May 2007 will mark thirty years since the original theatrical release of Star Wars. John Booth, who at age six converted his thumbs and index fingers from cowboy shooters to Han Solo-inspired blasters, is raking together his memories of the saga in a series of essays for Field's Edge.The series begins here.

Girls go to Jupiter
To get more stupider,
Boys go to Mars
To get more Star Wars cards. 
   Yes, it’s supposed to end with “candy bars,” but that’s the way my seatmates and I sang it on the school bus in second grade. 
   I never kept my Star Wars cards in albums. There were always either tossed into a shoebox or, more often, just kept rubber-banded together. And we measured collections not by number or completeness of card sets, but in stack thickness. Saying someone had “200 cards” or even “all the yellow ones” didn’t impress as much as if you said you knew someone with “about this many” Star Wars cards, and you held your fingers about four vertical inches apart. 
   I had a small bookshelf at home that had two sliding glass doors set into grooves along the front edges. One of these panes became the place for me to put the stickers I got from packs of Star Wars cards: Grand Moff Tarkin, C-3PO, a Tusken Raider. When I bought other kinds of cards, their stickers went there too, which is how a Close Encounters alien made it into the mix. I remember the earlier Star Wars stickers, the ones that were cut-outs of character heads outlined in bright colors, looking bizarre next to some of the later stickers that were rectangular and bordered with edges printed to look like film sprocket holes.
   It was always a cool thing when Topps put out a new set of Star Wars cards. The blues, yellows and reds came first, I think, but I remember being particularly stoked by the orange cards when I found them in Finney’s, the closest drugstore to our house. 
   Finney’s sold all kinds of other cards, too: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mork and Mindy. I can remember being in the store with Rick one day - his parents had driven: Finney’s wasn’t within biking distance - to buy Star Wars cards. We had money for two packs each. Rick somehow convinced me to split my purchase and buy one Star Wars pack and one pack of Kiss – yes, the rock band – cards. Kiss did not appeal to me at all, but it was the 1970s, so I caved in, even though I was embarrassed to be buying them. 
   Rick, though, was also the source of a big chunk of my early Star Wars card collection. He’d either bought or traded for a three-inch thick stack of green-bordered cards, and I bought them off him for fifty cents. I seem to think I got a Cleveland Browns 7-Up bottle in the deal, too, although that may have cost me another fifty cents. (From a sheer “get-more-Star-Wars-stuff” point of view, the trading cards had serious affordability working in their favor. My allowance wouldn’t support regular trips to the store to buy action figures or toys, but I could almost always scrounge up enough change to buy a pack of cards on a moment’s notice.)
   The one Star Wars card that practically everybody knows about now is the infamous C-3PO card where he seemingly has an extra appendage. A specifically male appendage. And it’s standing proud. I never saw this card as a kid, but I found one decades later at a flea market, in with a small bunch of Star Wars cards on a table full of random junk. It cost me a buck, and it remains my one true flea market jackpot. (When I was in college, I found a statue of a monkey sitting on a pile of books, one labeled “Darwin,” and pondering a human skull. It was $40. Not five minutes later, I found the same thing literally one aisle over for five bucks. That’s my second favorite flea market find.) 
   Collecting Star Wars cards was how I first learned the actors’ names, which were printed on some of the publicity-photo kind of cards: Han Solo (Harrison Ford); Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher); Darth Vader (David Prowse.) This last one caused a minor stir when I was over at Mike D.’s house and his parents were talking about an interview they’d seen on TV where somebody named James Earl Jones was talking about being Darth Vader, and this confused the hell out of me, because I knew for certain that DarthVader was David Prowse. Said so on my green-bordered Star Wars cards. And Mike’s parents were baffled because they had clearly heard James Earl Jones speaking specifically about the role. I don’t know if we ever figured out we were both right until much later. 
   Getting “checklist” cards was a mixed blessing: on the one hand, you felt kind of ripped off because it didn’t have a cool picture on the front, or a puzzle piece or trivia on the back. On the other hand, now you had a way to see which cards you had and which you needed. 
   Once, I was showing my Star Wars cards to a girl at school I had a crush on. I’m thinking first or second grade. One card showed Han Solo leaning back in the booth in the cantina, with the caption, “Cornered by Greedo!” Maybe I’d only seen the movie once at that point, or maybe I was just overcome by this girl actually talking to me, and I couldn’t concentrate properly with her head of long dark hair so close by. Either way, my explanation of the caption was that Darth Vader, being such a horrible villain, was obviously greedy, earning him the nickname “Greedo.” 
   Never mind that Han and Vader were never even onscreen together in Star Wars, much less hashing things out in a dingy bar booth. 
   While I only remember ever buying Star Wars cards in individual packs, by the time The Empire Strikes Back cards came out, they were selling them in three-packs, only they came without the gum. 
   The first Empire cards were the red-bordered set, and I remember that these were different from the Star Wars cards in that on the back, instead of the printed puzzle pieces, they had paragraphs describing the scene on the front. And there were little “teasers” to the next card, so the series actually told the story pretty much as the movie did. 
   My friends and I were particularly fascinated by one card: No. 90, “The Ordeal,” which showed Han on that torture rack in Cloud City. We were morbidly intrigued by that bit of the movie. Maybe it was the spookiness of that machine, with its flashing lights and electric shock noises, or maybe that it got Han Freaking Solo to just howl in pain from behind a closed door. It seems pretty tame by just about any standard today, but man, it stuck in my head when I was nine. I remember when another kid at school brought his Ordeal card and we clustered around him during recess to look at it. (In the second, blue-bordered set of Empire cards, a similar card of this scene was called “Han’s Torment.”) 
   My friend Jake and I also snickered a lot over card No. 67, the scene where C-3PO interrupts Han and Leia’s first kiss, because the caption on the front read, “Pardon me sir, but … ohhh!” We were nine or ten at this point, so while make-out scenes in movies were disgusting if your parents were around, references to them were clearly playground-talk fodder. Our laughter was a more innocent version of being in college, say, and making “bwomp-chicka-bwow-wooow” porn music cracks. 
   Until I grew up, I never even knew that Topps put out a third, gold-bordered set of Empire cards, or that there was a short-lived set of oversized cards, which I discovered at the Hartville Flea Market years later when I was home on a college break. 
   I was twelve by the time Return of the Jedi came out, and while I was as big a Star Wars fan as ever, I was reaching a point where getting all the toys wasn’t as big a deal. The trading cards, though still appealed to me. I remember going up to the flea market with my mom and brothers in the summer once, and none of the trading card booths there had any of the still-new Jedi cards, so I decide to walk to the nearest drugstore to search. 
   I don’t remember the name of the store, but it was about a half-mile away, in a shopping plaza where there was an IGA and a Fisher’s Big Wheel department store. To get there, I hiked east on Route 619, a fairly busy street with no sidewalks, past the concrete-and-gravel business and the barn that housed the hobby and craft shop which had sold Dungeons and Dragons stuff until the local churches threatened to boycott the place, and the gas station, and it was sunny and hot. 
   And the drugstore didn’t even have any Jedi cards. I wound up buying one of those “Official Collector’s Edition” Jedi magazine/program things, though, so it wasn’t an entirely wasted trip. 
   In the car on the way home, I was sitting next to a little kid named Nick - not my brother, but a friend of the family who had come along. Flipping through the book, I leaned over and showed him a big two-page photo, and I said, something like, “Oooh. Jabba the Hutt.” He responded by pointing to the other character in the picture and saying in this sing-song, dreamy voice, “Princess Leia.” 
   Getting cards was always about the collecting - the hunting and comparing and swapping - rather than achieving a full set. It was about the tactile experience of tearing into the wax paper, chewing that brittle, crunchy gum into something half-palatable, and flipping through the cards to see what you got and piling the doubles off to the side. It was buying a couple packs at a time, but never going someplace like a comic shop and asking for a whole unopened box. 
   I don’t know that I ever did assemble a whole series of any of the Star Wars cards as a kid, although enough of my Empire cards survived until I reached a point as an adult where I was back into collecting, and I was able to piece together the red and blue series with some buys over the Internet. And when I did get them, I stacked them all in a pile and was surprised to find how my hands still held the muscle memory of cupping the cards in my left hand and thumbing them over into my right as my eyes flicked over each image. All I was missing was the gum. 

      Here are the links to the rest of Remembering Star Wars:

Part I: Summer, 1977
Part II: The Droids We Were Looking For
Part III: Perfect Hibernation
Part IV: Into A Larger World
Part V: Collect All 21!
Part VI: A Certain Point of View
Part VIII: Size Matters Not

Part IX: Along A Different Path

Part X: There is Another

Part XI: Bounty Hunting