When it comes to financial success, I'm no Rockefeller, Gates or even a DeLorean. I failed to pocket my first million by 30. When Fortune or Forbes lists the wealthiest Earthlings, I am rightfully overlooked. But in the kingdom of eBay, I am a prince of finance. From Argentina to Norway to Piscataway, thousands have bought my '60s and '70s memorabilia: old postcards, vintage photos, even a piece of the original Hollywood sign. My clients know me as Jayboy, a modern alchemist turning schlock into gold.

A monetary success of any type, much less a killing on the memorabilia market once seemed beyond my feeble skills. My career began inauspiciously in 1970 in my suburban Boston hometown of Randolph, Massachusetts. I had just celebrated my 10th birthday. In addition to a wicked-cool AM transistor radio, I received a few checks. Mom, a child of the Depression, decided this was a ripe time to test my frugality. Unwisely, she let me loose in Westgate Mall. I snatched up a joy buzzer, some candy, and a cardboard sign in psychedelic colors that read "Sock It To Me." Mom reviewed my haul and told me, "You'll never know the value of a dollar." She ripped up the sign for dramatic effect.

Three decades later, Mom is no longer with us, but she'd be gobsmacked to see how those lowly artifacts have made her son a player in the memorabilia market.  Despite the mall trauma, I continued to buy stuff through the '60s and '70s. Nowadays, countless doctors treat obsessive collecting. But my condition held no psychological puzzle. I simply collected stuff because I was a short, chubby nerd with thick glasses, a whiffle cut and no friends. I wasn't buying with an eye towards profit and wrapping comic books and baseball cards in plastic for future sales. I simply wanted to dull the pain of loneliness.

If it existed, I collected it. Comic books (I had 900, from DC to Marvel, Archie to Gold Key, Harvey to Classics Illustrated). Bottle caps. Hardy Boys books. Marbles. Bubblegum cards. Top 30 lists from Boston's WRKO radio. Golden Magazine. Mad. Charlie Brown paperbacks. Teen magazines like 16, Tiger Beat, 16 Spec, and Fave! (More about that later.) And gum cards. Not only baseball cards, but football, hockey, and basketball, although I had no interest in sports beyond a two-month stint in Little League. I bought every gum-card series spun off from a TV show: "Batman," "The Flying Nun," "The Mod Squad," "Dark Shadows," "Laugh-In," "Welcome Back, Kotter," "Good Times." I memorized names, dates, song titles, celebrity bios. While other friends would lose their collections to overzealous mothers and cleaning sprees, I held on to my out-sized assemblage, and it accompanied me to adult life in New York City. The eBay empire was still years away. So my collection sat in the hall closet of my tenement apartment on Essex Street.

When I stumbled across eBay in 1998, this cyberspace flea market had already been humming along for three years. In that moment, my long, lonely existence as a nerdy collector fell into place. It was time to sell off my childhood. I was doing business with kindred spirits, fellow hoarders, pop culture junkies. I was no computer whiz, but I learned the finer points of scanning from a fellow seller in New Jersey. I learned how to put an item on auction, how to use key words to jazz up the description. The process simply flowed since I already knew the stories behind each item. As a journalist, I made my product descriptions breezy, funny, provocative, and enlightening. The anal-retentive in me kept meticulous records for each sale. In the likelihood that an IRS official is reading this article, I will refrain from sharing my gross income over eight years. But I garnered a profit that would have had Mom eating her words.

Until now, I viewed the business world as a snake pit, where selling goods meant selling your soul. But eBay is free of moral dilemmas, as evidenced by e-mails from elated winners now reunited with childhood talismans. As I closed in on my first $500, I became giddy with possibilities. I began haunting yard sales and flea markets with the eye of a speculator, buying items at bargain costs and turning them around on eBay for a neat profit.  I had also learned that the eBay universe was home to a number of gay men who collected physique photos. They would plunk down $40, $50, $60 for beefcake shots of athletes, soldiers, frat boys, wrestlers. One Saturday morning at a flea market in southern Jersey, I came across a collection of snapshots of American soldiers living in Burma after World War II. The photos included many shirtless Yanks. The lot of 105 photos was priced at $55. I did some quick calculations, smiled at the profit potential, and bought the set. Over the next two months, I sold them individually on eBay, realizing nearly ten times my initial investment. I accomplished similar economic coups when I bought a cache of shirtless shots from a retired celebrity photographer. A collection of 4 x 6-inch color backstage photos of actor Maxwell Caulfield clad only in leather pants was snatched up happily by a gentleman living in Southern England at $80 per shot. (I had spent $4 for each picture.) The aforementioned piece of the original Hollywood sign was gathering dust in a coworker's office and he gladly handed it over. I made $197 on that sale. I couldn't articulate the business principles behind my decisions, and would have made a sorry sight at business school, but I was turning pop culture artifacts (some would say junk) into cash. Mine was a seamless operation: When items failed to sell on eBay I brought them to the flea market in High Falls, where I sat for two seasons.

The golden paint on the palace of eBay has lately shown signs of peeling. The website's wild success has also been its curse. Capitalists and professionals have wrested the game from casual collectors. Auction costs keep climbing.  I no longer enjoy the dizzying prices of eight years ago; unless you're selling something truly rare, you're probably competing with several others selling the same item in any given week. Since I had a finite number of artifacts to sell and have now sold most of them, I have begun weaning myself from eBay. It's been a great ride. Where else would someone of my limited vision and lack of blood-thirst succeed in business? Beyond eBay, I may never again make a financial killing that brings me guilt-free money. But, for a brief time, it was comforting to know that a guileless childhood investment could turn me into a dot.com tycoon.