My Collection

1958 Puritan Meats BC Lions Football Cards

April 8th, 2014  |  Published in CFL Cards, My Collection

1958 Puritan Meats BC Lions football cardsBack of 1958 Puritan Meats BC Lions football cardHere are the latest additions to my own collection: two 1958 Puritan Meats BC Lions football cards. According to Beckett, there are 50 cards in the set, and they were distributed with Puritan canned meat products. They are 2 1/4 by 3 3/8″, and they are on thicker-than-normal cardboard. The backs of these two cards are the same, and I presume that the rest of the cards also have the same back. (You can click on the images to see slightly bigger versions.)

Howard Schnellenberger played two years in the CFL, then went on to a long coaching career, including two years as head coach of the Baltimore Colts. Ted Hunt played for BC for two seasons, and he also excelled at lacrosse, skiing, and boxing. Hunt was inducted into the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 1972.

These are the first two cards I have found from the set. If I get a few more, I’ll add the set to the Canadian section of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Tags: , ,

New in the Gallery: 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins Short Prints

April 30th, 2013  |  Published in My Collection, New in the Gallery

Last week I picked up few of the short prints from the 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins football card set. One of them, Abner Haynes, is pictured below. You can see all of the new cards and a description of the set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

The lot I purchased included a “Jr. Dolphin” card, also pictured below. This card is not listed in the price guides, but it looks like the rest of the Royal Castle cards, so I would consider it part of the set. I called it card #28 and added it to the Gallery, as well.

I am in the market for the cards I don’t yet have from this set: Frank Emanuel, Tom Erlandson, Norm Evans, Bob Griese, Jerry Hopkins, and Jim Warren. If you happen to have any of them for sale, please send me an email.
1967 Royal Castle Dolphins Abner Haynes football card1967 Royal Castle Dolphins Jr. Dolphin football card

Tags: , , ,

Happy Anniversary, Monday Night Football!

September 21st, 2010  |  Published in General Collecting Info, My Collection

As you have probably heard, today is the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Monday Night Football. The New York Jets played the Cleveland Browns on Monday, September 21, 1970, and the Browns won 31-21. Below are the 1970 Topps cards of the stars of the night: Matt Snell, who had 108 yards rushing for the Jets, and Homer Jones, who had a 94-yard kickoff return for a touchdown for the Browns. There is a box score for the game on pro-football-reference.com.
1970 Topps Matt Snell football card1970 Topps Homer Jones football card
According to Wikipedia, Marlboro was the first sponsor of Monday Night Football. The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned cigarette ads on television and radio, didn’t take effect until January 2, 1971. It has been forty years since the ads were taken off the air, but I can still recall their jingles.

The 1970 Topps set happens to be the first one I completed as a kid. I remember selling my duplicates for a penny each–what they cost at the time–and using the proceeds to buy more cards. I also remember that my teacher told me to knock it off, because I was selling them during class. The elusive Greg Cook was the last card I needed to complete the set. I probably traded a Bart Starr or a Joe Namath to get him!

Tags: , ,

Merry Christmas!

December 25th, 2009  |  Published in My Collection

Merry Christmas, everyone! So, did anyone give or get cards?

I can remember getting cards as gifts only twice. The first time was in 1972, when my 6-year-old brother gave me a pack of football cards for Christmas. Since it was so late in the season, I had lost interest in collecting for that year, so after opening the pack, I put the cards in the closet with the rest of my collection, and I forgot about them. Years later, when I looked through the box, I found that the cards from my brother were the only one that weren’t beat up.

The cards happened to be 1972 Topps 3rd series cards, and one of them was the Joe Namath Pro Action card. It’s worth $75-100 now, and it’s the only card from my childhood collection worth anything at all. It turned out to be a great gift!

Tags: ,

More on the 1972 Sunoco Stamps

December 15th, 2009  |  Published in My Collection, New in the Gallery, Oddball

As I wrote in an earlier post, it will take me several steps to add the 1972 Sunoco Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Last night I skipped ahead and finished step #4: Add player information (college, etc.) to player database. Now when you do a search by college, the Sunoco Stamps are included in the search. (To search by college, see the Search by College page or the Advanced Search page.)

Now everything’s done except the scanning. I finished the Atlanta Falcons and Baltimore Colts, so I have just 24 teams to go. Whew.

In a comment on my last article about the stamps, Rob Lewis, the eBay seller who sold me the set, offered to send a copy of the order form for the update stamps to anyone who sends him an SASE. He also added some remarks about the update set. To see his comment, go to the article and scroll toward the bottom. Rob said the stamp album–which I still haven’t opened–contains 144 stamps, too. So I guess those 144 would be double-printed and a little easier to find? When I finish scanning–sometime next year–maybe I’ll summarize the different ways you could obtain the stamps, show which ones were replaced by updates, etc.

Tags: , , ,

My New 1972 Sunoco Stamps

December 9th, 2009  |  Published in My Collection, New in the Gallery, Oddball

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I bought a set of 1972 Sunoco stamps on eBay. Well, I received them, and I’m very pleased. The stamps are just as described, and the seller packed them well: stars in sleeves and top loaders, and commons in team bags. The auction included a deluxe stamp album, and the seller also threw in a checklist and two stamps from the update set. (They’re the Norm Thompson and Dave Costa stamps pictured here.) It was great fun opening the package: I kept pulling out more and more stuff! The seller, rl1114, has lots of other items for sale, too, so check him out.

It will probably take me months to scan the stamps for the Vintage Football Card Gallery, so I’ll write blog entries for intermediate steps. So far I entered all of the players’ names, added personal information (college, position, hometown, etc.) for some of the players, and scanned the five pre-rookie stamps in the set so I could add them to my pre-rookie card page. Two of the pre-rookies are pictured here: Dan Dierdorf and Art Shell.

The stamp album is still in its original shrink wrap, but I’m curious, so I’ll probably have to unwrap it. Maybe that will be my next article on the set.

Tags: , , , ,

A Virtual 1960 Fleer Uncut Sheet

May 19th, 2009  |  Published in Football Card Trivia, My Collection, New in the Gallery

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.
virtual 1960 Fleer football card uncut sheet

Tags: , ,

Jack Kemp, Chargers and Bills Quarterback

May 4th, 2009  |  Published in Adventures in Card Dealing, My Collection, Player Deaths

I could tell that Jack Kemp had died even before I heard the news. A bunch of his cards suddenly appeared on eBay, and I got a couple of orders for his cards, as well. If I look at the log for my gallery, I’m sure I’ll also see a lot of recent searches there for Jack Kemp cards. I check the logs every week or so, and I can often tell that a player has died by the number of searches for him.

Pictured here is Kemp’s rookie card, the cornerstone of my 1960 Fleer set. I don’t recognize his jersey, though. Many of the players in this set are pictured in their college uniforms, but Kemp doesn’t appear to be in current Occidental colors. Before the Chargers, he also spent time with the Lions, Steelers, Giants, 49ers, and Calgary Stampeders, but I don’t recognize the jersey as being from any of those teams, either. Can anyone help?

 

Tags: ,

My First Football Card–the Second Time Around

November 15th, 2008  |  Published in My Collection

I collected cards as a kid for about five years, then they went into a shoebox in the closet, as a lot of cards do. It wasn’t until 1989 that I picked up the hobby again. A friend of mine who sold sports cards in his store gave me a pack of 1989 ProSet cards. They were very cool, I thought, and I was hooked again. I bought a few packs of the ProSet cards, and I started going to card shops and card shows.
At the time, Don Majkowski was doing well with the Packers, so I started speculating on his cards. I must have bought a couple hundred at a dollar each. Unfortunately, I was one Packers quarterback too early: in a short time Majkowski got hurt, and Brett Favre took over. Having been burned by Majkowski, I didn’t buy any Favre cards–and I still couldn’t tell you what the best Brett Favre card is.
But ProSet and Majkowski had gotten me back into the hobby, and in the course of hunting for Majkowski cards, I also worked on the sets I had started 20 years earlier. My shoebox had survived the years in a closet in my parents’ TV room, so I had a good start on some mid-grade sets. I completed the sets, started other vintage sets, upgraded the beat-up cards, on and on. It’s now been nearly another 20 years, and I’m still upgrading. And I still have a couple hundred Don Majkowski rookie cards in a shoebox in the back of a closet.
Tags: ,

My First Football Card

November 8th, 2008  |  Published in My Collection

1969 Topps Pete Banaszak football cardWell, it wasn’t really my first card, but it was the one I was after. Pete Banaszak was from my hometown, Crivitz, Wisconsin, and he played for the Raiders when I started getting interested in football. I wasn’t even sure he had a card, but I spent a lot of dimes looking for it.

There was a Red Owl grocery store down the block from our house, and that’s where I spent most of my dimes. I remember being annoyed at the sales tax, which was new at the time. Getting only four dime packs for my five dimes seemed to me like a complete rip-off.

When I finally found Pete, I pinned him to my bulletin board, and he remained there for years, maybe even through high school. He played for the Raiders for 13 years, a long time for a running back, finally retiring when I was in college.

Tags: , ,