Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

This week I added 1962 Kahn’s Wieners football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 38 cards in this set: sixteen Browns, fourteen Steelers, and a sprinkling of players from six other teams. Kahn’s Meats was (and still is) based in Cincinnati, and the early Kahn’s sets were heavily weighted toward players from nearby Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

The 1962 Kahn’s set includes a pre-rookie card of Gene Hickerson, pictured here. Hickerson’s generally recognized rookie card (because it was issued by a major card company) is in the 1966 Philadelphia set. (For a discussion about rookie cards and pre-rookie cards, see an earlier article, R is for Rookie Cards.)

According to beckett.com, Kahn’s also issued an album to hold their 1962 cards, but I have not seen one yet.

Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided images for several of the Kahn’s sets.

It seemed like a good week to add another set of wiener cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. So I added 1963 Kahn’s Wieners, a set of 92 black-and-white cards distributed in the Cincinnati region by Kahn’s Meats. (Kahn’s is still in operation; it is now a Sara Lee company.)

All fourteen of the 1963 NFL teams are represented in the set, but the distribution of the cards among the teams is very uneven. I thought that the distribution might be related to how the teams finished in 1962, so I looked up the 1962 NFL standings. I found that, except for the Redskins, there is a strong correlation between the teams’ 1962 records and the number of players representing them in the 1963 Kahn’s set. Why so many Redskins? I dunno, maybe they were expected to do better in 1963. (They didn’t; they finished 3-11.)

Like earlier Kahn’s cards, the 1963 cards have facsimile signatures printed on them. However, as I pointed out in a previous article, at least some of the facsimile signatures are not in the players’ handwriting. The signature on the John Unitas card pictured here, for example, does not look like any of his autographs that appear in a Google image search. Most obvious is that on all of the items I found with his actual autograph, he signed his first name “Johnny,” not “John.”

Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided the images for this set.

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This weekend I added 1975 McDonald’s Quarterbacks cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This is a bitty set: just four cards of AFC quarterbacks. Three of the four quarterbacks–Ken Stabler, Terry Bradshaw, and Joe Ferguson–had led their teams to the playoffs the season before. The fourth, Al Woodall of the Jets, was an odd choice. Perhaps he was included because New York was a big market, or perhaps because Marden-Kane, Inc., and Rosenfeld, Sirowitz & Lawson, Inc., the advertising agencies who produced the cards, were based in New York.

On the back of each card is a coupon for 25 cents off a McDonald’s Big Meal. Each coupon was good for a different week early in the 1975 NFL season.

I have never seen uncut sheets of 1951 Bowman football cards, but I am guessing that they were configured like 1950 and 1952 Bowman sheets. Yesterday I put together 1951 Bowman virtual uncut sheets and added them to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Click on the image to have a look!

Today I added 1964 Kahn’s Wieners cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Kahn’s, which is still in business, included football cards in packages of wieners each fall from 1959 to 1964. Only the 1964 set is in color, and they are great looking cards.

There are 53 cards in the 1964 Kahn’s set, with all 14 NFL teams of the time represented. Because Kahn’s distributed their products in the Cincinnati region (and since the Bengals had not yet arrived), the company put a disproportionate number of Cleveland Browns in the set: 9 of the 53 cards. One of the Browns cards, Paul Warfield, is a pre-rookie card, so I will be adding it to my pre-rookie card page. Warfield’s rookie card is in the 1965 Philadelphia set.

A big thanks to Mike Ford for providing images for this set.

This week I added virtual uncut sheets of 1948 Leaf and 1949 Leaf football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. From a picture of a 1949 sheet, I think I have also figured out what the 1948 sheets looked like. The 1949 Leaf set is basically a subset of the 1948 Leaf set with the card backs and card numbers changed, and it appears to me that the sheets would have been similar. Take a peek, and let me know what you think.

Over the weekend I added 1949 Leaf football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. It is quite an unexciting set: the fronts of 1949 Leaf cards are identical to the fronts of 1948 Leaf cards, and there are no new players–and hence, no rookie cards–in the 1949 set. The 1949 set is also just half the size of the 1948 set: 49 cards versus 98. Whereas the 1948 Leaf set contains both NFL and college players, the 1949 set contains just NFL players.

Leaf changed the backs of the cards in 1949, so it actually is easy to tell the two years apart. My earlier article, L is for Leaf, includes pictures of the backs of both 1948 and 1949 cards. Leaf also changed the card numbers in 1949. The 1949 Leaf set is skip-numbered, with numbers scattered between 1 and 150, presumably to fool kids into thinking there were more cards available to buy.

Yesterday I added 1971 Bazooka football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 36 cards in the set, with at least one player from each of the 26 NFL teams. The cards were printed, three per box, on the bottoms of 25-cent boxes of Bazooka bubble gum. There are nice pictures of two empty boxes in the Redskins Football Card Museum.

I wouldn’t categorize the set as either a regular issue or a food issue, so I’m filing them under Oddball. A big thanks to Mike Ford for providing the images.

Yesterday I added 1972 NFLPA Vinyl Stickers to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. A number of places on the web say that the stickers were sold from vending machines, but I couldn’t find a picture of such a machine. I was a little surprised at that. The stickers are bigger than standard-sized cards, and I’m curious about how they were packaged for vending.

There are twenty players in the set of stickers, with two variations. The Joe Namath and Dick Butkus stickers each come two ways: with a reversed image of the player’s head, and with the player’s head oriented correctly. To guess which stickers had the reversed images, I compared them to the images on 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons.

I can’t say I am fond of these stickers. The big-real-head-on-little-cartoon-body design also appears on other cards–1938 Goudey baseball cards, for example–and I have always found it a bit creepy. Also, the stickers don’t include the players’ teams, and some don’t even have the players in the correct team colors. Paul Warfield in green and John Brockington in purple? That must have alarmed young Dolphins and Packers fans!

For more oddball football cards and collectibles, see the Oddball page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Last week I added virtual uncut sheets of 1952 Bowman Large football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. From what I have read, Bowman simply enlarged their 1952 Small sheets to get the 1952 Large sheets, and when they printed the Large sheets, some cards on the edges of the sheets were truncated. The cards on the edges of the sheets thus became the short prints in the set.

Click the image below to see all of the 1952 Bowman Large sheets. Also, for an overview of the topic, see an earlier blog article, U is for Uncut Sheets.