Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Today I added 1960 Eagles Team Issue Photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are eleven 5×7 prints in the set, and the prints have blank backs.

The composition of the set is easily the oddest I’ve seen. First, Nick Skorich, an assistant coach in 1960, appears in the set, but Buck Shaw, the head coach, doesn’t. (Skorich took over as head coach in 1961.) Second, there are no quarterbacks, running backs, or receivers in the set! Hall of Famers Norm Van Brocklin and Tommy McDonald were both established starters in 1960, but neither is included. Finally, the Eagles had six Pro Bowlers in 1959 (Van Brocklin, McDonald, Jess Richardson, Marion Campbell, Bill Barnes, and Tom Brookshier), they were all still with the team in 1960, and not one of them appears in the set! It’s like the photographer was in a hurry, and he just grabbed the first eleven guys who showed up for practice.

(Speaking of Van Brocklin, this wasn’t the only set from which he was conspicuously absent. In 1958, after nine seasons and six Pro Bowls with the Rams, Van Brocklin was traded to the Eagles. He played three seasons for the Eagles, making the Pro Bowl in each of them, but he did not appear in any of the 1958-1960 Topps football sets. The only card I know of that shows him as an Eagle is his 1963 Stancraft playing card.)

As I’ve said in previous articles, one reason I like team sets is that they usually include players who never appeared on cards in mainstream issues. In this set, those players are Howard Keys and John Wittenborn, both offensive linemen. Keys was a rookie in 1960, and he played for the Eagles for four seasons. Wittenborn spent ten years in the NFL and AFL, with the 49ers, Eagles, and Oilers.

My favorite photo in the set is the one shown here, Jimmy Carr. Carr was a defensive back, but he could have been the drum major!

Oh, and incidentally, the Eagles won the NFL championship in 1960.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Nearmint Sports Cards

Last week, on my Facebook page, Pastor Scott asked if I knew if Fleer had planned a second series of football cards in 1963, since the 1963 checklist says “1st SERIES.” I told Scott that I had not noticed the label before, but that it was reasonable to surmise that Fleer had planned another series. Fleer printed two series in 1961–one of NFL players and one of AFL players–and perhaps the company had hopes of doing the same in 1963. (For more on Fleer’s early 1960s football cards, see F is for Fleer.)

The 1963 checklist is also curious for other reasons:

• It’s the first and only checklist that Fleer printed in its four years of producing football cards.
• It is the only card in the 1963 set that is not numbered.
• On an uncut sheet, the player cards were in a predictable order, by number, but the checklist was stuck in the middle, displacing two of the player cards. (You can see this on my virtual uncut 1963 Fleer sheet.)
• It is a short print (and so are the two cards it displaced on the sheet).
• It is orange and green, though the base color of the player cards is red. Checklists typically have the same color scheme as the rest of the set.

To me, it looks like a new Fleer manager came in just before production and said, “Hey, Topps has checklists, so we need to throw one in there, too. And maybe we’ll have a second series, so put ‘first series’ on it.” And then they left the kiddies hanging.

Fleer wasn’t the only company that had football card plans grander than they could execute. As I wrote in N is for National Chicle, the backs of 1935 National Chicle cards say “one of 240 football players with playing tips,” but there are only 36 cards in the set. There were only eight pro teams at the time, so 240 cards would have covered practically every player in the league. As I said in the article, I suspect that the company planned to include college players and coaches in their set, as well.

Last week a reader asked me why there aren’t any Chicago Bears in the first series of 1959 Topps football cards. My expert answer was, “Huh, I never noticed that.” But the reader was right: the 1959 Topps first series cards are numbered 1 through 88, and the Bears cards are all numbered 90 and higher. Topps compensated by putting eleven Bears in the 88-card second series, but, over the whole set, the Bears are still outnumbered by every other team.

Imagine being a young Bears fan, spending all of your paper route money on a stack of wax packs, and not getting any cards of your favorite team! Why might the Bears have been omitted? Did they send their photos to Topps too late to make the first series? Did Topps forget that Chicago had two teams? My guess is that Topps and the Bears had some sort of contract problem, but that’s only a guess. If anyone else has more information, please let me know.

Ironically, the Bears team card is one of the three easiest 1959 Topps cards to find in high grade, the others being the Giants and Steelers team cards. All three cards are in the second series, which appears to have been printed in greater quantities than the first series. (This is unusual: Topps typically printed the earlier series in greater numbers.) All three were also in the interior of the full sheet (see my virtual uncut 1959 Topps sheet), so they were less susceptible to damage in production than cards on the edge of the sheet. And, finally, I think that the team cards’ oval interior design makes them more forgiving of cutting problems. The other cards in the set–namely the player and team pennant cards–have rectangular interiors, making off-centering and diamond cuts more obvious.

I won this card in an eBay auction this week: it’s a 1957 Topps Ray Mathews card. Or at least that’s what I thought when I bid on it. When I got it in hand, I thought it looked too bright for a 1957 Topps card. Looking closer, I also noticed that it said HALFBACK rather than BACK. 1957 Topps cards, as far as I knew, didn’t distinguish between quarterbacks, halfbacks, fullbacks, and defensive backs: Topps just called them all BACKs. See the ungraded Mathews card below for an example.

I searched eBay for similar cards, and I found two: an Al Dorow and a George Blanda that say QUARTERBACK rather than BACK. So what are these cards, undocumented variations? That would be great, but I don’t think so. As I said, the one in my hand looks too bright for an old card. Forgeries? No, a forger wouldn’t change the player’s position, and I think he’d make sure the back was centered. Reprints? That was my first guess, but I searched eBay for 1957 Topps reprints, and I didn’t find any that said HALFBACK or QUARTERBACK. I still wonder if the cards are reprints, but I haven’t found any yet that resemble the card I have. The Mathews card has a small smudge in the upper right, but other than that, I don’t see any markings on it. Can anyone identify it?

I contacted the seller about the mysterious Mathews card, and he offered me a full refund for it. He said he had sold the card on consignment, and he assured me that he would talk to his consignor about it. Since the card was inexpensive (perhaps other potential bidders were more alert than I), I thought I’d just keep it. Who knows, maybe my intuition is wrong, and it’s a one-of-a-kind, never-before-seen, authentic 1957 Topps variation, and I’m now a rich man.

Here is the answer to a trivia question that Pastor Scott asked a few weeks ago. The question was “What player appeared on two different cards in one year for two different teams and two different leagues? Both cards were major card companies.” Scott had to tell me: it’s Corky Tharp.

Pictured here is Tharp’s 1960 Topps CFL card. He played for the Toronto Argonauts in 1955 and from 1957 to 1959, and Topps evidently expected him to stay with the team in 1960. He didn’t, though. He instead joined the New York Titans (later the Jets) of the new American Football League, and he appeared on a 1960 Fleer AFL card, as well. He spent one season with the Titans, playing nine games at defensive back.

While the fronts of 1960 Topps CFL cards are much different than their NFL counterparts, the backs of the cards in the two sets are alike. The only difference is that the text on the CFL cards is repeated in French. Even the text in the cartoon, which you can faintly see on this card, appears in both French and English. You can also see that repeating the text didn’t leave much room for detail.

I really like the fronts of the cards, with the colored portraits over the black and white action photos. Topps had used black and white photos for backgrounds in their classic 1955 Topps All-American set, and they would use them again as insets on their 1962 NFL cards. In 1962 they matched the inset photos with the players on the cards–or most of them, anyway–but they did not do that on the 1960 CFL cards. The photos on the CFL cards appear to be random, and Topps used each photo on multiple cards.

There are 88 cards in the 1960 CFL set, and for vintage AFL and NFL card collectors, it includes a few familiar names. Veryl Switzer, Ken Carpenter, and Tobin Rote had played in the NFL in the 50s, and Rote went on to play for the Chargers and Broncos in the 60s. Randy Duncan, Ernie Warlick, and Gerry McDougall also joined AFL teams in the 60s. And Joe Kapp and Sam Etcheverry later quarterbacked in the NFL.

Judging by his football cards, Y.A. Tittle seldom took off his helmet. From 1953 to 1964, the only Tittle card I know of that shows him bareheaded is his 1961 Topps card. Here he is in his many helmets:

I think it must have been Tittle’s preference to wear his helmet for photos, since I can’t think of any other player who appeared helmeted on so many cards. As I’ve written before, I usually don’t like images of players wearing their helmets, because the helmets cover too much of the players’ faces. But Y.A.’s many appearances in his helmet made him look natural in it, like Doonesbury’s B.D.

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.