Back in the day from the late 70's to early 90's, I was fairly heavily involved in buying, trading, and collecting sports collectibles.
It mostly entailed collecting hockey and baseball cards from mainstream pro leagues (NHL, MLB), limited edition items such as hockey team pins (Canucks, Canadiens), a focus on Mickey Mantle special insert card sets, as well as signed Gordie Howe card 'strips' featuring himself and his son Marty Howe on a 1991 Western Canadian tour etc. The cream of the collection is a series of 8.5 x 11" B & W photos of the Montreal Canadiens Stanley Cup champion dynasty teams of the 50's that my dad bought for me from, of all places, an old barn/garage sale in Nova Scotia in the mid-90's. He paid $20 for the lot. It included signed pictures of the entire team which featured Jean Beliveau, Doug Harvey, Bill Durnan and the centre-piece of the collection, the Rocket himself. Anecdotally I've been told this piece of my collection could be worth between $3-5000K.
I stepped away from the hobby around 1993 due to the crazy devaluation that occurred at the time due to the mass over production of all the major league NA sports card/companies that nearly sank the industry.
I recently dusted off a wealth of stuff that's been stored in the crawl space for several years and have started to renew my interest in my collection and the hobby. Of course nearly 25 years later those local dealers and retailers I got to know then are long gone now; the retail side of the industry really contracted by the end of the 90's due to the aforementioned plunge in collectible values at the time.
Do any other VV's collect sports cards and memorabilia and most critically can you recommend a good Victoria dealer outlet with whom you deal or have dealt with personally?