Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Yesterday I added virtual uncut sheets of 1963 Topps cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I have not seen an actual 1963 Topps sheet, but I was able to figure out the sheets’ configuration by looking at miscut cards and applying a little logic. Unfortunately, these sheets are not yet completely accurate, and I could use your help. I believe I have all of the player cards in the right places, but I have not yet figured out the order of the team cards and checklists within their rows. If you happen to find any badly miscut team cards, checklists, or neighboring cards, please send me pictures of them.

With these sheets I introduced a new feature: I started highlighting the cards that are scarcest in high grades. This helps illustrate how a card’s position on the sheet affects its availability. As I have time, I will go back and do this for the other sheets, as well.

(Click on the image to see the full sheets.)

Last night I added a virtual partial uncut sheet of 1967 Topps cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I modeled it after a proof sheet I found in an internet search. For now the partial sheet is on my Sheets In Progress page. At some point I will move it to a page of its own.

One bit of trivia: the cards in the bottom row of the partial sheet also appeared in Milton Bradley’s Win-A-Card game in 1969.

Click the image to see the rest of the partial sheet. (When the “In Progress” page comes up, scroll to the bottom.)

While surfing the web this week, I found a picture of a partial sheet of 1955 Topps All-American football cards. The partial sheet contains 50 cards, half of the 100 cards in the complete set. Today I created a virtual version of it and added it to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. For now it’s on my “In Progress” page, but I will probably promote it to its own page when I get time.

Today I added a virtual uncut sheet of 1956 Topps cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I modeled the sheet after a picture of a partial sheet I found on the ‘net. This is the first Topps sheet I have seen with a pattern to the numbering; this allowed me to extend the partial sheet to a half-sheet.

(Click the image to see the whole virtual sheet.)

Yesterday, while searching the internet, I found a tiny picture of a partial uncut sheet of 1957 Topps football cards. Using the picture as a model–and doing a lot of squinting!–I created a virtual partial sheet of 1957 Topps cards and added it to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Judging by the partial sheet, 1957 Topps football cards were not released in two series, as the price guides say. They were released in just one series, with most of the high-numbered cards being short prints.

(Click on the image to see the rest of the partial sheet.)

Over the weekend I picked up a couple of miscut 1959 Topps first series cards. That allowed me to add a 1959 Topps section to my page of partial virtual uncut sheets. The cards are Bill Barnes, with a sliver of Leo Nomellini’s card showing on the right side, and the Colts pennant, with a sliver of Bob St. Clair’s card on the left side.

A previous blog article, U is for Uncut Sheets, contains a full list of the virtual uncut football card sheets I have completed. As always, if you have miscut cards from sheets I haven’t done yet, I’d love to see them.

Last week I added 1961 Kahn’s Wieners cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 36 cards in this Kahn’s set, with 32 being Browns and Steelers. Kahn’s was (and still is) based in Cincinnati, and Cleveland and Pittsburgh were the closest pro teams at the time.

The other four players in the set–Frank Varrichione, Will Renfro, Jimmy Orr, and Joe Lewis–were with either Cleveland or Pittsburgh the previous season. It appears that Kahn’s intended to make the set all Browns and Steelers, but these players moved, so Kahn’s simply changed the teams on the backs of their cards.

Two of the cards in the set, Tom Tracy and Larry Krutko, have their images swapped. This is especially unfortunate for Krutko, because I believe that this is his only football card. (For more old football cards that picture the wrong player, see my Mistaken Identities page.)

The set includes a pre-rookie card of Gene Hickerson. Hickerson had more pre-rookie cards than any other Hall of Famer I can think of: he appeared in the 1959 through 1962 Kahn’s sets, and on a 1962 Post Cereal card.

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

A few weeks ago, in a previous blog article, I asked readers to send me any images they had of miscut vintage football cards. In response, Steve Liskey of TheCowboysGuide.com sent me this image of a 1967 Topps Steve Tensi card. You can see that it has a sliver of a Buffalo Bills card showing; the card happens to be Jack Kemp. Steve’s contribution prompted me to create a page of virtual sheets in progress. It’s short for now, but hopefully you can help me make it grow.

Thanks, Steve!

Last week I added virtual uncut sheets of 1955 Bowman cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I have not seen an actual sheet of 1955 Bowmans, but I presume they followed the same numbering pattern as sheets of older Bowman cards. I believe that the 160-card set was printed on 5 sheets of 32.

Bowman apparently printed the fifth 1955 sheet in smaller quantities than the other four, because most of the scarce cards in the set are from the fifth sheet.

(Click on the image to see all five sheets.)

Yesterday I added virtual uncut sheets of 1954 Bowman cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I have not seen an actual sheet of 1954 Bowmans, but I followed the numbering patterns on sheets of older Bowman cards and made an educated guess as to what the 1954 sheets looked like.

Bowman apparently printed the third 1954 sheet in smaller quantities than the others, because most of the scarcer cards are from that sheet.

(Click on the image to see all four sheets.)

Last week I added 1969 Glendale Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 312 stamps in the set, 12 each for the 26 NFL teams of the time. The stamps are slightly smaller than 2×3 inches.

The stamps were printed on panels of 12, and they were designed to be stuck in a special album. The album contains a page for each NFL team, and each team page contains a bio for each player and a place for his stamp. The full stamp panels were approximately the same height and width as the album, so I assume that the stamps and album came packaged together. The album was published by Glendale Publishers, Inc., of New York City.

Oddly, the title of the stamp album is “Official 1970 Pro Football Stars,” though Glendale apparently published it in 1969. The copyright date inside the album is from 1969, and the players’ bios include their performances in 1968, but not 1969. (Click on the image below to see a larger image.)

There are three Hall of Famers in the 1969 Glendale set whose stamps predate their rookie cards: O.J. Simpson, whose rookie card is a 1970 Topps; Jan Stenerud, whose rookie card is also a 1970 Topps; and Gene Upshaw, whose rookie card is a 1972 Topps. When I find time, I will add them to my pre-rookie card page.

• See the full set of 1969 Glendale Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
• Find individual Glendale stamps, full panels, and stamp albums on eBay.

Dan Tester (thanks, Dan!) sent me a link yesterday to a picture of a four-card panel of 1953 Bowman football cards. That small panel was enough to show that 1953 Bowmans were printed in numerical order on the uncut sheets, as the earlier Bowman cards were. That bit of knowledge prompted me to go ahead and assemble virtual uncut sheets for the 1953 Bowman set.

One thing I don’t understand is why the price guides show short prints in the 1953 Bowman set. It looks to me as if the 96-card set broke evenly over three sheets of 32. If Bowman had printed fewer copies of one sheet than the others, that would have resulted in short prints, but the price guides’ short prints don’t match up with a single sheet. Maybe some reader can explain it to me.

Anyway, check out the new sheets!

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.

(Feel free to Twitter this article.)

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.