Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Yesterday I added 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These are patches that you could (and still can!) iron onto your clothes to impress your friends. Beckett calls them “Fabric Cards,” but they aren’t cards at all: they’re cloth, not cardboard, and they’re floppy.

There are 35 patches in the set, with 22 of the 26 NFL teams represented. Oddly, there are no Bengals, Oilers, Eagles, or Rams in the set, but there are four Chargers, and the Chargers were a losing team at the time. Perhaps Deacon Jones was supposed to represent the Rams in the set, but he was traded to the Chargers before the 1972 season.

Most of the NFLPA patches have a blue background, but there are six with a pink background, one with white, one with yellow, and one with green. I don’t think the colors are significant, but the distribution is odd, so perhaps I am missing something. There are no logos or trademarks on the patches, but John Brockington and Jim Plunkett appear in their College All-Star jerseys, complete with stars on the shoulders. Brockington and Plunkett also appear in their All-Star jerseys on their 1972 Topps cards, but Topps airbrushed the stars off of them.

According to Beckett, the NFLPA patches were sold from vending machines. When researching them, I found a couple of related items on eBay: a promo package and a vending machine display, pictured below. Interestingly, the list of players on the vending machine display does not match the list of players in the set: some players in the set are not on the display, and some players on the display are not in the set. Pity the poor young Bob Lilly fan, who kept chucking quarters into the machine, trying to get a patch of his hero!

• Find 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons on eBay.

I shouldn’t laugh at this, but I did. It’s a marked-up 1935 National Chicle Knute Rockne card, currently for sale on eBay. The price isn’t too out of line for this card in poor condition, and hey, the corners are in pretty good shape.

If you’re a Rockne or Notre Dame fan, check out The Unofficial Homepage of Knute Rockne. It’s a tribute site assembled by Rockne’s cousin’s grandson, Birger Rokne, from Rockne’s hometown, Voss, Norway. I found Rockne’s association with Studebaker interesting–did you know that Studebaker produced a model called the Rockne? Cousin Birger has a restored one, and his site includes a photo or two.

For more interesting eBay football card auctions, take a look at the right-hand column of this page. I try to flag a few noteworthy listings each day.

I noticed that a handful of football cards from the 1969 Milton Bradley Win-A-Card game are currently listed on eBay. They look suspiciously like 1967 Topps cards, but you can see that each card has a strip of brown along the top or bottom edge. That strip of brown is a bit of a baseball card that was also included in the Win-A-Card game. See my blog post from last November for a description of the game and the cards it included.

Click on any card to see a larger image. Here are the eBay listings: Buck Buchanan, Sid Blanks, Ben Davidson, Ernie Ladd.

As I wrote in W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues, 1970 and 1971 Kellogg’s football cards came in thin paper wrappers that you could see through. The paper-wrapped cards were then included in boxes of Kellogg’s cereal. The complete 1970 Kellogg’s set was also available via mail order, but the 1971 set was not. The company apparently concluded that kids wouldn’t buy as much cereal if they could get the cards all at once.

I also said in the article that some people collect Kellogg’s cards that are still in their wrappers. Since you can see through the paper, you can tell who is on the cards, and you can collect the entire set, still wrapped. A friend of mine does this, and I tease him about it, but I actually think it would be fun and challenging.

This week there are about twenty still-wrapped 1971 Kellogg’s cards on eBay, including the five pictured here. Can you recognize the players through the wrappers? Click on any image to see the auction for that card.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1970 Kellogg’s
• Search eBay for: 1970 Kellogg’s, 1971 Kellogg’s

Wow. A PSA 5, with six days to go, and this Bronko Nagurski card is already up to $4050. I’ll have to wait for the next one to come around–or maybe the one after that. The card does look nice for a PSA 5.

I hadn’t noticed before (it’s on the back) that Nagurski was from International Falls, Minnesota, the “Icebox of the Nation.” I went to the City of International Falls web site to see if there was any mention of him, and I was surprised not to find anything. Searching further, though, I found that there is a Bronko Nagurski Museum in town (scroll down to Smokey Bear Park), and that the Falls High School Broncos were named after Nagurski. I wonder why the city doesn’t make more of these things?

In my search, I also found a nice tribute to Nagurski, with lots of stories, pictures, and links to other sites, on the Windy City Gridiron web site. Check out the story about Bronko’s service station.

Nagurski’s son, Bronko Nagurski Jr., also played pro football, but in the CFL, with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. (According to Wikipedia, Bronko Jr. was drafted by the 49ers in 1959, but he elected to play in Canada.)

For more on the 1935 National Chicle cards, see N is for National Chicle.

• Search eBay for: 1935 National Chicle, Bronko Nagurski Jr.

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’s a card up for auction that I don’t see often: a 1961 National City Bank Browns card of Len Dawson, with a starting bid under $10. This is a pre-rookie card of Dawson; he played for the Steelers and Browns in the NFL before jumping to the Texans/Chiefs in the AFL. (For other pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie cards page.)

There are 36 cards in the 1961 National City Bank Browns set. They were distributed on 6-card panels, so any individual cards you see have been cut by hand from a panel. There are usually a few individual cards on eBay, and at the moment there is also a complete set of uncut 6-card panels.

PSA has designated this Dawson card Authentic rather than assigning it a grade because it is hand-cut and not all of its borders are present. The following is from the section called “The Grading of Hand Cut Cards” on the PSA Grading Standards page.

In order for PSA to actually assign a grade to any of the cards that possess visible/defined borders on all four sides, evidence of that border must be present. If the cut exceeds the visible border for the card in question, PSA will encapsulate the card as “Authentic” only.

For this card that seems a bit harsh. If you don’t mind that a bit of the dashed border is cut off, it looks like a pretty nice card.

For more interesting auctions, see my Interesting Auctions page.

This uncut sheet of 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns cards was on eBay last week. 1946 was the Browns’ first year; they were part of the new eight-team All-American Football Conference. The Browns were the AAFC champions all four years of the league’s existence, 1946-1949, and they joined the NFL when the AAFC folded in 1950. As far as I know, these Sears cards were the only cards printed of an AAFC team.

Conspicuously absent from this set are Marion Motley and Bill Willis, African American stars who later made the Pro Football Hall of Fame. According to Willis’s Wikipedia page, the two did not play in the Browns’ 1946 game against the Miami Seahawks, because they were forbidden by law to play against white players in Miami.

This small Sears set contains pre-rookie cards of three other Hall of Fame players: Otto Graham, Dante Lavelli, and Frank Gatski. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) The black-and-white head shots are nice, but otherwise the cards are unremarkable: all eight have the same ad on the front and the team’s 1946 schedule on the back.

The set is rare–these particular cards are the first I have seen–so it is hard to assign a value to the cards. The highest bid in this auction was $2000, and it did not meet the seller’s reserve. Perhaps the seller will list it again with a better description and a scan that shows the corners of the sheet.

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

Here’s another 1961 Lake to Lake Packers card that fetched a strong price. It’s a Larry Hickman card, one of the short prints, and it sold for $97.28, despite having paper loss on the back. Considering the paper loss, I would guess that a grading company would grade it G or VG.

As I wrote in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets, the short prints in the Lake to Lake set are far more difficult to find than the regular prints. The set is popular among old Packers fans, so when the short prints come up for auction, they usually do well. You can see the full set of Lake to Lake Packers cards, including all of the short prints, in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

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.