Bruno’s Shoebox

Conrad Brunner spent 40 years writing about athletes. Now he sells them. One card at a time.

Brunner runs a card shop in suburban Indianapolis called Bruno’s Shoebox and, while the name sounds quaint, it’s actually an accurate description of his entire collection.

“I have my collection in a shoe box at my house,” Brunner says. “I don’t have thousands of cards, I don’t have a 1952 Mantle. It’s a collection of cards that have personal meaning to me. My favorite football player is Sonny Jurgensen. Frank Howard is my favorite baseball player so I collect those guys.”

Brunner spent 40 years in sports journalism, covering the NBA and NFL for the Indianapolis Star and other papers but he retired recently and decided to open his shop to keep himself and his dog, Blue, occupied. The baseball card business isn’t what it used to be, but it’s far from dead.

In the mid to late 1980s, card collecting became less of a hobby and more of an investment. People saw the big dollars being paid for vintage cards and decided they needed a piece of the action. That philosophy had a few problems though.

The reason vintage cards were valuable was because they were scarce. Stories of people, or their parents, throwing their cards away became legendary. But no one was throwing away the new product card companies knew it so they produced more and more of it. The market became flooded and the bottom fell out.

“When the big collapse hit it just took the floor out,” says Brunner. “Shops went under, companies went under. People became sour about the hobby. They had bought cases and cases of cards that turned out to be valueless. They felt like they’d been burnt, and they had been.”

“Maybe in the last 5 years, the hobby has really bounced back,” Brunner says.  “It wouldn’t surprise me to see more shops opening. The product is really good, the companies learned from the past, and it hasn’t hurt at all that basketball and football have come on strong.”

Brunner’s shop caters to collectors across the board, from 50-year-old men looking to complete 40-year-old sets to kids who pick a card from the nickel box because they like the colors. He’s seen an uptick in young collectors and he finds it encouraging.

“I’m incredibly surprised and and impressed with the number of kids who love vintage cards,” he says. “Even if they’re not buying vintage cards, they’re buying modern cards of Mantle, or Ruth. That’s something I think the card companies have been very intelligent about, is including cards of those players in their sets. It informs the kids that these are the guys who really got it going. It sparks interest.”

It’s also helped rekindle his interest in collecting and given him insight into the hobby thanks to personal experience. Brunner attended Georgia Southern University, and seeing the face of a fellow Eagle staring up at him one day triggered something.

“I was opening up a random pack of Panini Select football and I pulled a 1/5 autographed refractor of Matt Brieda and I thought I was going to pass out,” he said. “I thought, ‘Why do these people spend this money to open these packs?’ At that point I truly understood it. It’s hard to replace that sensation when you open a pack and there’s that card, whoever it is, that card that you really wanted, it just takes your breath away.”

You can find Bruno’s Shoebox on Facebook.