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.

One of the perks of this business is that I often get notes from players’ relatives and friends. Occasionally I even hear from the players themselves. Yesterday I got an email from Lee Folkins, who played for the Packers, Cowboys, and Steelers from 1961 to 1965. What he told me was interesting: he said that the signature on his 1964 Wheaties Stamp is not his. Pictured here is the stamp in question.

The signatures on the Wheaties Stamps are facsimiles, printed right on the stamps, but because the handwriting is different from stamp to stamp, I presumed that they were copies of the players’ actual signatures. Apparently not all of them are. This isn’t too surprising: Topps printed the stamps for Wheaties, and Topps was known to alter players’ images, even before the 1970s airbrushing era. (For some examples, see my article on the inset photos on 1962 Topps cards.) It’s not much of a stretch to go from altering images to faking simulated autographs.

I had actually wondered how Topps got signatures for all of the players in a large set, considering that they often didn’t even seem to have good photos of all the players. For at least one set, 1970 Supers, Topps didn’t even attempt to obtain the players’ real signatures: they used the same script for the facsimile signature on every card. (See my article on the 1970 Topps Super set.) For other sets–the 1964 Wheaties Stamps, for example–I suppose that they used whatever authentic signatures they had, then employees created signatures for the rest.

I don’t know much about autographs, so I did a quick internet search to see if it’s commonly known that some of the facsimile signatures on vintage cards were faked. I didn’t find anything that explicitly said so, but I did find this paragraph on thehistorybank.com:

Finally, remember that Topps’ player facsimile autographs on cards are just that—facsimiles with no intent of looking real. Interestingly, Topps put facsimile signatures on cards for years, but don’t try to “authenticate” using those signatures. They often do not match the real thing. Note here that Marshall’s and Averill’s hand-signed signatures match the facsimile signatures fairly closely, but Narleski’s ballpoint signature bears no resemblance to the printed signature on the card.

Unfortunately, the image in the History Bank article is too small to compare the two Ray Narleski signatures, but perhaps Narleski’s ballpoint signature bears no resemblance to the printed signature because the printed signature isn’t his. An autograph collector would certainly know more about this than I do. Can anyone else provide comments or examples?

Back to Mr. Folkins. Besides his Wheaties stamp, he appeared on one card that I know of: the 1964 Philadelphia card shown here. Both his stamp and card were issued the year after he made the Pro Bowl. All of the players on the 1964 Wheaties Stamps, in fact, were 1963 Pro Bowlers. You can read more about the Wheaties Stamps and accompanying album in a previous blog article.

Back in January I posted an article about an autographed 1963 Fleer Billy Shaw card that I picked up on eBay. Well, one collector has done 80 cards better: he has autographed copies of 81 of the 89 cards in the 1963 Fleer set. Yesterday he posted pictures of all of them on the Collectors Universe message board. Check them out!

I’m not an autograph expert, but the jewel in his set appears to be the checklist, which is in great shape and inscribed by Lance Alworth. (You need to scroll down in his post to see it.) The checklist is the toughest card in the set, because its thin borders make it hard to find well-centered. It is also a short print, as are two other cards in the set. They’re not as short-printed as the price guides indicate, though. See my 1963 Fleer virtual uncut sheet for an explanation.

A common error on vintage football cards was spelling a player’s name Charlie when he spelled it Charley, or spelling it Charley when he spelled it Charlie. I don’t know how the guys named Charles chose which spelling to use, but it appears that the card companies just flipped a coin. And as you can see on the back of the 1966 Philadelphia Charley Taylor card shown here, sometimes they used both!

My Beckett catalog identifies most cards with errors, including Charlie/Charley errors. Unfortunately, it appears that Beckett got some wrong, too. (My catalog is from 2005, but I’ll bet this hasn’t changed.) Charley Johnson’s name, it says, is spelled Charlie, and Charlie King’s name, it says, is spelled Charley. The players’ own signatures, though, show that my Beckett is wrong. Shown here is Charley Johnson’s autograph on a 1967 Philadelphia card and Charlie King’s fascimile signature on his 1969 Tresler Comet Bengals card.

With my Beckett proving unreliable, I turned instead to pro-football-reference.com to help with the Charlie/Charley discrepancies. That site had both Johnson and King correct, and I have found it reliable for all other information, as well.

Following are links to the Charlie/Charley misspellings I have identified in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. It is possible that I missed some, so if you find another, leave a comment or drop me a line.

• Charlies misspelled Charley
• Charleys (and a Charle) misspelled Charlie

Last Saturday evening I was drinking beer and cruising the web, and I saw this autographed 1963 Fleer Billy Shaw card on eBay. That’s cool, I thought, and the price seemed right, so I hit the Buy-it-Now button. So now I have the beginning of an autograph collection.

This is Billy’s second card, his first being his 1962 Fleer rookie card, a tough one to find in high grade. Billy is the only pro football hall-of-famer to have played only in the AFL. Other AFL players have made it to the hall-of-fame, of course, but each of them also played in the NFL at some time, mostly after the AFL-NFL merger.

My new Shaw card happens to be the version with the red stripe on the bottom on the reverse. 1963 Fleer cards with numbers divisible by four were printed both with and without the stripe, and Shaw is card #28. I don’t have a Shaw without the stripe, unfortunately, but I do have one of each of card #40, Jim Norton, pictured below. Like the purple and blue variations of 1963 Topps cards, the striped vs. non-striped variations of 1963 Fleers are not recognized by Beckett, PSA, or any other football card authority that I am aware of.