Allan Loewen first started collecting hockey cards in Steinbach, Man., when he was 10 years old.

Cost: a nickel for two cards and a wafer of bubble gum.

He paid for the cards by delivering the Winnipeg Free Press and the Winnipeg Tribune around the neighbourhood after being encouraged by his parents to make some extra money when their family had fallen on hard times.

"It was peanuts by today's standards. You made a nickel or two here and there. Instead of giving it to my parents to buy food of course I squandered it on bubble gum,” he laughed. "But they were OK with that, they were just happy with the fact that I had a job.

"As I recall, I would make a nickel a day per customer, and if I had 25 customers that would be a $1.25 a day … if they all paid up and were home on Saturdays when I was collecting.”

Before long, he had the entire 1952-53 set.

Still does.

The set is on display this week at Scotiabank, which will be host to autograph signings by former NHLers Wendel Clark, Brad May and Kelly Hrudy starting at 3 p.m. Thursday and Trevor Linden, Lanny McDonald and Mark Napier on Friday starting at 3 p.m.

The display is part of the lead up to Scotiabank's Hockey Day in Canada celebration on Feb. 12.

Loewen recalled that the set he has put on display came together so many years ago by chance.

He had 99 cards but was missing one – Tim Horton.

That was a card, in all his dealings, he had never seen.

At an outdoor rink in Steinbach, he ran into a kid from town he had never seen before, a rarity, he pointed out.

The kids there traded cards around a stove where they laced up their skates.

"That's where I found Tim Horton,” Loewen said.

That must have blown your mind.

"It did. It absolutely did,” he said. "I had never seen the card, and I had been trading for months by this time, but nobody could remember what the card looked like.

Some people knew who the player was, but I have never seen it.”

Loewen doesn't know what the entire set is worth these days.

"I don't really know, right now. I checked the value 10, 12 years ago, and the value was in the neighbourhood of $5,000 or $6,000 then,” he said.

"Most of my friends have not seen these cards. I almost never bring them out.

Usually it's because I never think about it, but I've kept them in a very safe place.”

He remembered having the entire set around 1980, when his mother, during a move, found the cards packed in Velveeta Cheese boxes.

Loewen entrusted the cards to his nephew, Leigh Broesky, 10 at the time, with the cards, until he traveled home to retrieve them in 1997.

"Certainly, I had forgotten about them – long forgotten about them,” Loewen said.

Now that they're back in his life, he said he will likely give them to his grandsons, rather than cash them in.

And, after all these years, he still questions his motivation in collecting.

"A lot of boys gave up long before their sets were finished. I don't know why I had this drive to finish the whole set. It was just there; it's just how I was. To this day, I don't know why I was like that.”