Nearmint’s Vintage Football Card Blog

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.

I made a few small improvements to my eBay Sports Card Finder today. The changes provide more information to help you decide whether to click through to the auctions.

• For auction listings, added a field for number of bids.
• For each listing, added the seller’s feedback score and positive feedback percentage.
• Turned the seller name and feedback score fields into links that will take you to the appropriate eBay pages.

Check it out–comments are welcome.

Today a collector on the Collectors Universe message boards posted pictures of 5 uncut panels of 1952 Wheaties Champions cards. From the looks of it, his panels are in great shape. The Wheaties Champions set is a multi-sport set, and it includes women as well as men. There are 10 cards on each panel, so the collector has 50 of the 60 cards in the set.

There are thirty athletes in the set, with each athlete appearing on both a portrait card and an “in action” card. Six of the athletes are football players: Doak Walker, Otto Graham, John Lujack, Tom Fears, Glenn Davis, and Bob Waterfield. I haven’t yet added the football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but since there are only a few of them, I’ll try to do that sometime soon. There is currently a full set listed on eBay, but I’ll probably pick up individual cards as they become available. Surprisingly, though they were hand-cut from the boxes, most of the cards I see are in pretty good condition. I infer from this that people saved the full boxes, and the cards I’m seeing were cut from boxes relatively recently.

Thanks to my friend Pat for pointing out this auction: an ungraded 1969 Topps Bob Brown card that sold for $96.45. Why so much? Well, 1969 Topps is a popular set in the PSA set registry, and I’m guessing that a couple of registry participants wanted this high grade example to submit to PSA. Buying ungraded cards on eBay is risky, since sellers often overgrade them, so the seller of the Brown card must have a reputation for being an accurate grader.

Brown is in the Hall of Fame, but that would account for only a small part of the premium the buyer paid. As you can see on my 1969 Topps virtual uncut sheet page, though, the Brown card is on the edge of the sheet, and edge cards tend to be scarcer in top condition than other cards. Edge cards evidently were damaged more often in the printing and packaging process than cards on the interior of the sheet. There are lots of lower-grade examples of the card on eBay, but apparently high-grade examples don’t appear regularly.

Brown also has a stamp on a 1969 Topps 4-in-1 insert card, but the picture isn’t him, it’s Bob Brown of the Packers.

Here’s an interesting item: a 1966 American Oil Game Sheet. The object of the game was to complete a row of stamps–which I assume you got from American Oil gas stations–to win a prize. One stamp in each row, of course, was rare.

The 1966-68 American Oil Sweepstakes Stamps page on thecowboysguide.com shows some of the stamps and has another view of the game sheet. If you hold your cursor over the game sheet, you can see that most of the stamps are pasted on it. The missing stamps are the key stamps needed for prizes. I can’t tell who is on the missing stamp in the Mustang row. I wonder if any examples of that stamp exist?

You can usually find examples of other American Oil game pieces on eBay.

I made a few improvements to the eBay Sports Card Finder last week:

• All of the search controls are on top now, rather than in the left column, so you don’t have to scroll to see the bottom ones. I changed most of the controls to pull-down menus to save space.
• I added a Submit button so you can set all of the search criteria before doing the search. Previously the page sent out a search each time you changed an option. That got annoying if you were changing a few of them.
• I added options in the Grading menu to let you search for cards graded PSA 7 and higher, PSA 8 and higher, and so on. There are similar searches for SGC cards.

The purpose of the page is to do eBay searches tailored for vintage sports cards. For whatever search criteria you choose, it creates the appropriate eBay search strings behind the scenes. For vintage baseball sets it searches for both the set name and set number, for example: if you choose 1910 Mello Mint, it searches for E105, as well. If I’m aware that a set has been reprinted, the page filters out the reprint cards for that set. The page shows auctions, fixed price listings, and store listings all in the same table. It also shows the seller for each listing, so you don’t have to open the listings to see if they’re from your favorite or not-so-favorite sellers.

Like normal eBay searches, the page depends somewhat on the accuracy of the listing titles. If someone has a baseball card listed under football cards, the page won’t find it if you do a baseball card search.

Check it out and see what you think. I haven’t tested every set, so if you find a problem, just send me an email. I have not completed the basketball sets yet, but I can do that quickly if someone asks.

As I wrote in O is for Oddball, I don’t collect many oddball items. This full set of 1963 Nalley’s CFL coins is pretty darn cool, though, and if I had $12,000 to burn, I’d grab it. The seller has a 1964 set of Nalley’s coins up for auction, also.

I recognize a few names from NFL teams. Dave Mann, who played for the Chicago Cardinals in the 1950’s, finished his pro career with the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL. Bud Grant, Joe Kapp, and Bobby Walden jumped from the CFL to the NFL later in the 1960’s.

Bronko Nagurski, Jr., also appears in the 1963 Nalley’s set. He played eight years for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

You can also find lots of individual 1963 and 1964 Nalley’s CFL coins on eBay. For more interesting vintage football auctions, see the Interesting eBay Auctions tab.

eBay seller “batnbal” is auctioning off some old San Diego Chargers items that I’ve never seen before. I thought I’d point them out.

1961 Golden Tulip Chargers cards were distributed in bags of Golden Tulip potato chips. As I wrote in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets, you could send in five Golden Tulip cards of the same player for a 8×10 photo of a San Diego Charger. The cards themselves are scarce, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of the photos. The seller has two: the Charlie Flowers pictured here, and Ron Nery. I have not seen the full list of photos, but there are 22 cards in the Golden Tulip set, so perhaps there are also 22 photos. If you sent in five Ron Nery cards, would you get a Ron Nery poster? Sounds logical, but I have no idea.

The seller also has three 1962 Golden Arrow Dairy San Diego Chargers milk bottle caps up for auction: Jim Bates, Emil Karras, and Dick Harris. These aren’t pretty: they’re milk-stained, and they have staples in them. I suspect they’re rare, though–who would have kept them?–and they’re sure to sell to a hardcore Chargers fan or a collector who’s gotta have it all. The seller included a little write-up for each player, so it’s worth checking out the auctions just for that.

This is the first time I’ve seen these offered together: a full set of 1969 Glendale Stamps, still on panels, with the accompanying album. The seller, cocicoco, has lots of oddball items like these, and it is fun to browse their football card listings.

There are 312 stamps in the Glendale Stamp set, 12 for each of the 26 NFL and AFL teams. The stamps came on 26 panels of 12 stamps each. 24 of the panels could be called team panels, because they each had 11 cards from one team and 1 card from another. The remaining two panels contained stars from multiple teams. The Redskins and Falcons did not have team panels; their stamps were scattered among the other team panels. Why the odd distribution of teams among panels? I can only guess that it was a marketing ploy, to ensure that you needed at least two panels for a complete team set.

Because the Glendale set is bigger than the Topps football card issues of the time, the Glendale set contains a few players that did not appear on cards. I always like that: seeing players on cards–or in this case stamps–whom I have not seen before. The Glendale set also includes a pre-rookie stamp of O.J. Simpson. When I get one, I will add it to my pre-rookie cards page.

I don’t yet have the stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but the Cowboys Guide site shows all of the Cowboys stamps, and the Redskins Football Card Museum shows all of the Redskins. The Cowboys Guide site has a nice picture of the album, too. (The album says 1970, though. I wonder why?) PSA’s web site has the full list of stamps.