Not sure which one of these I will be attending, assuming it will be 100% dependent on baseball schedules for the late August/early Fall ones. But will definitely be at one of the ones in December.
Central PA Card Shows
- Thread starter katester44
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I really miss living down there. They had card shows, card auctions and card stores way before upstate NY did. In the early/mid 80s there was one card store in Binghamton and that was it. When I hear York I think of that huge barbell factory off of I-83 (I believe), And oddly, I remember Jeff Lebo was a huge basketball recruit out of Carlisle who went to your favorite college. I lived in Lebanon which is where Sam Bowie had gone to high school just before I got there. Funny the stuff I remember.
You nailed all of it. York Barbell is right off of I-83, with the big spinning weightlifter on top. Right next door is the Weightlifting HOF. Lebo did go down to Chapel Hill to play - shame that his Carlisle teammate went north to Syracuse (Billy Owens). There used to be a card show in the area at a mall every weekend when I first moved here. And there were at least a dozen card shops scattered around the area as well.
And don't forget our Peppermint Patties or our heating/cooling behemoth York International who at one point handled all the systems to keep the luge/bobsled/skeleton runs in the Olympics frozen.
We usually get the privilege of heading to the Lebanon area once a month or so for baseball tourneys - somehow always the 8am game....
Well....I visited the Carlisle version of this show on Saturday. If you like Pokemon, it was fantastic. If you were looking for sports cards, it was a lot less fantastic. If you were looking for vintage baseball, it was a disaster. 200 or so tables and I saw exactly ONE vintage card. It was a 1976 Topps ATG Honus Wagner that looked like its prior home was bicycle spokes. Turned lemons into lemonade by detouring on the way home and heading to Gettysburg to pick up dinner for the family at our favorite pizza joint.
You are the third or 4th person that has told me that Pokeman is dominating card shows lately. How times have changed since I lived down there where vintage cards were all over the place. Granted that was 4 decades ago, but still.
These shows need to set up rules like "Dork free zone", "No shirt, no shoes, no dorks" or something similar for their shows so as not to waste everyone's time.
I know in today's Cancel Culture World, I'll probably get ostracized for being Dorkist or Dorkaphobic but I can't help it as I was born this way.............and NO.... I am not a Lady Gaga fan!
As someone whose collected tiny pictures of men for decades, we really don't get to call anyone else "dorks" for their collecting preferences. We're all chasing nostalgia. If the other kids collected Pokemon when I was a kid, I'd probably collect it too, and probably would collect it to this day.
Pokemon and TCG dominates a lot of shows. At the West Cost show a couple of weeks ago, about 40% of the 1000 tables were Pokemon, but they were segregated to one part of the hall. There are now TCG only shows, but also shows that allow only non-TCG. I'm certainly not the only one who drove 1 hour or more to a show to find nothing even in the category I collect. Show promoters are figuring that out finally, because if I don't find something I want to buy I'm not going to that promoters shows again.
Pokémon is what is carrying the hobby imo. So many more sold in stores than all the sport cards combined in the various retail stores. Some of the grading companies are grading more Pokémon cards than all sport cards combined. Sooner or later we have to hit a bubble.
I mistakenly thought Pokemon was a thing of the 90s that had died off. I had not heard of it in years and even our LCS never had much demand or interest on those type cards. But one person after another keeps talking about Pokemon being the dominant feature at card shows.
The city of Syracuse had a collectible card company close down this Summer. I had never heard of this company but it was a non sport grading/authentication company that was owned by Ebay who moved the facility down South. Here is an article about it from this past May.
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/...ayer-office-in-syracuse-cutting-220-jobs.html
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