Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Andy Robustelli, a defensive end from 1951 to 1964 for the Los Angeles Rams and New York Giants, passed away this morning. The Connecticut Post’s web site has a report of his death, including numerous photos. Robustelli was a seven-time Pro Bowler, and he played on NFL Championship teams with the Rams in 1951 and the Giants in 1956. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971.

The card shown here is one of Robustelli’s rookie cards, a 1952 Bowman Small. His other rookie card is a 1952 Bowman Large, which is identical except for its size.

• See all of Andy Robustelli’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
• See Andy Robustelli’s career stats at pro-football-reference.com.

Here are the interesting eBay auctions I bookmarked this week. My bookmark folder has been filling up quickly!

• These are really sharp: a complete set of 1962 Tang NFL team photos. Scroll down to the bottom to see more of the teams.
• I loooove 1970 Topps Super Glossies! Here is a PSA 10 of O.J. Simpson, the key card in the set.
• 1969 Partridge Meats is a multi-sport set of cards of players from Cincinnati’s pro teams. (See Beckett’s description.) Four of the cards are football players, and two are listed on eBay this week: Bob Johnson and Bob Trumpy.
• This 1957 Topps Eddie Lebaron is priced nicely for a PSA 7, but did PSA miss an OC?
• Here’s a great postcard of Paul Hornung, running for paydirt.
• Joe Namath’s 1965 Jets Team Issue photo shows him throwing a jump pass!
• 1966 Philadelphia wax pack wrappers say that there was a tattoo insert inside. There are a few of the tattoo inserts up for auction this week. You have to look closely: the little football tattoos have NFL team names printed on them.
• Finally, here’s one for you miscut lovers: a miscut 1956 Topps Joe Schmidt rookie that otherwise looks ExMt.

Duke Iversen, a back and linebacker from 1947 to 1951 for the New York Giants and New York Yanks, has passed away. He was 91. There is a recent article about Iversen’s career at petaluma360.com.

Iversen appeared on one football card, the 1948 Bowman card pictured here.

You can see Duke Iversen’s NFL career statistics at pro-football-reference.com.

Here are the interesting eBay listings for vintage football cards that I bookmarked this week:

• A full uncut sheet of 1970 Topps Super cards. For help identifying the players, see my virtual uncut sheet.
• Ever see players’ wives on football cards? Check out this lot of 1968 American Oil Mr. and Mrs. football cards.
• Here are items I’ve never seen before: Famous Redskins matchbook covers, from around 1959.
• This looks like a nice card for the grade: an SGC 40 1926 Shotwell’s Red Grange card.
• Seller deckhand200 has a bunch of vintage wax packs listed, including a few from the 1950s.
• Seller cocicoco, who always has lots of great obscure football collectibles, has a bunch of 1966 Green Bay Packers Williams Portraits for sale. Included is an original envelope, picturing Jerry Kramer.
• Another oddball item, a: Sid Luckman Bread for Health label.
• Finally, a badly cut fake 1957 Topps Bart Starr rookie card. I don’t get it: who would bid on this?

I was looking at some 1969 Topps cards today, and I ran across this Marv Woodson card. When I read the cartoon on the back, I thought, wow, now that has to be a record! So I did a search for the 1967 Pro Bowl, and I found a nice article about it. The article, it turned out, didn’t support the cartoon; it said Woodson’s team, the NFL East, had a total of four interceptions in the game. I then checked Woodson’s page at pro-football-reference.com and got the real story: Woodson had seven interceptions during the 1967 season, and he also made the Pro Bowl that year. The cartoonist sort of contracted those two accomplishments.

Though I don’t often look at the cartoons, this is the second big error I have found in a cartoon on a Topps card. The other was on Homer Jones’s 1968 Topps card, which said that “Homer Defeated the Russians in the 1960 Olympics.” As I wrote in an earlier blog post, Jones never competed in the Olympics.

So now I’m skeptical: Did Butch Byrd really love to read detective stories in his spare time? Did Roy Jefferson really dabble in investments after football season? Did Ron McDole really play paddle-racquets to stay in condition? I’ll check my facts before quoting the cartoonist!

I added a new feature to the eBay Sports Card Finder today: a way to exclude a particular seller’s listings with a single click. If you find that some seller’s listings are cluttering up your search results, you can now click a link on any of his listings and filter them all out. You can repeat the process to exclude the listings of up to six sellers, and you can save your searches by adding them to your browser’s bookmarks or favorites.

While I was in the code, I also made the Toolhaus link for each seller more prominent. Toolhaus sifts through all of an eBay user’s feedback and shows you just the negative and neutral entries, instead of making you scroll through all the positive ones. (Warning: for a seller with a lot of feedback, it can be slow.)

Finally, an older feature is also worth mentioning: the Sports Card Finder also lets you limit your searches to auctions that have one or more bids. Looking just at auctions with bids can give you a bit of assurance that the items are worth the listing prices.

Give it a whirl! If you find a bug or have a suggestion, let me know.

Here are a few notable or unusual items that are on my eBay watch list this week. If you like this, let me know, and I’ll try to do it each week.

• A PSA 8 1967 Philadelphia Green Bay Packers team card–last I looked, at $360!
• A full, though worn, uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards. (See my virtual 1960 Fleer uncut sheet to identify the cards.)
• A full set of 1969 Drenks Potato Chips Green Bay Packers Pins.
• A 1960 Bell Brand Rams Lou Michaels card that’s still in its wrapper–the first I’ve seen, I believe.

See my current eBay listings, too!

I recently put some 1969 Topps football cards up for sale, including this one, Tom Vaughn of the Lions. The Lions logo that Topps used in this set has always looked familiar to me, so yesterday I did some searching. I believe I found what I was thinking of: a Ford Mustang logo from around that time. This might be obvious to Detroit fans, but it appears to me that the designer of the Lions logo gave a nod to the city’s main industry. (The image of the Mustang logo is from motortopia.com.)

This card happens to show Vaughn in my favorite football card pose, where the player is about to put on his helmet. For more examples, see My Favorite Pose, More of My Favorite Pose, and Still More of My Favorite Post.

Today I added 1964 Kahn’s Wieners cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Kahn’s, which is still in business, included football cards in packages of wieners each fall from 1959 to 1964. Only the 1964 set is in color, and they are great looking cards.

There are 53 cards in the 1964 Kahn’s set, with all 14 NFL teams of the time represented. Because Kahn’s distributed their products in the Cincinnati region (and since the Bengals had not yet arrived), the company put a disproportionate number of Cleveland Browns in the set: 9 of the 53 cards. One of the Browns cards, Paul Warfield, is a pre-rookie card, so I will be adding it to my pre-rookie card page. Warfield’s rookie card is in the 1965 Philadelphia set.

A big thanks to Mike Ford for providing images for this set.