied it in their half of the fourth. But in the last two innings, they added nine runs to go on to an eventual 14-6 victory. The Curse has been revisited. Let’s hope this thing ends for good soon or Julia will no longer be allowed to attend games where I want a victory for the home team. She will only be allowed at Cubs games at Wrigley where the Cardinals are not their opponent.

To see photos from the day, click HERE.

PS: Special thanks to WordPolice for pointing out my geographical moronity when I stated that Holden Beach was on the Pacific in the Day 5 post. Wow. I’m dumber than a squirrel.