Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Last week, on my Facebook page, Pastor Scott asked if I knew if Fleer had planned a second series of football cards in 1963, since the 1963 checklist says “1st SERIES.” I told Scott that I had not noticed the label before, but that it was reasonable to surmise that Fleer had planned another series. Fleer printed two series in 1961–one of NFL players and one of AFL players–and perhaps the company had hopes of doing the same in 1963. (For more on Fleer’s early 1960s football cards, see F is for Fleer.)

The 1963 checklist is also curious for other reasons:

• It’s the first and only checklist that Fleer printed in its four years of producing football cards.
• It is the only card in the 1963 set that is not numbered.
• On an uncut sheet, the player cards were in a predictable order, by number, but the checklist was stuck in the middle, displacing two of the player cards. (You can see this on my virtual uncut 1963 Fleer sheet.)
• It is a short print (and so are the two cards it displaced on the sheet).
• It is orange and green, though the base color of the player cards is red. Checklists typically have the same color scheme as the rest of the set.

To me, it looks like a new Fleer manager came in just before production and said, “Hey, Topps has checklists, so we need to throw one in there, too. And maybe we’ll have a second series, so put ‘first series’ on it.” And then they left the kiddies hanging.

Fleer wasn’t the only company that had football card plans grander than they could execute. As I wrote in N is for National Chicle, the backs of 1935 National Chicle cards say “one of 240 football players with playing tips,” but there are only 36 cards in the set. There were only eight pro teams at the time, so 240 cards would have covered practically every player in the league. As I said in the article, I suspect that the company planned to include college players and coaches in their set, as well.