A celebration of life will be held Oct. 25 for Ray Stonehouse, Port Moody’s longtime merchant of sports collector cards and memorabilia from his shop at the corner of St. Johns and Moody streets.
Stonehouse passed away in July. He was 77.
While his Great Canadian Sportscard Shop has been a fixture in Port Moody since 1989, Stonehouse was also a passionate supporter of junior hockey. He owned the Ridge Meadows Flames of the Pacific Junior Hockey League for 25 years and he was the president of the Junior B circuit from 2016 to 2020.
But it was at the glass display counters and cabinets in the shop most locals got to meet him and catch his infectious enthusiasm for the waxed cardboard cards depicting hockey, baseball and football heroes.
“I’m still like an eight-year-old kid,” Stonehouse told the Tri-City News in 2020.
He ran the shop with his wife, Susan, and they often doled out free promotional packs of cards to young visitors, alighting their eyes with delight and excitement for the added bonus.
Stonehouse said his passion for sports cards was sparked by his own mismanagement of an impressive collection of 325 rookie cards of his favourite baseball player, Mickey Mantle. Long before collector conventions, published price lists and online auctions drove the price of some rare cards into the stratosphere, he traded most of them away.
But Stonehouse kept up the hobby as he forged a career in the auto industry until he eventually opened up his own shop.
Over the years, he introduced thousands of kids to collecting.
Even as the market for cards waxed and waned through the 1990s on the hype surrounding lucrative resales of rare finds, Stonehouse endured based on personal connections.
He never built a website, set up a social media account or pursued online trading.
Instead, Stonehouse worked the phones to track down or authenticate a unique card for a customer, or to gauge the market for the tens of thousands of cards he had neatly filed in boxes in a warren of storage rooms at the back of his shop.
“It’s a mom and pop shop,” he said about his old-school approach to business. “We really don’t care.”
The gathering to honour Stonehouse will be held at the Burnaby Winter Club, from 1 to 4 p.m. Vaccination passports and masks will be required for admittance.
