Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Today I added 1964 Wheaties Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. When I bought my first group of these stamps, I assumed that they would be the thickness of a card, like the 1969 Topps 4-in-1 inserts. I found, though, that they’re like postage stamps, only much bigger: 2 3/4 by 2 1/2 inches. Because they’re so big and on such thin paper, they are fragile, and bending one can leave an indentation, even if it doesn’t leave a crease.

There are 74 stamps in the set: 70 player photos and 4 team emblems. The player photos are sharp and bright. Most of the photos are waist-up or head-and-shoulders shots, and Y.A. Tittle is the only player whose face is obscured by his helmet. (Tittle must have preferred posing in his helmet. Most of his cards picture him wearing it.) My two favorite stamps, Jerry Kramer and John Henry Johnson, are shown here.

The stamps go with a magazine-sized booklet called the Wheaties NFL Pro Bowl Football Player Stamp Album and Fact Book–or WNPBFPSAFB for short. You could buy the album for 50 cents via a mail-in offer from General Mills. The stamps were originally part of the album, most of them on pages just inside the back and front covers. There were 6 pages of stamps, with 12 stamps on each page. That makes 72 stamps, and there were 2 more on a small panel adhered to the inside of the front cover. In my album, the tab from the small panel is still there, and there are remnants of the stamp pages along the album’s spine.

The 6 full pages were printed on a single master sheet, as you can see on the Topps Vault web site. (Evidently Topps supplied the stamps and album for General Mills.) The master sheet is missing two stamps, Norm Snead and Jack Pardee, the two that came on the small panel stuck to the inside of the album’s front cover. This small panel seems odd, when Topps could have fit Snead and Pardee on the master sheet by displacing two of the team emblem stamps. Perhaps it was just poor planning: “Oh, crap, we forgot Snead and Pardee. Quick, make a little two-stamp panel!”

The non-stamp pages of the album include a short writeup for each player, and a place to stick his stamp. The players are grouped by conference, first the Eastern Conference players, then the Western Conference players. (The Pro Bowl back then matched the East against the West.) Within each conference, the players appear in alphabetical order–almost. I wonder how many kids noticed that Mitchell came before Michaels, and Promuto came before Pottios? Also, the album shows Jim Ringo in transition from the Packers to the Eagles: his writeup says Eagles, but he’s still on the Western Conference side of the album. (According to Packers legend, after the 1963 season, Ringo appeared with his agent in Vince Lombardi’s office, asking for a raise. Lombardi left the room, returned in five minutes, and told Ringo he’d been traded to the Eagles.)

All of the players on the stamps played in the 1963 Pro Bowl. According to pro-football-reference.com, there were 71 players in the Pro Bowl that year, so one Pro Bowler didn’t get a stamp. Who went stampless? It was Frank Gifford, but I don’t know why he was excluded.

Oddly, though there are 70 player stamps, the album has writeups for only 68 of the players. Joe Schmidt and Y.A. Tittle appear on stamps, but they were omitted from the album. It’s not like there wasn’t room: the creators of the album included several pages of Pro Bowl history, facts, and records, and they could easily have squeezed in another couple of players. Unless I am missing a page, though, there is no place for Schmidt and Tittle.

It’s also odd that there are only four team emblem stamps. The Vikings, 49ers, Cardinals, and Giants are the only teams with stamps, a pity because the team emblems are colorful and fun. There is no place in the album to stick the four team stamps, either.

• See all of the 1964 Wheaties Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery
• Find 1964 Wheaties Stamps on eBay

Last week I added an error card search to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and since then I have been marking the error cards in my database. Here’s a good one: it’s a 1967 Philadelphia Raymond Berry card, but the image on the card is not Raymond Berry. Who is it? Check out the latest entry on my Mistaken Identities page.

My old Beckett catalog also lists a couple of other cards where the wrong player is pictured, but I can’t find other photos of the players to see for myself. One is 1955 Topps All-American #91, Bob Odell, which Beckett says pictures Howard Odell. Another is 1972 Topps #174, Adrian Young, which Beckett says pictures Rick Duncan. If I find other photos of these players, I will add the cards to the Mistaken Identites page.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Raymond Berry, Bob Boyd
• Search eBay for: Raymond Berry, Bob Boyd

Today I added the ability to search for error cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. You can combine that search with other searches and find, for example, all error cards of hall-of-famers or all error cards of Philadelphia Eagles. To do the fancy searches, see the Advanced Search page.

Though I have the search working, I don’t yet have all of the error cards identified in my database. If your favorite error card is missing, leave a comment and I’ll get it in.

Can you spot the error on the 1969 Topps Sonny Jurgensen card shown here?

Steve Liskey, from The Cowboys Guide, recently asked me if I planned to add scans of the backs of the cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. My first thought was “Are you out of your mind, Steve?” But then I told him that scanning just the fronts has taken an enormous amount of time, so I will probably never get to the backs. (Another visitor had a more modest suggestion: providing a single example of a card back for each set. Now that sounds like something I can accomplish–someday.)

It turned out, though, that Steve was particularly interested in the backs of 1966 Philadelphia cards. Why? Well, because as shown on the Dennis Claridge card to the right, each card in the 1966 Philly set has a player pictured on the back who is not the player on the front. (That’s Roman Gabriel on the back of the Claridge card.) Steve collects Dallas Cowboys cards, of course, and he wanted to know which cards have a Cowboy on the back.

Now that’s a serious collector, and I understand completely the desire–no, the need–to get every one of whatever type of cards you collect. If you collect a certain team, of course you want the cards that picture your team’s players on the back. So what I will probably do–again, someday–is note which players appear on the backs of the 1966 Philly cards so that the cards show up in searches for the players and their teams.

It had occurred to me even before Steve wrote that a player collector might want any cards on which his player was pictured, whether the player was identified on the card or not. That’s why, for each 1966 Philadelphia team play card, I have added the names of all the players appearing in the action on the front of the card. For example, for the Cowboys play card shown here, I included all five players pictured–three Cowboys and two Giants–in the list of players appearing on the card.

While adding players for the team play cards, I noticed that some of the players don’t appear on cards of their own. For example, to my knowledge, the Cowboys play card above is the only card on which Jerry Rhome appears. (Jerry is the holder for the kick.) I sell a lot of cards to players’ friends and relatives, and I suspect that this extra information will someday help a player’s grandson find his granddad on a card he didn’t know existed.

Search for 1966 Philadelphia cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s cards.

Today I put together another “virtual uncut sheet” page, this time for 1963 Fleer cards. More reasons to be skeptical of your price guide!

I spotted an uncut sheet of 1970 Topps Super cards on eBay this week, so I thought I’d create a virtual uncut sheet for that set. My previous virtual uncut sheets have been 1959 Topps and 1960 Fleer.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the cards in this set have attractive fronts and ugly backs. In addition to the photo, each card features the player’s name in script that looks like a signature. It’s not a signature, though: the script is the same on all of the cards. While 1970 Topps Super baseball cards have facsimiles of the players’ actual signatures, the football cards got short shrift.

One of last week’s posts was about a virtual uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards that I created for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I got some nice feedback on that, so today I created another, this time a virtual 1959 Topps uncut sheet. This one was a little less challenging, since I had a picture of a real sheet to look at, but I still learned a few things. For one, you only have to look at a couple of these to see that a card’s position on the sheet greatly affects its availability in high grade. It’s remarkable that the price guides don’t recognize this. They must know what the sheets looked like, since they know which cards are short prints, but to my knowledge none of the guides consider sheet position when assigning prices.

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.

Awhile back, a collector called to ask if I had any 1962 Post Cereal cards, because he was interested in the Bob Lilly card from that set. He said he collected pre-rookie cards of hall-of-famers, and that the 1962 Post Lilly was one he still needed. An interesting idea, I thought.

Today I added a page to the gallery that highlights a few pre-rookie cards. I included a few well-known players that aren’t in the hall of fame, in part because I wanted to include a few 1961 Nu-Cards. The Nu-Card set is one of the few vintage college sets, and it contains cards of a lot players who went on to play in the NFL and AFL.

Yesterday I added the 1959 Bell Brand Rams set to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Like the 1960 Bell Brand Rams, these cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are difficult to find. The cards are sturdy and attractive, with a high-gloss finish unlike other issues of the time, but many of them were cut off-center. Each card features a facsimile of the player’s autograph, a nice touch except that some autographs are tiny relative to the size of the cards.

The 1959 set includes a pre-rookie card of hall-of-fame coach Sid Gillman. In 1960 Gillman moved to the Los Angeles Chargers of the new American Football League, and his “official” rookie card, a 1960 Fleer, is with the Chargers. Why is it his official rookie card? That’s debatable, but it is generally accepted that a rookie card must have been printed by a major card company, and cards from regional issues such as Bell Brand are not considered for rookie cardism.

Of course, a player’s rookie card would be more accurately called his first card. I often get emails saying “you say that so-and-so’s rookie card was 19xx, but he was a rookie in 19yy.” And so I have to explain. Oh well, it’s too late to change it now.

I recently added 1960 Bell Brand Rams cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery–or at least the first half of the set. These cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are very tough to find in nice condition.

Looking at PSA’s population report, the cards appear to have been issued in two series–or maybe half were included in potato chips and the other half in corn chips? With two exceptions, PSA has graded more cards numbered 1-18 than cards numbered 19-39. The first exception is card #2, Gene Selawski, which I understand was pulled from production when he left the team early in the year. The second is card #30, Charley Bradshaw, which appears many more times in the population report than any other card from 19-39. Perhaps Bradshaw replaced Selawski in the potato chips?

There are three quarterbacks in the set–Frank Ryan, Bill Wade, and Buddy Humphrey–and they all got playing time in 1960. None of them lasted much longer with the Rams, though: Wade and Humphrey played for other teams in 1961, and Ryan went to the Browns in 1962, making room for Roman Gabriel.

Yesterday I added the full set of 1970 Topps Super cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Not to be confused with 1970 Topps Super Glossy insert cards, these are large cards that were sold separately from the regular 1970 Topps cards. The cards are colorful and attractive, and because they are elongated, most show a good portion of the player’s uniform. Some of the players’ pictures are the same as on the regular 1970 Topps cards, some are the same as on the Super Glossies, and some are completely different from the other 1970 Topps issues. The Joe Namath card, thankfully, doesn’t show him with a Band-Aid on his head.

The backs show the same information as the regular 1970 Topps cards, but the large amounts of white space make the backs look like an afterthought. On the set I have, a few of the backs have paper wrinkles from the factory. It’s best just to enjoy the fronts of these cards and not turn them over.

Today I added the eight 1951 Berk Ross football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The 1951 Berk Ross set is a 72-card multi-sport set, with baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and several minor sports all represented. You can find a checklist for the entire set at oddlyquirky.com.

Pictured here is the Doak Walker card. Walker was another member of the great Lions teams of the 1950s, and he is one of the few Heisman Trophy winners who have been inducted into the hall of fame. He retired after only six years in the league, hanging it up after the 1955 season.

Yesterday I added 1968 Topps Stand Up cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These were insert cards in 1968 Topps packs, and there are 22 cards in the full set. Each card is perforated around the player’s head and shoulders such that you can punch the player out from the back and stand the card up. Of course, cards that have been punched out are now worth far less that those that remain intact, so it’s best if the cards’ original owners didn’t have any fun with them.

Topps choose a curious group of players for this set. The set contains at most one player per team, and Topps chose Jim Grabowski to represent the Packers over Bart Starr and Ray Nitschke. They also chose Willie Richardson over John Unitas, Jack Concannon over Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus, and Curtis McClinton over Len Dawson. (Topps did feature puzzles of Bart Starr and Len Dawson on the backs of the some of the regular 1968 cards, though.)

There is only one defensive player in the set, Alex Karras. And oddly, Homer Jones appeared in this set but not in the regular set of 1968 Topps cards.

As the About page says, the Vintage Football Card Gallery is a reference site. The cards in the gallery are not for sale, but I do have lots of cards for sale on my Nearmint’s Vintage Football Cards site.

You can search the gallery for your favorite set, team, player, or college. To do complex searches, such as “Show all the rookie cards of Hall of Fame players named Bob,” try the Advanced Search page.

On the Site Map you will find links to other miscellaneous pages. Among them:

• The sports card auction finder, a tool for searching eBay auctions that is tailored for vintage sports cards
• A page that shows a bunch of cards that picture the wrong player
• A page showing lots of vintage football card wrappers
• Interactive team cards: 1959 Topps New York Giants, 1961 Topps Green Bay Packers, 1963 Topps Dallas Cowboys, 1964 Topps Oakland Raiders, and 1967 Philadelphia Cleveland Browns
• Puzzles of Bart Starr, Len Dawson, and Fran Tarkenton, assembled from the backs of 1968 and 1969 Topps football cards
• Examples of pre-rookie cards, minor issues that were printed before players’ commonly accepted rookie cards
• “Virtual” uncut sheets of cards: 1948 Bowman, 1958 Topps, 1959 Topps, 1960 Fleer, 1960 Topps, 1961 Fleer, 1962 Topps, 1963 Fleer, 1966 Philadelphia, 1968 Topps, 1969 Topps, and 1970 Topps Super.

I add to the gallery whenever I have time, so check back occasionally for new cards. Enjoy your visit!