Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

You have probably seen 1970s Topps football cards on which the team logos have been airbrushed from the players’ helmets. (For a couple of examples, see my article about airbrushing on 1972 Topps San Diego Chargers cards.) Well, apparently Topps couldn’t show the NFL logo on football cards, either. Last week, while scanning this 1976 Topps C.L. Whittington card, I noticed that someone had traced over the NFL on Whittington’s football and changed it to WPD. At first I thought it was only on my card, but the C.L. Whittington cards on eBay all have WPD on the football, too.

It seems like it would have been preferable to cover the logo with a dab of brown, but changing the letters was definitely better than how they handled Bob Hayes’s 1970 Topps Super and 1970 Topps Super Glossy cards. On those cards it looks like they burned the logo off the ball!

Most of you are familiar with my virtual uncut sheets of vintage football cards. There are a lot of sets I haven’t been able to do yet, though, because I have not seen pictures of real sheets. So I would like your help: if you see an uncut sheet for a pre-1970 set that I have not done yet, please send me an email and let me know where you saw it. The sheets I have completed are listed on the Vintage Football Card Gallery home page.

I would also like to see any pre-1970 cards that are miscut so badly–on either the front or the back–that they show part of the next card. The card pictured here is an example that I found in an eBay auction: it’s a miscut 1957 Topps Sid Watson card that shows Kyle Rote’s toe. If I see enough cards like this, I might be able to piece together what the uncut sheet looked like–especially if there is a pattern to the card numbers.

Here are this week’s interesting eBay auctions for vintage football cards and related collectibles:

• Three complete sets of 1948 Bowman football cards: a high-grade set graded by PSA, a high-grade complete raw set, and a complete raw set in its original album.
• Some fun beverage cans: an Iron City Beer Can picturing the 1976 Pittsburgh Steelers and a near-set of 1976 Canada Dry cans with NFL helmets on them.
• A full set of 1961 Fleer wallet pictures, still in the album–sort of. (You can see the full list of these wallet pictures in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.)
• A leopard-print 1965 Topps Jim Otto card.
• Three 1960 Fleer wrong-back cards. (For more examples of these, see my 1960 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page.)
• Alan Page on grocery store displays for 1974 Wonder Bread and 1974 Town Talk Bread football cards. (For more on Wonder Bread and Town Talk cards, see my blog article about food issues.)
• A rare 1960 O-Pee-Chee Test Tattoo of Jim Brown–listed at $19,500! (The seller has lots more of these tattoos, as well.)
• And, finally, a PSA 10 1955 Topps All-American Knute Rockne card. Wow!

Today I added 1960 Eagles Team Issue Photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are eleven 5-by-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.

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.

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 that were recently listed on eBay: print blocks that were used to print 1961 Lake to Lake Packers football cards. 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 people printed cards with these blocks. I do know that half of the Lake to Lake cards were severely short-printed, and four of the five blocks the seller had for sale were for short prints. Why the cards were so short printed is a mystery to me; unfortunately, the print blocks aren’t giving me any clues.

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 the copyright date on the bottom of the back tells 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 was 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.

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 players in the set are of Hall of Famers, 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 web site lists the Hall of Famers and describes the other challenges facing 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 are no new players in the set. 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.

You can see all of the 1948 Leaf and 1949 Leaf cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

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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. You could buy the album for 50 cents 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.