Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

This week I enhanced the Vintage Football Card Gallery so that I can easily add searches for players who received various honors. Prior to the enhancement, you could search only for Hall of Fame members and Heisman Trophy winners. With the enhancement (and after I do some data entry), you can search for cards of College Hall of Famers, Most Valuable Players, members of each team’s hall of fame, and so on.

To test the enhancements, I added searches for CFL Hall of Famers, Broncos Ring of Famers, and members of the new Jets Ring of Honor. Over time, I will add the recipients of other awards, as well.

The change appears in two places. The first place is the Advanced Search page, which now has drop-down menus containing all of the various honors. You can pick up to three honors, and the search will find the players who received all of the honors you chose.

The second place the change appears is the search results page. That page now has a column that lists each player’s honors, regardless of the search you did.

Try it out! If you have any requests–or if you find a bug–let me know.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Nearmint Sports Cards

Today I added 1960 Eagles Team Issue Photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are eleven 5×7 prints in the set, and the prints have blank backs.

The composition of the set is easily the oddest I’ve seen. First, Nick Skorich, an assistant coach in 1960, appears in the set, but Buck Shaw, the head coach, doesn’t. (Skorich took over as head coach in 1961.) Second, there are no quarterbacks, running backs, or receivers in the set! Hall of Famers Norm Van Brocklin and Tommy McDonald were both established starters in 1960, but neither is included. Finally, the Eagles had six Pro Bowlers in 1959 (Van Brocklin, McDonald, Jess Richardson, Marion Campbell, Bill Barnes, and Tom Brookshier), they were all still with the team in 1960, and not one of them appears in the set! It’s like the photographer was in a hurry, and he just grabbed the first eleven guys who showed up for practice.

(Speaking of Van Brocklin, this wasn’t the only set from which he was conspicuously absent. In 1958, after nine seasons and six Pro Bowls with the Rams, Van Brocklin was traded to the Eagles. He played three seasons for the Eagles, making the Pro Bowl in each of them, but he did not appear in any of the 1958-1960 Topps football sets. The only card I know of that shows him as an Eagle is his 1963 Stancraft playing card.)

As I’ve said in previous articles, one reason I like team sets is that they usually include players who never appeared on cards in mainstream issues. In this set, those players are Howard Keys and John Wittenborn, both offensive linemen. Keys was a rookie in 1960, and he played for the Eagles for four seasons. Wittenborn spent ten years in the NFL and AFL, with the 49ers, Eagles, and Oilers.

My favorite photo in the set is the one shown here, Jimmy Carr. Carr was a defensive back, but he could have been the drum major!

Oh, and incidentally, the Eagles won the NFL championship in 1960.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Nearmint Sports Cards

Earlier this week, Les Richter and Chris Hanburger were named the 2011 senior finalists for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. You can read the announcement and see the players’ biographies on the Hall of Fame site.

Richter’s two rookie cards are a 1952 Bowman Large and a 1952 Bowman Small, issued the year he graduated from the University of California. (The 1952 Bowman Small is pictured here.) He served in the Army for two years after graduating, and he joined the Rams in 1954. Richter played for the Rams from 1954 to 1962, and he appeared on at least one football card in each year of his career–unusual for a defensive player. He passed away earlier this year.

Hanburger’s rookie card is a 1967 Philadelphia, issued in the third year of his career. After that, he appeared on at least one card or stamp each year until he retired after the 1976 season.

Judging by recent history, it is likely that at least one of the two senior nominees will be elected to the Hall. The Hall of Fame’s senior nominees page shows that at least one senior candidate has been elected each year since 1998. Since 2004, when the senior committee began nominating two players per year, 11 of the 14 nominees have been elected. One nominee, Bob Hayes, was not elected in 2004, but he was nominated again in 2009 and elected that year.

You can see all of Les Richter’s cards and all of Chris Hanburger’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Michael Thomas

Yesterday I added 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These are patches that you could (and still can!) iron onto your clothes to impress your friends. Beckett calls them “Fabric Cards,” but they aren’t cards at all: they’re cloth, not cardboard, and they’re floppy.

There are 35 patches in the set, with 22 of the 26 NFL teams represented. Oddly, there are no Bengals, Oilers, Eagles, or Rams in the set, but there are four Chargers, and the Chargers were a losing team at the time. Perhaps Deacon Jones was supposed to represent the Rams in the set, but he was traded to the Chargers before the 1972 season.

Most of the NFLPA patches have a blue background, but there are six with a pink background, one with white, one with yellow, and one with green. I don’t think the colors are significant, but the distribution is odd, so perhaps I am missing something. There are no logos or trademarks on the patches, but John Brockington and Jim Plunkett appear in their College All-Star jerseys, complete with stars on the shoulders. Brockington and Plunkett also appear in their All-Star jerseys on their 1972 Topps cards, but Topps airbrushed the stars off of them.

According to Beckett, the NFLPA patches were sold from vending machines. When researching them, I found a couple of related items on eBay: a promo package and a vending machine display, pictured below. Interestingly, the list of players on the vending machine display does not match the list of players in the set: some players in the set are not on the display, and some players on the display are not in the set. Pity the poor young Bob Lilly fan, who kept chucking quarters into the machine, trying to get a patch of his hero!

• Find 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons on eBay.

The 1972 Topps football card set is full of bad airbrushing. (See my earlier posts on John Brockington and MacArthur Lane and on College All-Star jerseys in the 1972 Topps set.) Here’s another example: Deacon Jones in red. The Rams traded Jones to the Chargers in 1972, and Topps apparently didn’t want to show him in his old Rams jersey. But the Rams wore blue, and the Chargers wore blue, so how did Jones end up in red? Did the artist see “Chargers” and think it said “Cardinals”? Did he just finish Randy Vataha and not want to put his pen down? Who knows, maybe he just thought Jones would look good in red. And he does, doesn’t he?

Speaking of the Chargers, the two 1972 Chargers cards below, Dennis Partee and Jerry LeVias, also caught my eye the other day. I thought that the players’ helmets, with just numbers on them, looked strange. So I visited the Helmet Project web site and found that the Chargers helmets of the time had both lightning bolts and the players’ numbers on them. Topps airbrushed the trademarked lightning bolts away, but left the numbers behind.

Last year, in an article called “A Cup of Coffee–and a Card,” I showed cards of a few players who had played exactly one game in the NFL or AFL. Last week, when I added 1950 Topps Felt Backs to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, I found a card of another such player: Don McKissack. McKissack played in exactly one NFL game, for the Dallas Texans in 1952, two years after he was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams. If you count variations, he appeared on two cards in the 1950 Felt Back set: a brown one and a yellow one.

Topps printed 25 of the 100 cards in the 1950 Felt Back set in both brown and yellow, so a “master set” contains 125 cards. In all of the price guides I have seen, common brown cards have been priced the same as common red, green, and blue cards in the set, and common yellow cards are have been priced higher. PSA’s population report, however, indicates that the price guides have it backward: in each case, PSA has graded fewer of the brown version than the yellow one, typically around half as many. It appears that the brown cards were short printed compared to the others, and the brown cards, not the yellow ones, should carry the premium.

• Find 1950 Topps Felt Backs on eBay.

Steve DeLong, who played defensive end and defensive tackle from 1965 to 1972 for the San Diego Chargers and Chicago Bears, passed away on Wednesday. DeLong made the Pro Bowl once, in 1969, with the Chargers. Prior to his pro career, DeLong was a standout at Tennessee, and he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1993. His obituary at knoxnews.com includes some nice photos from his college days.

DeLong appeared on a lot of football cards for a lineman. Pictured here is his rookie card, a 1965 Topps “tallboy.” Topps apparently liked this image, because they used it on his cards for the next four years, also. On one of them, his 1966 card, Topps airbrushed DeLong’s left shoulder off, making for a strange picture.

You can see all of Steve DeLong’s football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Dom Moselle, who played halfback and defensive back from 1950 to 1954 for the Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers, and Philadelphia Eagles, passed away yesterday. He was a rookie on the Browns team that won the NFL Championship in 1950, their first year in the league. Moselle also spent one season, 1955, with the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL.

Moselle is the only University of Wisconsin-Superior alumnus who appears on cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Pictured here is his 1952 Bowman Small card; he also appeared on a 1952 Bowman Large card, identical except for its size.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Michael Thomas

Today I put together another virtual uncut sheet, this time for 1958 Topps football cards. Once again, the cards that are scarcest in high grade are on the edges of the sheet.

(Click on the image to see the whole sheet.)

In an article in April, I wrote that Lee Folkins had told me that the facsimile signature on his 1964 Kellogg’s stamp was not in his handwriting. Today I noticed that some Kahn’s Wieners cards also have faked facsimile signatures on them. Below are the 1962 and 1963 Kahn’s cards of Fran Tarkenton. I don’t know if either card shows a true representation of Tarkenton’s signature, but you can certainly tell that at least one does not.

I looked around on eBay and found other Kahn’s cards of the same player that have obviously different handwriting on them. The facsimile signatures on Ernie Stautner‘s 1961 and 1963 Kahn’s cards are much different from one another (look at the t’s), as are the ones on Lou Michaels‘s 1962 and 1963 cards (look at the leading L). And the signatures on Jim Brown‘s 1961, 1962, and 1963 cards all look different to me. It took me just a few minutes to find these, so I am sure it would be easy to find more examples.

I wonder: did the people who designed these cards intend for people to think that the signatures were copies of the players’ real signatures? If they wanted to fool people, I would think that they would have used the same signatures from year to year. Perhaps they wanted to give the impression that the signatures were copies of the real thing, but it didn’t matter enough to put a real effort into it. After all, the cards came free with wieners.