Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

I’ll bet I’ve looked at Del Shofner’s 1960 Topps football card a hundred times, and yesterday I finally noticed that his image on the card is reversed. Here it is alongside his 1961 Topps card. The images on the two cards appear to be from the same photo session, and if you compare the numbers and lines on Shofner’s jersey, you can see that the image on the 1960 card is backward. Shofner wore number 29 for his four seasons with the Rams.

At least three more 1960 Topps football cards also have reversed images: Bill Wade, Doug Atkins, and Frank Varrichione. I have seen a few more examples in other sets, but the 1960 Topps set has the most, by far. I thought that maybe there was a pattern to the errors on the uncut sheet, but the cards were not together on the sheet. I guess someone working at Topps in 1960 simply wasn’t paying attention.

As I wrote last week, one of my readers pointed out that the player on the cover of the San Francisco 49ers 1969 Topps Mini-Card Album is Joe Walton, and that the same image appeared in the inset photo of Walton’s 1962 Topps football card. This made me curious, so I checked to see if other inset photos from 1962 Topps cards had been reused on 1969 Mini-Card Albums. Sure enough, I found a few:

First, the image of Bart Starr on the Green Bay Packers Mini-Card Album appeared in the inset of Starr’s 1962 Topps card.

Next, the image of John Unitas on the Baltimore Colts Mini-Card Album was also used in the inset photo of Zeke Bratkowski’s 1962 Topps card. Topps changed Unitas’s number 19 to Bratkowski’s number 12 on the 1962 Topps card, as I noted in an earlier article.

The image on the Minnesota Vikings Mini-Card Album also appeared in the inset photo of Don Perkins’s 1962 Topps card, but the player’s number is different. I’m guessing that the image was altered for the 1962 card, so the player probably isn’t Perkins.

The image on the Denver Broncos Mini-Card Album is the same one used in the inset photo on Ollie Matson’s 1962 Topps card, but again, the player’s number is different. Matson was number 33 with the Rams, so it appears that the image on his 1962 card was altered. Does anyone recognize the player?

Finally, the image on the Washington Redskins Mini-Card Album is the same as the inset on John Aveni’s 1962 Topps card. Again, the player’s number appears to have been changed on the 1962 Topps card. I believe that the player is Dick James, who wore number 47 for the Redskins in 1961.

Given that there are so many altered jersey numbers on the 1962 Topps cards, I wonder how many of the inset photos actually picture the right player. Not many, I’ll bet.

While doing some web searches the other day, I ran across a long page of photos of Bo McMillin. McMillin was an All-American quarterback at Centre College in 1919 and 1921, and he played a few games in the NFL with the Milwaukee Badgers and Cleveland Indians. After his playing days, he had a long coaching career, including four seasons as an NFL head coach. There is a short biography of McMillin on the Centre College web site.

Reading the commentary in the long page of photos, I learned that McMillin’s name is misspelled on both his 1955 Topps All-American card and his 1926 Spalding Champions card. It is spelled correctly in my Beckett price guides, but the cards are not noted as errors, so the errors were news to me. I also learned from the photo page that the image on McMillin’s 1926 Spalding card is not McMillin, but another player. If you put the card next to one of his other photos, it is clear that the Spalding card pictures someone else. Does anyone recognize the impostor?

Having learned about the mistakes, I fixed the spelling of McMillin’s name on my two web sites, noted the errors on his individual cards, and added his 1926 Spalding card to my page of football cards that picture the wrong player. Whew!

A while back, someone told me that Adrian Young’s 1971 Topps card pictures not Adrian Young, but Rick Duncan. Today I searched for pictures of the two players to see for myself. As far as I know, neither of the players appeared on another standard football card, but I did find pictures of them on a few other items listed on eBay.

Rick Duncan, a kicker and punter, played in four games over three seasons for the Broncos, Eagles, and Lions. He had been out of football for two years by the time he showed up on Young’s card. Topps apparently used a photo of Duncan from 1968, because he is pictured in an Eagles uniform, and 1968 was the season he spent with the Eagles. He evidently had a tryout with the Bears in 1967, because I found a press photo of him and Bruce Alford in Bears uniforms.

Adrian Young, a linebacker, played for six seasons with the Eagles, Lions, and Bears. I found two items that picture the real Adrian Young: a 1969 Eagles team issue photo and a 1972 NFLPA stamp. (Young is in the bottom row, second from the right.) I’d say there’s not much resemblance between Young and Duncan.

Coincidentally, while searching for a photo of Young, I learned that he will be inducted into the USC Athletic Hall of Fame in 2012. I also found an article that says he once intercepted four passes in a game against Notre Dame. Unfortuately, the article uses the image from Young’s 1971 Topps card–the one that pictures Rick Duncan!

For more vintage football cards that picture the wrong player, see my Mistaken Identities page and my blog article about errors in the inset photos on 1962 Topps football cards.

Last week I added 1961 Kahn’s Wieners cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 36 cards in this Kahn’s set, with 32 being Browns and Steelers. Kahn’s was (and still is) based in Cincinnati, and Cleveland and Pittsburgh were the closest pro teams at the time.

The other four players in the set–Frank Varrichione, Will Renfro, Jimmy Orr, and Joe Lewis–were with either Cleveland or Pittsburgh the previous season. It appears that Kahn’s intended to make the set all Browns and Steelers, but these players moved, so Kahn’s simply changed the teams on the backs of their cards.

Two of the cards in the set, Tom Tracy and Larry Krutko, have their images swapped. This is especially unfortunate for Krutko, because I believe that this is his only football card. (For more old football cards that picture the wrong player, see my Mistaken Identities page.)

The set includes a pre-rookie card of Gene Hickerson. Hickerson had more pre-rookie cards than any other Hall of Famer I can think of: he appeared in the 1959 through 1962 Kahn’s sets, and on a 1962 Post Cereal card.

Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided images for several of the Kahn’s sets.

Happy Interesting eBay Auctions of the Week Day!

• First up is a 1949 Silber’s Bakery card of Dick Barwegan, from the AAFC’s Baltimore Colts. (His name is misspelled on the card.) This is one of the few Silber’s cards I have seen for sale. The set also includes a Y.A. Tittle pre-rookie card, which I wrote about in an earlier article.
• wwwprpsportscom is selling a bunch of individual 1959 Bell Brand Rams cards, another tough regional set, .
• The pre-rookie card of the week is a 1948 Kellogg’s Pep Lou Groza card. (Groza’s rookie card is a beautiful 1950 Bowman.)
• Here are a couple of sharp 1951 Berk Ross “doubles,” cards that were not separated at the perforations. As you can see, this was a multi-sport set.
• Holey Bronco Nagurski rookie card!
• This week’s crinkled 1960 Kahn’s Jim Brown card looks a lot like last week’s crinkled 1960 Kahn’s Jim Brown card, but the price has gone up.
• Another very tough regional card: a 1969 Fairmont Dairy Len Dawson card, still on the milk carton. You can see many more Fairmont Dairy Chiefs cards and information about them on the net54 message board.
• Here’s a full set of 1956 Parkhurst CFL cards. The 1956 Parkhursts came undeveloped, and you rubbed a special piece of paper on them to develop them. There is also an undeveloped Bud Grant card on eBay, as well as a square of the special paper.
• Finally, the oddball item of the week: a full set of 1967 New Orleans Saints Doubloons!

Last week, while I was scanning 1969 Glendale Stamps for the Vintage Football Card Gallery, I noticed that the Bob Griese and Mel Farr stamps have reversed images. The players’ jersey numbers were what clued me in: Griese wore number 12 for the Dolphins, and Farr wore number 24 for the Lions. I’ll bet that there are more reversed images in the set, but most of the players’ jersey numbers are not visible, so it is hard to tell.

There are several other reversed images in the Gallery: Charley Trippi on one variation of his 1948 Kellogg’s Pep card; Bill Wade, Doug Atkins, and Frank Varrichione on their 1960 Topps cards, and Dick Butkus and Joe Namath on variations of their 1972 NFLPA Vinyl Stickers.

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!

Yesterday I added 1972 NFLPA Vinyl Stickers to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. A number of places on the web say that the stickers were sold from vending machines, but I couldn’t find a picture of such a machine. I was a little surprised at that. The stickers are bigger than standard-sized cards, and I’m curious about how they were packaged for vending.

There are twenty players in the set of stickers, with two variations. The Joe Namath and Dick Butkus stickers each come two ways: with a reversed image of the player’s head, and with the player’s head oriented correctly. To guess which stickers had the reversed images, I compared them to the images on 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons.

I can’t say I am fond of these stickers. The big-real-head-on-little-cartoon-body design also appears on other cards–1938 Goudey baseball cards, for example–and I have always found it a bit creepy. Also, the stickers don’t include the players’ teams, and some don’t even have the players in the correct team colors. Paul Warfield in green and John Brockington in purple? That must have alarmed young Dolphins and Packers fans!

For more oddball football cards and collectibles, see the Oddball page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Woodley Lewis appeared on three Topps football cards, and Topps spelled his name differently on all three. In 1958, he was Woodly. In 1959, he was Woody. In 1960, Topps finally got it right and spelled his name Woodley. The card companies misspelled plenty of players’ names (see a previous blog article, E is for Error Cards), but I can’t think of another player who had his name spelled three different ways.

As I usually do when I write about a player, I did a little web search for Lewis, and I turned up a couple of nice non-card images. One, on the University of Oregon web site, pictures him in the middle of a broad jump. Another, on flickr, shows him in front of the Sportsman Bowl, a bowling alley that he owned after retiring from football. I also found an old matchbook for Woodley Lewis’s Sportsman Bowl on eBay.

In an article a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that Rick Redman’s 1965 Topps card doesn’t picture Rick Redman. In a comment on that article, my friend Todd, from whom I learned about the Redman error, pointed out that Art Powell’s 1965 Topps card pictures the wrong player, too. So I added that card to my Mistaken Identities page, as well. Somehow, I don’t think it will be the last one.

Todd, in his own blog, recently wrote a nice article about Art Powell and his older brother Charlie. Charlie Powell played for the 49ers and Raiders, and he was a world-class boxer, to boot. Check it out!

You can see all of Art Powell’s cards and all of Charlie Powell’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. You can also search for all of the error cards–or at least the ones I have identified so far.

I learned from Todd Tobias’s new blog, Tales from the American Football League, that Rick Redman’s rookie card, the 1965 Topps card shown here, does not picture Rick Redman. So, if it’s not Rick Redman, who is it? Well, Todd has a nice story to tell about it, so I’ll direct you to his article.

A surprising number of vintage football cards picture the wrong player. I keep a list of them, and Mr. Redman’s card is just the latest addition. You can see all of them on my Mistaken Identities page.

There are two cards on eBay this week that I seldom see for sale: a 1955 Topps All-American Whizzer White card with Gaynell Tinsley’s bio, and a Gaynell Tinsley card with Whizzer White’s bio. Both were graded 8, or NM/MT, by PSA. It apparently didn’t take Topps long to correct their error in 1955, because these two cards are much scarcer than the corrected versions. The back of each error card is shown here. Clicking on an image will take you to eBay and show you the front, as well.

Years ago, when I first read about these errors, I assumed that the backs of the cards were swapped in their entirety. Wrong-back cards are fairly common; you can see a few of them on my 1960 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page. It was only recently that I learned that only the bio sections of the White and Tinsley cards are swapped. This is why the descriptions in the price guides say Gaynell Tinsley (Whizzer White bio) and Whizzer White (Gaynell Tinsley bio). Duh.

I have always thought that the corrected Whizzer White card was undervalued, considering that it is his rookie card, and that he served as a U.S. Supreme Court justice for 31 years after his football career. White’s card sells for only about double the price of a common in the 1955 All-American set, and the price guides put it at two or three times the price of a common. His error card sells for much more, but that is because of its scarcity, not his fame.

For more on the 1955 Topps All-American set, see A is for All-Americans.

Yesterday I added 1948 Kellogg’s Pep football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The five cards are part of a 42-card sport and entertainment set that was distributed in boxes of Kellogg’s Pep cereal. You can see the composition of the set on PSA’s web site, but you have to look in two places, since PSA split the set into athletes and celebrities. Apparently not many trading card sets contain both.

The cards are small, about half the height of a standard trading card. There is one variation among the football cards: some instances of Charley Trippi’s card have the image reversed, and some have it corrected. The Trippi card shown here has the reversed image, though I’m not sure how to tell. Perhaps by how his chinstrap is fastened?

Trippi’s card shows him in his College All-Star uniform–note the stars on the shoulders. He played in the game five times: four as a college all-star, and one as a Chicago Cardinal, after the Cardinals won the 1947 NFL championship. The College All-Star Game site has a photo of Trippi in action in 1945, the year he was the All-Stars’ MVP.

Another notable card in the 1948 Pep set is a Lou Groza pre-rookie card, pictured here. Groza’s rookie card is a 1950 Bowman. Check out my pre-rookie card page for more pre-rookies.

There is currently an empty Kellogg’s Pep box for sale on eBay that shows some of the 1948 cards on the front. If you squint, you can see some of the football cards listed on one of the side panels. The box, which the seller says is the first cereal box to show a sports figure on the front (namely, George Mikan), is listed for a mere $2599.

• Search eBay for: 1948 Kellogg’s Pep cards
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Charley Trippi, Lou Groza

I mentioned in F is for Fleer that the logo is reversed on every one of the 1961 Fleer Green Bay Packers cards. Fleer didn’t employ any geography majors, evidently. Other than the logo problem, the cards are great. It appears that all of the photos except Bill Forester’s were taken on the same day, since the players are all wearing the same sweater, and most of the images show the stadium in the background.

Here are a few of them, all Hall of Famers. You can see the whole 1961 Fleer Packers team set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. (Incidentally, some collectors consider the Jim Taylor card pictured here and his 1961 Topps card to be his true rookie cards, since his 1959 and 1960 Topps cards picture another Jim Taylor.)

Here is the Packers logo in its correct orientation, with Green Bay and Door County in the east, from Chris Creamer’s sportslogos.net. Later variations of the logo, such as the one on the 1967 Philadelphia Packers insignia card, had dots on the little Wisconsin map for both Green Bay and Milwaukee, since the Packers played home games in both cities.