Wisconsin man owns nearly 1 million Cubs baseball cards

Beau Thompson is approaching a magic number when it comes to baseball cards of Chicago Cubs players.

“I’ve been collecting cards for over 30 years and as of right now I have 997,286 cards and I’m going to break the million mark on April 5th of this year,” Thompson, of Madison, Wisconsin, said on Premiere Saturday morning. St. Card Show at the Kane County Fairgrounds in St. Charles. “It’s going to happen at Wrigley Field because I planned it.”

More than 100 vendors were present at the event, offering to buy, sell or trade cards representing various sports teams, as well as other memorabilia. But according to Thompson, the Cubs have the upper hand.

He said he has attended a number of trading card shows and that “it would take a few truckloads to get all my cards here.”

“I plan to keep these for as long as possible and I’m not sure what I’ll do with them when I get older,” he said. “My oldest Cub card dates back to 1887 and I have several. I never thought I’d go this deep. I started the project in December 2017 and made collections and bulk purchases. I always put the Cubs card aside. “One million in total is a nice milestone.”

Partners Mike Oberheim and John Craig, both of Rockford, attended the event and said physical trading cards remain popular even in the digital age.

“There has definitely been a resurgence of interest during and after COVID,” Oberheim said. “That’s when I started again; after a break for a few decades, I came back to cards.”

He said the shows attract “a wide range of people, from children to parents to seniors who have been collecting for years.”

“Children, parents, grandparents are a very diverse group,” he said. “When it comes to the most popular sports card today, it kind of depends on the season. Baseball is being played now, with more football and then the NBA in the fall. But baseball has always been the king of cards.”

Evan Wojtyla, 12, of South Elgin, showed up at the opening of the show on Saturday with a plastic box of cards and said he was “considering trading to the Baltimore Orioles, along with Michael Jordan and some other cards.”

“I’ve been collecting cards for about four years and my dad got us into it,” he said. “I have about 2000 cards. My favorite is baseball. Looking ahead, I may sell a few to pay for college, and the rest I’ll probably keep and trade when I’m older.

Rob Wojtyla, Evan’s father, said he started collecting cards “in the ’90s, when things weren’t as good as they are now.”

“I got back into it again because of COVID, and when you kind of enter adulthood and start a job, you live a little bit of a better life, and I wanted to recreate my childhood a little bit,” he said. “Now my son is getting into the sport and we started entering the market in 2019 after finding a local card store in South Elgin.”

Ray Richter of Genoa brought his sons, Blake, 10, and Brett, 6, to the show and said “we all loved the cards.”

“I passed this disease on to my sons,” Richter said with a laugh. “Kids enjoy doing this, just like I enjoy doing it. They took my old cards and started collecting and making them themselves. Children are very responsible; “They protect them, they don’t bend them, they know who is good and who is bad.”

Lindsey Lind of Elgin came to the trading card show with her son, Connor, and said she “came here to both buy and sell.”

“He’s excited to find good deals and he heard they have $1 card boxes, so he wants to try and find something,” Lind said. “My son is 13 and I hate the cards all over my house when it comes to collecting, but I think he’s learning how to bargain, how to value things and actually talking to people because that’s kind of missing these days.”

Lind also praised the benefits of a tangible, hand-held item like trading cards in today’s digital world.

“It’s like vinyl records,” he said. “I love the retro part of it and the responsibility of looking after the cards.”

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.