I have ALL of my sports cards in a closet piled from floor to ceiling. None are minty mint, many are dog earred as we flipped cards regularly. I collected baseball cards until early 1980's. I have like every variation in that ridiculous first Fleer set, imprinted hands and all. I didn't collect much with other sports but I believe I have some early series stadium club football hockey. I sold all my wackys to Andrew Relkin, it was a pile of extras, I believe my keeper wackys were lost in one of the mid 1970s hurricanes that also claimed my football cards so my football card collecting ended there. I then regretted selling my wackys to Relkin and took the money to buy a massive collection of wackys from a guy in Michigan who wanted to sell his wackys to buy slot cars. I got almost a complete run series 1 through 15 for $200. It started my addiction to buying collections in the old Prodigy days.....and now here we are!
It was probably Hurricane Belle in 1976. I vividly remember that one really slammed the East Coast, the NYC area in particular.
I was also an active baseball card collector from 1976 to about 1987. Unfortunately like you, most of my cards were prime flipping material so, other than sentimental value, are pretty worthless now. I was fortunate enough to pick up a 1976 mint Topps baseball set a long while ago for about $40 which is worth a decent amount more now, but all my other mint sets (1981 to 1987 Topps and Fleer) are fairly worthless as I've since learned there were literally tens of millions of these sets printed.
My few valuable sports cards are from 1980s OPC hockey sets with Gretzky and Lemieux rookie cards. I also have a 1986 Fleer basketball rookie Jordan card that's a PSA 8, which is probably the gem of my collection.
And my originally collected Wackys from the 1970s - well, they were all put to good use as I "stuck 'em anyplace".
