End of Hibernation / #155 - Peter Sundstrom

So this was meant to be a several-times-a-week thing, but I haven't actually posted since November, and haven't put a card up since September. Been busy! Really! I'll try to get back on it again; I'd like to do this up right.

I've been planning to restart this, and today I got impetus in the mail:


The scan's a bit crappy; my scanner is tempermental. Hopefully I'll get a better one done this weekend, but I ain't making any promises.

Peter Sundstrom (or Sundström, if you live in a land where umlauts are easier to create on keyboards) was, to my mind, the less-famous of the Sundström brothers that came over to the NHL in the mid-'80s. I have some vague memories of Patrik playing with the Canucks and Devils, but if it weren't for the hockey card evidence, I would have completely forgotten (or didn't know about in the first place) Peter. But he did put together a decent little career, racking up 338 NHL games for the Rangers, Capitals, and Devils. After he left the NHL, he returned to Sweden and played several more seasons with Malmö. He also represented Sweden in two Canada Cups (1984 and 1987).

As an aside, the Swedish version of Wikipedia says that Patrik and Peter hold the all-time NHL record for twins playing on opposite teams in the same game, with 18. (Ron and Rich Sutter, again according to Swedish Wikipedia, faced off 17 times.) I'm not going to double-check that stat, but it is pretty cool.

Peter Sundstrom's stats at hockeydb

Service Interruption

Well, I've managed to miss just about all of October on this. Other projects and general sloth have taken precedence. But, I'm going to get it back going tomorrow. I'll be posting a trade list in the coming days, too.

What it is, what it will be

The '84-'85 O-Pee-Chee set has long been my all-time favorite hockey card issue. Not because I got them when they came out -- in 1984, I wouldn't have known how to get my hands on O-Pee-Chee cards.

But when I was in college down in Arizona, I frequented a little card shop called the Sports Page. The guy who ran it was a blast -- older fellow from Michigan who'd relocated to Tucson, and who knew more about the WHA than anyone I've ever met. He had boxes and boxes of hockey cards and memorabilia that no one ever touched, including big crates of the '84-'85 OPC.

I'd head over there, root through those boxes and listen to his stories, and as a result ended up with more cards from that set than any human being really needs.

I've also been a hockey autograph collector, for 15 years or so now, and in the last year I've been trying to step up attempts to get as many cards as possible autographed. I post a lot of autographs on my site, Czechfan.com -- but I can be kind of lousy about updating that, and this is a different/fun way to post the autos and go off on tangents of free association as I do it.

I'll try to update this every two days or so, either posting autos as they come in or digging them out of the collection I already have. Occasionally I'll toss in little oddities as well.

The Sports Page, alas, is long-gone -- I haven't been to Arizona in nearly a decade but one of the last times I was there I drove by and it was gone. The guy who ran it popped up on eBay, selling old WHA stuff, but I haven't seen him offering anything in a while. It still lives on, though, in the ten million '84-'85 OPC cards I've got.