Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Today I added the ability to search the Vintage Football Card Gallery for members of the Philadelphia Eagles Honor Roll. I found the list of Honor Roll inductees, along with summaries of their careers, in the Eagles media guide. As I have written in earlier posts, I like looking at team halls of fame because they include the second tier of stars, the ones who have not made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

One name on the Eagles Honor Roll surprised me: Ollie Matson. I didn’t know that he had been an Eagle! So I looked up his stats and found that he had played for Philadelphia from 1964 to 1966, his last three seasons before retiring. He didn’t appear on a football card during those years, I suppose because his production had waned by then. According to Wikipedia, when the Eagles introduced their Honor Roll in 1987, they inducted all former Eagles who were members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. So they included Matson, though his best years had been with the Cardinals and Rams.

Another member of the Eagles Honor Roll inaugural class, Harold Carmichael, is pictured above. This is Carmichael’s rookie card, a 1974 Topps.

You can use the Gallery’s Advanced Search page to find cards of members of the Eagles Honor Roll or other team halls of fame.

I learned from Todd Tobias’s new blog, Tales from the American Football League, that Rick Redman’s rookie card, the 1965 Topps card shown here, does not picture Rick Redman. So, if it’s not Rick Redman, who is it? Well, Todd has a nice story to tell about it, so I’ll direct you to his article.

A surprising number of vintage football cards picture the wrong player. I keep a list of them, and Mr. Redman’s card is just the latest addition. You can see all of them on my Mistaken Identities page.

The New York Giants introduced their Ring of Honor at New Meadowlands Stadium early this month. The inaugural class included twenty-two players, plus eight coaches, owners, and executives. You can see the full list of inductees on the Giants’ Wikipedia page. (You can also see the full list on the Giants’ web site, but beware: the page automatically starts a video, and it’s kind of startling.)

Thirteen of the inductees appear as individuals on cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. You can search for them by choosing “Giants Ring of Honor” in one of the “Honor” menus on the Advanced Search page. At least one more inductee, coach Jim Lee Howell, does not appear on a card of his own, but you can find him on some of the team cards–see him on my interactive 1959 Topps Giants team card, for example.

Two of the inductees, Dick Lynch and Joe Morrison, first appeared on cards in the 1962 Post Cereal set, a minor issue. Their cards are pictured here. (For a description of the Post set, see W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues.) Lynch’s first card in a major issue–in other words, his rookie card–is a 1964 Philadelphia, and Morrison’s is a 1965 Philadelphia. Despite being stars, both players spent seven years in the league before appearing in a major set.

For more early Giants cards, matchbooks, etc., also check out revmoran’s Giants Football Cards page on the Giants web site. It’s great stuff!

I recently added the ability to search the Vintage Football Card Gallery for members of the Miami Dolphins Honor Roll. According to Wikipedia, “The Miami Dolphin Honor Roll is a ring around the second tier at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, which honors former players, coaches, contributors, and officials who have made significant contributions to the Miami Dolphins franchise.” The Wikipedia article includes a list of inductees and a picture of the ring. Oddly, I couldn’t find a reference to the Honor Roll on either the Sun Life Stadium web site or the Dolphins official site. Perhaps it’s a user problem.

Pictured here is one member of the Honor Roll, Dick Anderson, on his 1969 Topps rookie card. Anderson once intercepted four passes in a game, an NFL record he shares with seventeen other players.

To search for players in other teams’ Rings and Halls of Fame and Honor, see the Gallery’s Advanced Search page.

It’s been awhile, but I finally added another “interactive” team card to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This one is a 1967 Philadelphia Cleveland Browns team card. Just click the image shown here to see it.

Whenever I create one of these, I find a surprise. This time it was #87, Tom Hutchinson, in the front row. I didn’t think I had a card of Hutchinson by himself, but I do: a 1961 Nu-Card, which pictures him still in college, at Kentucky. Hutchinson played for the Browns from 1963 to 1965, then for the Falcons in 1966. He apparently left the Browns shortly after this photo was taken.

Yesterday I added 1968 Browns Team Issue 7×8 photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The set contains just seven players, the team’s offensive stars at the time. The photos are printed on lightweight cardboard, and the backs are blank. The “7×8” in the set name is to distinguish it from a second 1968 Browns team issue, in which the photos are 8-by-10. The 8-by-10 set, according to Beckett’s site, contains twelve photos, with some overlap with the 7-by-8’s.

There are facsimile autographs on the photos, and as far as I can tell, they are copies of authentic signatures. (This isn’t always the case on vintage cards; see my article on the facsimile signatures on Kahn’s Wieners cards.) At first I thought that the signatures on the Browns photos might be real, not facsimiles, because Ernie Green’s extends into the border. But then I noticed white fisheyes in the “F” and “k” of Frank Ryan’s signature, which I don’t believe would appear in an original.

Today I added 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery–or two-thirds of them, anyway. All of the cards in this regional set are scarce, and ten of them are short prints, so they’re doubly scarce. The short prints are the ones that I don’t have yet. The backs of the cards say that two cards were made available each week of the season, and I can only guess as to why some were short-printed. Perhaps the promotion didn’t get the response the restaurants expected, so they didn’t print as many cards in the later weeks. Or perhaps the promotion was more popular than the restaurants anticipated, so they increased their print runs after five weeks, and the cards printed earlier became short prints.
According to a Miami Herald article, Royal Castle restaurants were modeled after White Castle, and at one time there were at least 185 Royal Castles in the Miami area. By 2008, only one or two were still in operation. A message board thread on roadfood.com includes pictures of the last two Royal Castles and their fare.

The card pictured here is Wahoo McDaniel, who wrestled professionally in the off-season and after his football career. I don’t remember McDaniel as a football player, but I do remember watching him battling Baron von Raschke on Saturday nights. There is a nice photo of him flexing his muscles on the onlineworldofwrestling.com web site.

The key card in the Royal Castle set is a pre-rookie card of Bob Griese. It is a short print, so I don’t have it yet, but there is a picture of one on SGC’s web site. Oddly, it appears that Griese dedicated his signature to “Alan,” but the signature on the card is a facsimile.

Yesterday I added 1955 Rams Team Issue photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The photos are about 4 inches by 6, and they are printed on cardboard. This is unlike the team issue photos I added earlier to the gallery–1955 49ers, 1958 49ers, and 1960 Eagles–which are on paper the thickness of catalog covers.

Beckett says there are 37 photos in the 1955 Rams set, but there are actually 38. The 38th is Bob Kelley, a sports announcer at the time for the Rams and baseball’s Los Angeles Angels. The back of his photo says he moved with the Rams from Cleveland to Los Angeles in 1946.

Besides the Kelley photo, there are 36 player photos and one photo of the coaching staff. The only players on the 1955 Rams roster who are not included in the set are Jack Dwyer and Bob Long. I am nearly sure that this is because the photos were produced during the season, and Dwyer and Long had already left the team by the third game.

Since the whole team is included in the set, many of the photos–eleven, if I counted correctly–picture players who never appeared on cards of their own. I think these guys were excited to get their chance, because they gave us the best action poses in the set. Pictured here are my two favorites, Art Hauser and Ed Hughes.

I realize now that when I picked up my first sets of team issue photos, I bit off more than I expected. I definitely like them, but there are a lot of them! To make room for more, I created a separate team issue photo page in the Gallery.

Today I added 1963 IDL Steelers photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These resemble the team issue photos I have been adding recently–1955 49ers, 1960 Eagles, and 1958 49ers–and I wouldn’t really call them cards. They are about 4 inches by 5, and they are printed on thin stock, approximately the thickness of a magazine cover. The backs are blank, or at least they were when they were printed. All of mine but one have “URBANI’S PHARMACY” and its address stamped on the back.

I learned from Wikipedia that IDL stood for Independent Drugstores League, and that the IDL “was a cooperative of independent drugstores that disbanded in the late 1960s.” I also did a web search for “Urbani’s Pharmacy,” and I found an obituary for Mr. Arthur Urbani, who owned the drug store that my photos came from. He sold his store to Rite Aid in 1984.

The images in this set are action shots cropped such that only the players’ faces and upper bodies are showing. The players are clearly exerting themselves, but you can’t see what they are doing, so many of them appear to have odd expressions on their faces. The Buddy Dial photo shown above is one example. Cropping action shots this close is not a good idea.

As is common with team sets, the IDL Steelers photos include a few players who, to my knowledge, never appeared on cards. Those players are Frank Atkinson, John Burrell, Lou Cordileone, and Glenn Glass. As I’ve written before, the thing I enjoy most about team sets is getting to see a few new faces.

This morning I added the ability to search the Vintage Football Card Gallery for members of the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor. Just go to the Advanced Search page, choose Cowboys Ring of Honor in one of the “Honor” menus, and hit the Search button.

Pictured here is one member of the Ring, Don Perkins, on his 1962 Topps rookie card. He’s wearing the Cowboys’ first home jersey, my all-time favorite over all the NFL teams. He doesn’t appear to be wearing it in the black-and-white inset photo, though, so I wonder if that is a college photo. Or maybe it’s not even him: on some 1962 cards, Topps pictured a different player in the inset photo, sometimes altering the image to look like the player on the card. For examples of that, see my earlier blog article on the subject.

Looking through the cards I have of members of the Cowboys Ring of Honor, it’s striking that there are no cards of players who had moved on to different teams. It is possible that I don’t have all of the players’ cards, but the impression I get is that the Cowboys’ best players stayed with the Cowboys.