Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

I spotted an uncut sheet of 1970 Topps Super cards on eBay this week, so I thought I’d create a virtual uncut sheet for that set. My previous virtual uncut sheets have been 1959 Topps and 1960 Fleer.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the cards in this set have attractive fronts and ugly backs. In addition to the photo, each card features the player’s name in script that looks like a signature. It’s not a signature, though: the script is the same on all of the cards. While 1970 Topps Super baseball cards have facsimiles of the players’ actual signatures, the football cards got short shrift.

One of last week’s posts was about a virtual uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards that I created for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I got some nice feedback on that, so today I created another, this time a virtual 1959 Topps uncut sheet. This one was a little less challenging, since I had a picture of a real sheet to look at, but I still learned a few things. For one, you only have to look at a couple of these to see that a card’s position on the sheet greatly affects its availability in high grade. It’s remarkable that the price guides don’t recognize this. They must know what the sheets looked like, since they know which cards are short prints, but to my knowledge none of the guides consider sheet position when assigning prices.

I’ve never seen a full uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards, so I created a page in the Football Card Gallery that shows what I think an uncut sheet looked like. I’m calling it the Virtual 1960 Fleer Uncut Sheet. To piece it together, I looked at some uncut strips like these and filled in the blanks. The page also shows some wrong-back cards from the set.

Yesterday I added an assortment of PSA-graded regional, insert, and oddball football cards to my sales site, including 1960 Bell Brand Rams, 1960 Mayrose Cardinals, 1961 Lake to Lake Packers, 1961 Nu-Card, 1968 Topps Stand-Up, 1970 Topps Super Glossy, and 1970 Kellogg’s 3-D. Shown here are a couple of the Mayrose Cardinals cards, Woodley Lewis and King Hill, both wearing number 17. Hill appears to have been the real number 17, since Lewis’s other cards with the Cardinals show him in number 20. Hill’s 1959 Topps card also has him in number 17.

There are eleven cards in the complete Mayrose Cardinals set. They were distributed in the St. Louis region in packages of Mayrose franks and bacon. 1960, the year the cards were issued, was the year that the Cardinals moved to St. Louis from Chicago. Mayrose brand lunchmeats are still produced by Armour-Ekrich Meats, but to my knowledge they haven’t included cards since 1960.

The 1964 Philadelphia set includes a Play of the Year card for each team. Looking at some of those cards this week, I noticed that the Lions’ Play of the Year was pretty lame. Their play of the year went for only 10 yards?

Looking through the rest of the cards, I found that the other teams’ plays were also unimpressive. The Eagles’ play of the year was a 12-yard pass from Norm Snead to Bobby Mitchell. The Colts’ play of the year was a screen from Johnny Unitas to Jerry Hill that netted 15 yards. The Packers’ play of the year, a run by Tom Moore, was also for 15 yards, but it at least went for a touchdown.

Perhaps the plays came in critical situations or were the teams’ bread-and-butter plays throughout the year. There’s no indication of that on the cards, though. My guess is that because the cards were oriented horizontally, there wasn’t room for diagrams of long plays, so the card designers picked short plays instead.

According to Wikipedia, 0 and 00 are no longer legal uniform numbers in the NFL. That means that the players who wore them effectively have had their numbers retired. Pictured here are cards of five players who wore number 0 or 00: a 1963 Fleer Jim Otto, a 1972 Topps Ken Burrough, a 1961 Fleer Wallet Picture of John Olszewski, a 1968 Topps Obert Logan, and a 1948 Bowman John Clement.

I learned from the Wikipedia article that Jim Otto wore 00 because you could pronounce it like his name: aught-oh. Otto wore number 50 in his first season, 1960, and he switched to 00 for the remainder of his career. Otto’s 1964 Topps card shows a four-year-old image of him wearing number 50.

John Olszewski and Obert Logan also wore numbers other than 0 early in their careers. Olszewski’s cards with the Chicago Cardinals picture him in numbers 33 and 36. Logan’s 1967 Philadelphia card shows him in number 25 for the Cowboys.

Yesterday I added a stack of sharp 1950′s football cards to my football card sales site. Included is this gorgeous 1956 Topps Em Tunnell card. Though the card says he was a halfback, Tunnell was actually a hall-of-fame defensive back. Until 1959 the card companies did not distinguish between offensive halfbacks and defensive backs, nor between offensive and defensive tackles, nor between offensive and defensive ends. A player was simply a halfback, tackle, or end.

Until I looked at Tunnell’s page on the pro football hall-of-fame site, I had not realized that he played with the Packers for three years. I knew he was with the Packers in 1961, since he appears on a 1961 Lake to Lake card. But he also was on the team in 1959 and 1960. Oddly, though he had appeared on Bowman and Topps cards every year from 1951 to 1958, Topps did not print a card of Tunnell in his three years with the Packers.

Today I put a big stack of graded 1960′s cards up for sale. Included is this Chuck Howley rookie card. Like many defensive players’ rookie cards, Howley’s came well into his career: his first season in the NFL was with the Bears in 1958, but he didn’t appear on a card until 1966.

Howley could be the next player elected to the Hall of Fame whose rookie card is in the 1966 Philadelphia football card set. After two years with the Bears and a year of retirement, Howley un-retired and joined the Cowboys in their second year, 1961. He played thirteen seasons for the Cowboys, and he was an All-Pro in six of them. In Super Bowl V he had two interceptions and a fumble recovery, and he was named the game’s MVP. The Cowboys lost the game to the Colts, however, and Howley remains the only Super Bowl MVP who played for the losing team.

You can see all of Chuck Howley’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Awhile back, a collector called to ask if I had any 1962 Post Cereal cards, because he was interested in the Bob Lilly card from that set. He said he collected pre-rookie cards of hall-of-famers, and that the 1962 Post Lilly was one he still needed. An interesting idea, I thought.

Today I added a page to the gallery that highlights a few pre-rookie cards. I included a few well-known players that aren’t in the hall of fame, in part because I wanted to include a few 1961 Nu-Cards. The Nu-Card set is one of the few vintage college sets, and it contains cards of a lot players who went on to play in the NFL and AFL.

Yesterday I added the 1959 Bell Brand Rams set to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Like the 1960 Bell Brand Rams, these cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are difficult to find. The cards are sturdy and attractive, with a high-gloss finish unlike other issues of the time, but many of them were cut off-center. Each card features a facsimile of the player’s autograph, a nice touch except that some autographs are tiny relative to the size of the cards.

The 1959 set includes a pre-rookie card of hall-of-fame coach Sid Gillman. In 1960 Gillman moved to the Los Angeles Chargers of the new American Football League, and his “official” rookie card, a 1960 Fleer, is with the Chargers. Why is it his official rookie card? That’s debatable, but it is generally accepted that a rookie card must have been printed by a major card company, and cards from regional issues such as Bell Brand are not considered for rookie cardism.

Of course, a player’s rookie card would be more accurately called his first card. I often get emails saying “you say that so-and-so’s rookie card was 19xx, but he was a rookie in 19yy.” And so I have to explain. Oh well, it’s too late to change it now.

Yesterday I added a large group of ungraded 1960 and 1963 Fleer cards to my sales site. Included is the card on the right, a 1963 Fleer card of Bob Coolbaugh, who looks like he’s about to get hit in the forehead with the football.

So why does Bob look like he’s trying to catch a beach ball?  Because the football was superimposed on the image.  Below is the same photo on Bob’s 1961 Topps and 1962 Fleer cards.  On the 1962 card, Fleer even took the trouble to change the colors on Bob’s uniform!

I have recently been listing a lot of ungraded 1972 Topps cards for sale, and it’s given me a chance to admire some of Topps’s airbrushing work. As I wrote in this entry, the company often used airbrushing to put a player in the right colors for his new team. Here are a couple of fine examples.

The first is John Brockington, who appears on two cards in the set: his rookie card, which shows him in his college all-star jersey, and his All-Pro card, which shows the same photo with the jersey airbrushed green. The second is MacArthur Lane, who was traded from the Cardinals to the Packers and needed his jersey changed to Packer green. They even airbrushed poor MacArthur’s ear!

Find 1972 Topps cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s Cards

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.

You learn something every day. I’ve looked at these cards a hundred times, and I never knew they were the same person. According to Remember the AFL, the player on both cards is Ed Rutkowski.

The bottom picture shows an older Ed Rutkowski on a Living Prime Time cover. It’s pretty clear that this is the guy on the Abruzzese card. For more photos of Rutkowski, see the full Living Prime Time article.

I’ve compiled a list of football cards showing the wrong players on a page in my gallery. Know of more? Send me an email!

Today I added the eight 1951 Berk Ross football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The 1951 Berk Ross set is a 72-card multi-sport set, with baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and several minor sports all represented. You can find a checklist for the entire set at oddlyquirky.com.

Pictured here is the Doak Walker card. Walker was another member of the great Lions teams of the 1950s, and he is one of the few Heisman Trophy winners who have been inducted into the hall of fame. He retired after only six years in the league, hanging it up after the 1955 season.