Lifelong Hockey Collection...in Iowa?

[iowa49erfan]

Terry "Woody" Gottburg of Sioux City isn't most boys.
In 40-plus years, he has seen his modest hockey card collection explode into a phenomenal -- if cluttered -- amassment which has pretty much taken over the basement of the home he shares with his wife and two card-collecting boys. It has gone way beyond cards to jerseys and programs, coins and action figures, signed photos and hockey pucks and even some personal honors, thanks mostly to his 30 years' employment with the Sioux City Musketeers -- many of those years as the Voice of the Musketeers, both on radio and as the team's public address announcer.
"I have somewhere around 50,000 cards, a few hundred programs and yearbooks, over 100 pucks. I never really counted, but it's a lot," he said.
Some of it is on display. A lot of it is boxed up. And a few pieces, like three of the four treasured Wayne Gretzky rookie cards he got in a trade with a Canadian collector in 1979 (Gretzky's rookie year), well they're in a safe deposit box. The fourth card he traded away. Several years ago, burglars once made off with his old baseball and football cards, leaving the hockey cards behind because they thought no doubt they were worthless. Nobody said burglars were smart.

He got into puck collecting, acquiring every variation of a Musketeer puck and a wide variety of other minor league and NHL pucks. Connections with players, coaches, fans and other collectors helped build his collection.
For instance, John Saville, the Muskies' second coach, decided to get rid of some old mementoes he had collected as a kid. "So he gave me a set of hockey coins of the old original six NHL teams that were put out in 1961 when John was growing up as a kid back in Ontario. It's a complete set of coins that was issued in boxes of tea and cookies up in Canada by Salada Foods," he said. "So I've got his full set of six (Maple Leaf) shields of those."
He then showed, with true fan boy enthusiasm, the coins featuring the Detroit Red Wings with Gordie Howe, Alex Delvecchio and other stars of the '60s.

http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/life...ef80c9a86.html

[Chuck-17]

That is a great collection!!!