The Decade of the Eighties was more than Ronald Reagan, the USFL, We Are The World or that guy with the ski-slope haircut from Flock of Seagulls.
It was a decade of huge growth for the trading card industry, opening with one manufacturer in 1980 – Topps – and closing out the decade in 1989 as five card makers (Topps, Donruss, Fleer, Upper Deck and Score… not to mention Classic Games) fought it out for your pocket change. Or in the case of UD, the folded bills in your wallet. For when UD arrived in 1989 they were charging $1 (!!!) per pack.
Leading the industry charge as the boom hit was the forward-thinking Dr. James Beckett, the founder of this publication and a man who compiled and analyzed market data and presented it in a way that could even be absorbed and understood by non-doctoral guys like me. While Jim, with the late Dennis Eckes, had been publishing The Sport Americana Price Guide books, it was the Beckett Monthly baseball title that helped bring – as our company often says – order to the chaos, when launched in 1984.