Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

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.