Nearmint’s Vintage Football Card Blog

My friend Chas sent me this scan today; it’s a 1955 Bowman Harlon Hill card with an inverted Chet Ostrowski back. Chas asked if I knew anything about the card–scarcity, value, etc.–and I had to admit that I didn’t. Maybe someone here can chime in and tell us more.

Wrong-backed cards aren’t unusual: there are always a bunch on eBay, both vintage and modern. I’ve accumulated a few myself, in the course of buying lots for my 1960 Fleer set. My wrong-backs are listed on my 1960 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page, and I posted some scans there, too. As on Chas’s card, the backs on my wrong-backs are all inverted. My theory is that a plate was installed upside down in the printing press, but I know zilch about printing, so I don’t even know if that makes sense.

The hobby appears to consider wrong-back cards printing flaws, rather than error cards, so they’re not included in set checklists, and they’re collectible mostly as curiosities. I can think of one exception: the Gaynell Tinsley and Whizzer White cards in the 1955 Topps All-American set can each be found with the back of the other, and they are considered error cards. I assume that the backs of those two cards were switched on the uncut sheets, whereas other wrong-backs were caused by mishaps in the printing process, not the configuration of the sheets.

If you know more about wrong-backs, or if you have one to share, post a comment!

In 1977, Topps tried translating their football cards to Spanish and producing and selling them in Mexico. The composition of the 1977 Topps Mexican set was the same as the 1977 Topps football set released in the U.S., but the Mexican cards were printed, packaged, and distributed differently, and they are much scarcer than their U.S. counterparts.

Scott Alpaugh, who collects the 1977 Mexicans, has put together a terrific web site that describes the set in detail. I don’t have anything to add to what Scott says, so I’ll just point you to his site: 1977 Topps Mexican Football Cards.

Pictured here is the 1977 Topps Mexican Golden Richards card. Around the edges you can see the perforations that Scott discussed in his article. Oddly, Topps translated Cowboys to Vaqueros on the front, but not on the back. (Click on the scans to see larger images.)

You can see the composition of the set on PSA’s set registry, and you can find more pictures of 1977 Topps Mexicans on eBay.

Alas, the experiment evidently didn’t work, since there’s no 1978 Topps Mexican set.

Brad Ecklund, who played center for five years in the AAFC and NFL, passed away on February 6. Ecklund started his pro career with the New York Yankees of the AAFC in 1949, then joined the New York Yanks (formerly the New York Bulldogs) of the NFL when the AAFC merged with the NFL in 1950. He remained with the team when they became the Dallas Texans in 1952 and the Baltimore Colts in 1953. He made the Pro Bowl twice, in 1950 and 1951.

After his playing days, Ecklund coached for nineteen years for five NFL teams. His obituary in the Philadelphia Enquirer includes a nice photo from his days as an Eagles coach.

Ecklund’s rookie card is a 1951 Bowman, pictured here. Like the other Yanks cards in the 1951 Bowman set, it shows a picture of Yankee Stadium rather than a logo. Perhaps the team never had a logo as the New York Yanks: I don’t see one on logoserver.com, and the team’s Wikipedia page shows a Bulldogs logo.

Ecklund also appeared on two other cards, a 1952 Bowman Large and a 1952 Bowman Small, in the team’s only year as the Dallas Texans.

Here are some interesting items: print blocks that were used to print 1961 Lake to Lake Packers football cards. The seller has several, including Willie Wood and Emlen Tunnell. The 1961 Lake to Lake Willie Wood card is a short print and also a pre-rookie card of Wood. (His rookie card is a 1963 Topps.) The Lake to Lake Emlen Tunnell card is his only card with the Packers, though he spent three years with the team. Tunnell, who is now in the Hall of Fame, had been a star with the Giants, and it is odd that neither Topps nor Fleer printed a card of him in his last years in the league.

I don’t know much about printing, so I don’t know how these blocks were used to print cards. I do know that half of the Lake to Lake cards were severely short-printed, and four of the five blocks the seller has are for short prints. Why they were so short printed is a mystery to me; unfortunately, the print blocks aren’t giving me any clues.

Here are the auctions I mentioned yesterday, a bunch of 1948 Bowman football cards with the wrong backs. The group includes a Steve Van Buren rookie card and a Sammy Baugh rookie card.

These are the first 1948 Bowman wrong-backs I have seen. I do have a bunch from the 1960 Fleer set, apparently the result of a printing plate being installed upside-down. My 1960 Fleer Virtual Uncut Sheet page includes scans and more details.

Since the backs on these 1948 Bowmans are right-side-up, I’d guess that the printers used the wrong plate rather than installing the correct one upside-down. I admit I know little about printing, though. How about you readers?

You can see (almost) the full set of 1948 Bowman football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

For more interesting auctions, see my Interesting eBay Auctions page.

Check out the back of Charley Conerly’s 1948 Bowman football card: there’s an offer for toy “Frisky Dogs” that says “Lots of Fun–Watch them fight.” I suspect they would reword that these days.

Though it says Charley Conerly, the card back shown here is actually not on a Charley Conerly card. It’s on a Chris Iversen “wrong-back” card being offered on eBay. I only noticed the ad on the back because I had never seen a 1948 Bowman wrong-back before, and I looked at the auction to check it out. I didn’t know that Conerly’s nickname was “Chucking,” either!

The Leaf Gum Company printed football cards in 1948 and 1949. The cards from the two years are very similar. In fact, except for the variations in the 1948 cards, for players who appear in both sets, the fronts of the cards appear identical. The backs are different for the two years, fortunately, and I look at the copyright date on the bottom of the back to quickly see which year a card is from. Shown here are Leaf’s two Herb Seigert cards, the first from 1948, and the second from 1949.

The images on the Leaf cards started as black and white photos, and then someone colored the images’ backgrounds and the players’ uniforms. On some cards, such as the Harry Szulborski card below, the coloring makes it look as if the player’s head were cut out and pasted on a colored background.

My favorite feature of the Leaf cards is that many have both the player’s first name and nickname on the front: ‘Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, ‘Bullet’ Bill Dudley, Charlie ‘Choo Choo’ Justice, and so on. A quick bit of trivia: which player’s nickname is in double quotes? Answer: Clyde “Bulldog” Turner’s–or at least his is the only one I’ve seen.

The 1948 Leaf set consists of 98 cards, with cards 1-49 being easier to find and cards 50-98 being difficult. The set features both pro and college players, with slightly more than half of the cards being pros. The bigger stars of the day–mostly pros–are concentrated in the first half of the set, and most of the college players are in the second half.

The set contains many variations: mostly in the colors used, but in the players’ names as well. The 1948 Leaf set composition page on PSA’s web site lists most of the variations, but I don’t believe it is complete. It lists two variations of the Pete Pihos rookie card, for example, one with yellow numbers and one with blue. I have also seen a variation with greenish numbers, though. It is pictured here with the yellow-numbered version for contrast.

Because there had been no major football card issues since 1935 National Chicle, all of the 1948 Leaf football cards are rookie cards. Fourteen of the cards are of Hall of Fame players, making it a key set for Hall of Fame rookie card collectors. Fortunately for those collectors, only two of the Hall of Fame players–namely Leo Nomellini and Chuck Bednarik–are in the tougher second half of the set. (Nomellini and Bednarik were both still in college at the time.) An article by Kevin Glew on the Collectors Universe site lists the Hall of Famers and describes the other challenges facing the 1948 Leaf collectors.

Compared to the 1948 Leaf set, the 1949 Leafs are not very interesting. The 1949 set contains only 49 cards, all pro players, and there is a lot of overlap with 1948. Also, as I wrote above, there is no perceptible difference in the card fronts for players who appear in both sets. So Leaf’s 1949 offer was essentially half of 1948’s cards, but with different backs.

One odd thing about the 1949 set is that it is skip-numbered, with the numbers of its 49 cards scattered between 1 and 150. When I first learned this, I wondered if Leaf had intended to release more cards to fill in the gaps. It turns out, though, that they also skip-numbered their 1949 baseball set. That suggests to me that they were trying to trick kids into buying more cards, even if they already had the whole set. I’d call that just plain mean. It’s not surprising that this was Leaf’s last football set.

I don’t yet have the Leaf cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but you can see pictures of most of them in collections in PSA’s set registry. OTWCards has most of the 1948 Leafs, and skittles has all of the 1949 cards.

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Today I added 1964 Wheaties Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. When I bought my first group of these stamps, I assumed that they would be the thickness of a card, like the 1969 Topps 4-in-1 inserts. I found, though, that they’re like postage stamps, only much bigger: 2 3/4 by 2 1/2 inches. Because they’re so big and on such thin paper, they are fragile, and bending one can leave an indentation, even if it doesn’t leave a crease.

There are 74 stamps in the set: 70 player photos and 4 team emblems. The player photos are sharp and bright. Most of the photos are waist-up or head-and-shoulders shots, and Y.A. Tittle is the only player whose face is obscured by his helmet. (Tittle must have preferred posing in his helmet. Most of his cards picture him wearing it.) My two favorite stamps, Jerry Kramer and John Henry Johnson, are shown here.

The stamps go with a magazine-sized booklet called the Wheaties NFL Pro Bowl Football Player Stamp Album and Fact Book–or WNPBFPSAFB for short. I assume that the album was obtained via a mail-in offer from General Mills. The stamps were originally part of the album, most of them on pages just inside the back and front covers. There were 6 pages of stamps, with 12 stamps on each page. That makes 72 stamps, and there were 2 more on a small panel adhered to the inside of the front cover. In my album, the tab from the small panel is still there, and there are remnants of the stamp pages along the album’s spine.

The 6 full pages were printed on a single master sheet, as you can see on the Topps Vault web site. (Evidently Topps supplied the stamps and album for General Mills.) The master sheet is missing two stamps, Norm Snead and Jack Pardee, the two that came on the small panel stuck to the inside of the album’s front cover. This small panel seems odd, when Topps could have fit Snead and Pardee on the master sheet by displacing two of the team emblem stamps. Perhaps it was just poor planning: “Oh, crap, we forgot Snead and Pardee. Quick, make a little two-stamp panel!”

The non-stamp pages of the album include a short writeup for each player, and a place to stick his stamp. The players are grouped by conference, first the Eastern Conference players, then the Western Conference players. (The Pro Bowl back then matched the East against the West.) Within each conference, the players appear in alphabetical order–almost. I wonder how many kids noticed that Mitchell came before Michaels, and Promuto came before Pottios? Also, the album shows Jim Ringo in transition from the Packers to the Eagles: his writeup says Eagles, but he’s still on the Western Conference side of the album. (According to Packers legend, after the 1963 season, Ringo appeared with his agent in Vince Lombardi’s office, asking for a raise. Lombardi left the room, returned in five minutes, and told Ringo he’d been traded to the Eagles.)

All of the players on the stamps played in the 1963 Pro Bowl. According to pro-football-reference.com, there were 71 players in the Pro Bowl that year, so one Pro Bowler didn’t get a stamp. Who went stampless? It was Frank Gifford, but I don’t know why he was excluded.

Oddly, though there are 70 player stamps, the album has writeups for only 68 of the players. Joe Schmidt and Y.A. Tittle appear on stamps, but they were omitted from the album. It’s not like there wasn’t room: the creators of the album included several pages of Pro Bowl history, facts, and records, and they could easily have squeezed in another couple of players. Unless I am missing a page, though, there is no place for Schmidt and Tittle.

It’s also odd that there are only four team emblem stamps. The Vikings, 49ers, Cardinals, and Giants are the only teams with stamps, a pity because the team emblems are colorful and fun. There is no place in the album to stick the four team stamps, either.

• See all of the 1964 Wheaties Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery
• Find 1964 Wheaties Stamps on eBay

A couple of months ago I wrote about the white footballs you sometimes see on old Bowman cards. Naturally, after writing that post, I started noticing more and more white footballs. Here are a few that I came across while adding 1950’s cards to my sales site the last couple of days: 1953 Bowman Emlen Tunnell, 1954 Bowman Emlen Tunnell (apparently from the same photo session as 1953), 1955 Bowman Tom Fears, 1956 Topps Adrian Burk, and 1957 Lenny Moore.

The 1954 Tunnell card is the corrected version, with two L’s in his last name. The second L looks as if it’s been penciled in: it’s a bit fainter and wider than the first L, and the spacing isn’t quite right. I don’t know anything about printing, but it looks like someone improvised to fix the spelling error.

It appears that Adrian Burk was another jumping quarterback, or at least he’s up on his tip-toes.

Today I ran across a page on pro-football-reference.com called “Cups of Coffee.” It lists all of the pro football players who appeared in only one game. I wondered if I had cards for any of the players listed, so I went through the list and found these three.

First is Ronnie Knox, who played in one game for the Bears in 1957 but did not have any stats. It appears that he was the fourth-string quarterback, a rookie playing behind three veterans, and Topps printed a card for each of the four quarterbacks in 1957. Knox’s card is in the second series, and it is a tough card to find in high grade.

Next is Buddy Allen, who had three carries in one game for Denver in 1961–for minus-4 yards and a fumble. He evidently at least tried out for the Raiders the year before, because his only card is the 1960 Fleer card shown here. It is possible that he was on the Raiders’ roster in 1960, but the rosters I have found online show only the players who actually played in a game that year.

Finally, there’s Jim Yeats, who appeared in one game for the Oilers in 1960 but had no stats. This is his 1960 Fleer card, and Fleer misspelled his name. I heard from one of his relatives a few years ago, and she told me that he was with the Packers in 1958 and 1959, and that he was still with the Oilers in 1961. He evidently did not get playing time those years.

1960 was the first year of the AFL, and the teams’ rosters apparently were unsettled when Fleer decided which players to include on their cards. Some of the players on 1960 Fleer cards do not appear at pro-football-reference.com. Jim Woodward is one of these players. And wouldn’t you know it, because of its placement on the the sheet, Woodward’s card is the toughest in the set!w