Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog » My Collection

Happy Anniversary, Monday Night Football!

nearmint — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 01:57:07 +0000

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.

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!

Merry Christmas!

nearmint — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:02:59 +0000

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!

More on the 1972 Sunoco Stamps

nearmint — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:25:05 +0000

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.

My New 1972 Sunoco Stamps

nearmint — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:29:32 +0000

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.

A Virtual 1960 Fleer Uncut Sheet

nearmint — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:46:23 +0000

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.

Jack Kemp, Chargers and Bills Quarterback

nearmint — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:07:39 +0000

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?

Of Teletrade and Joe Klecko

nearmint — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:21:05 +0000

In the dark days before eBay, there was a telephone auction called Teletrade. You could send your cards to Teletrade, they would grade the cards and sell them in their automated phone auction, and they would send you a check for the proceeds. Teletrade is still in business, but their auctions now appear to be limited to coins and currency.

I bought a lot of cards through Teletrade, including some I should have passed on. I found these yesterday in a box of junk cards: ten 1978 Topps Joe Klecko rookie cards, still with the Teletrade seal on them. What was I thinking, that Joe would be a hall-of-famer some day? That I could find his mom and she would pay big bucks for them? Or did I hit the wrong key on my phone, meaning to bid on a John Unitas rookie card instead? Most likely I just wanted to bid on something, and there wasn’t anything I was interested in buying that week.

So what are they worth now? There are loads of them on eBay at around a dollar each. But those, of course, don’t have the genuine Teletrade seal.

Mine are up for auction, too. Click here if you love Joe Klecko!

My First Football Card–the Second Time Around

nearmint — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:35:00 +0000

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.

My First Football Card

nearmint — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:51:00 +0000

Well, 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.

See all of Pete Banaszak’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery
Find Pete Banaszak cards on eBay