David Brunelle, a long-time Fullerton resident with his very own Baseball Hall of Fame, has a card collection consisting of 230 cards. Back in 1994, Mr. Brunelle and his oldest son, Sean, were playing at West Fullerton Little League. After one of their games, Sean asked his dad to take him to a local baseball card show so he could buy cards of his favorite player, Ken Griffey Jr. “So we went to the show. While he was looking for his cards, filtering through a bunch of boxes, I wandered over to another table and noticed that there were some cards from when I was kid,” said Mr. Brunelle. He found familiar faces from the 60’s and 70’s and was enthralled with once again touching cards from his youth. Little did he realize that this would be start of a twenty-five year challenge to collect one card of every player in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“I was just knocked over by how much I enjoyed my old baseball cards,” he said. “My son bought a Griffey Jr. and I bought a Ted Williams card from 1951. We went to a few more card shows. He picked up a few more cards. I picked up a few more cards. And it got to the point where I said, ‘Hey, a lot of these guys-Willie Mays, DiMaggio, all these great players-are in the hall of fame. Why don’t we start collecting one card of every player in the Baseball Hall of Fame? That was 1994 and I’ve been collecting ever since.”
Mr. Brunelle invited me to his house to see his collection in person and was more than happy to share his card collection with me. In fact, his den with the Baseball Hall of Fame almost seemed like a museum. Every baseball collectable occupied its own case and its own section of the room.