Nearmint’s Vintage Football Card Blog

Today a collector on the Collectors Universe message boards posted pictures of 5 uncut panels of 1952 Wheaties Champions cards. From the looks of it, his panels are in great shape. The Wheaties Champions set is a multi-sport set, and it includes women as well as men. There are 10 cards on each panel, so the collector has 50 of the 60 cards in the set.

There are thirty athletes in the set, with each athlete appearing on both a portrait card and an “in action” card. Six of the athletes are football players: Doak Walker, Otto Graham, John Lujack, Tom Fears, Glenn Davis, and Bob Waterfield. I haven’t yet added the football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but since there are only a few of them, I’ll try to do that sometime soon. There is currently a full set listed on eBay, but I’ll probably pick up individual cards as they become available. Surprisingly, though they were hand-cut from the boxes, most of the cards I see are in pretty good condition. I infer from this that people saved the full boxes, and the cards I’m seeing were cut from boxes relatively recently.

One problem with collecting rookie cards is that it locks you in to the cards that you will include in your collection. Whether you collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, or players from your favorite college or team, there’s not much wiggle room: if you want to complete your collection, you’ll probably have to purchase some cards that aren’t very attractive. Check out Bobby Mitchell’s rookie card, for example. He looks like he’s ordering a five dollar footlong while falling over backward.

One way to avoid this is to choose your own “best card” for each player you want in your collection. A great example of such a personalized collection is RustyWilly’s HOF Portrait Gallery. Rather than collecting whatever happens to be the rookie card of each Hall of Famer, RustyWilly chose a nice head shot of each player. He didn’t limit himself to major sets, either, so he has cards from Kelloggs, Swell, Stop N Go, 7 Eleven, and Wonder Bread. Not only did this give him a wider selection of images to choose from, it allowed him to include Hall of Famers who didn’t appear on cards in major issues, and hence didn’t have rookie cards. (See R is for Rookie Cards for the definition of “rookie card.”)

Clicking on an image in RustyWilly’s gallery brings up large scans of both the front and back of the card. The card backs are a nice feature, since they provide little bios of the Hall of Famers. They’re also a ton of work, which is why I haven’t included them in my own gallery.

RustyWilly also has a Baseball HOF Portrait Gallery. I don’t know much about baseball cards, though, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Here’s an interesting item: a 1966 American Oil Game Sheet. The object of the game was to complete a row of stamps–which I assume you got from American Oil gas stations–to win a prize. One stamp in each row, of course, was rare.

The 1966-68 American Oil Sweepstakes Stamps page on thecowboysguide.com shows some of the stamps and has another view of the game sheet. If you hold your cursor over the game sheet, you can see that most of the stamps are pasted on it. The missing stamps are the key stamps needed for prizes. I can’t tell who is on the missing stamp in the Mustang row. I wonder if any examples of that stamp exist?

You can usually find examples of other American Oil game pieces on eBay.

Yesterday I added 1955 49ers Team Issue photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The photos are bigger than cards, at just under 5×7, and I had to order extra-large toploaders for storing them. They came in the original envelope, pictured below. The photos, amazingly, are in much better condition than the envelope.

The photos are sharp black-and-whites, and each includes a facsimile of the player’s signature. On the back of each photo is a glowing biography of the player on the front. (Hardy Brown’s bio calls him “the most feared linebacker in the game because of his fantastic ’shoulder tackle’ which uncoils like a pile driver and causes many fumbles”!) Most of the images of the well-known players are familiar, since they also appear in color on 1950s Bowman and Topps cards. Being a team issue, though, the set also includes numerous players who never appeared on cards. In the 50s and 60s, the major card companies printed cards of only 10-12 players from each team, and most linemen and defensive players were left out. I love team sets for this reason: I get to see players I’ve never seen before.

There are 38 photos in the set, and it includes photos of the 49ers’ coaches and their TV and radio announcers. I imagine that in the 50’s, the announcers for each team were as familiar to fans as the players, so it was natural to include them in a team set.

The set includes six Pro Football Hall of Fame players, including the four members of the 49ers’ “Million Dollar Backfield”: Y.A. Tittle, Hugh McElhenny, Joe Perry, and John Henry Johnson.

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.

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.

As I wrote in O is for Oddball, I don’t collect many oddball items. This full set of 1963 Nalley’s CFL coins is pretty darn cool, though, and if I had $12,000 to burn, I’d grab it. The seller has a 1964 set of Nalley’s coins up for auction, also.

I recognize a few names from NFL teams. Dave Mann, who played for the Chicago Cardinals in the 1950’s, finished his pro career with the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL. Bud Grant, Joe Kapp, and Bobby Walden jumped from the CFL to the NFL later in the 1960’s.

Bronko Nagurski, Jr., also appears in the 1963 Nalley’s set. He played eight years for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

You can also find lots of individual 1963 and 1964 Nalley’s CFL coins on eBay. For more interesting vintage football auctions, see the Interesting eBay Auctions tab.

I mentioned in O is for Oddball that someday I would buy a set of 1972 Sunoco stamps. “Someday” came sooner than I thought: I picked up a set last night. I bought them mainly to add to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and now I have a lot of work to do. Here’s the process:

1. Scan all 624 stamps and number the scans.
2. Create thumbnail pictures from the scans.
3. Enter all 624 stamps in my card database: stamp number, player, team, errors, etc.
4. Check for players I don’t have in my player database, look them up online, and add them: name, position, college, hometown, etc.
5. Back up the gallery site, in case I botch something.
6. Upload all the new stuff to the gallery site.
7. Update the various pages that refer to the set, such as the home page, O is for Oddball page, and pre-rookies page.
8. Test it all.
9. Write a blog post to announce the addition and say something about the stamps.

I’ve automated some of the process, so there’s not much thinking involved anymore. The scanning and data entry still take plenty of time, though. It’s a good thing I love the hobby!

eBay seller “batnbal” is auctioning off some old San Diego Chargers items that I’ve never seen before. I thought I’d point them out.

1961 Golden Tulip Chargers cards were distributed in bags of Golden Tulip potato chips. As I wrote in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets, you could send in five Golden Tulip cards of the same player for a 8×10 photo of a San Diego Charger. The cards themselves are scarce, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of the photos. The seller has two: the Charlie Flowers pictured here, and Ron Nery. I have not seen the full list of photos, but there are 22 cards in the Golden Tulip set, so perhaps there are also 22 photos. If you sent in five Ron Nery cards, would you get a Ron Nery poster? Sounds logical, but I have no idea.

The seller also has three 1962 Golden Arrow Dairy San Diego Chargers milk bottle caps up for auction: Jim Bates, Emil Karras, and Dick Harris. These aren’t pretty: they’re milk-stained, and they have staples in them. I suspect they’re rare, though–who would have kept them?–and they’re sure to sell to a hardcore Chargers fan or a collector who’s gotta have it all. The seller included a little write-up for each player, so it’s worth checking out the auctions just for that.

To a card collector, “oddballs” are collectible items that have some characteristics of cards–small size, two dimensions, pictures of players, team logos, and so on–but are not traditional trading cards. Some examples are coins, bottle caps, cap liners, discs, stamps, stickers, patches, pins, and playing cards. Many of them came on or in packages of food. Some were regional and featured a particular team.

I distinguish oddball items from inserts (see I is for Inserts), though some inserts also fit the description above. Why? Well, since inserts came in packs of cards, most of them are familiar to collectors, and there are enough of them to group them into a category of their own. Oddball items are the unfamiliar, the hard to categorize, the things that go under “miscellaneous.” They have brand names you might never have heard of, like Stancraft and Drenks and Salada.

Any number of items can be considered oddball, and I’ll list just a few here. I don’t collect many of them–you have to draw a line somewhere–so I’ll mostly provide links to other places. The only oddballs I have in my collection are playing cards and stamps, which aren’t too far removed from trading cards.

Playing Cards

I know of two sets of vintage playing cards with images of football players: 1963 Stancraft and 1973 Nebraska Cornhuskers. Both came in full decks, and I’m sure their creators did not intend for the decks to be broken up. Broken up they were, though, and it is easier to find individual cards than full decks.

1963 Stancraft playing cards were released in conjunction with the opening of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. 48 of the 54 cards in the deck–all but the aces and jokers–picture star players and coaches. Oddly, though there were 17 inductees in the Hall of Fame’s class of 1963, only 9 of the 17 appear in the Stancraft deck. Of the 48 players and coaches in the deck, 37 eventually made it into the Hall.

The Stancraft playing cards were issued as a two-deck bridge set: one deck with red backs and one deck with green backs. Both decks picture the same players and coaches. You can see a full deck of 1963 Stancraft Playing Cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

The 1973 Nebraska playing cards picture Nebraska players and coaches from that year’s team. Coach Tom Osborne is the ace of spades, and Memorial Stadium appears on the two jokers. I don’t yet have these cards, but you can see them in PSA’s set registry. A collector named Sumo Cornhuskers has pictures of the whole ‘Huskers set.

Stamps

I am familiar with three sets of vintage football stamps that were not inserts: 1964 Wheaties, 1969 Glendale, and 1972 Sunoco. Each of the sets had an accompanying album into which you could stick the stamps. I recently added the 1964 Wheaties stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and you can read about them in an earlier blog post. (One of the Wheaties stamps, Raymond Berry, is pictured here.) I don’t yet have the 1969 Glendale stamps, but that didn’t stop me from writing a little about them, too.

I don’t have 1972 Sunoco stamps yet, either, but they are plentiful on eBay. They appear to have been distributed both in packs and on sheets. The base set is huge: 12 offensive and 12 defensive players for each of the 26 teams, for a total of 624 stamps. On top of that, Sunoco released an 82-stamp update set. Among the 706 stamps are numerous players who never appeared on cards. I like seeing unfamiliar players on cards (or on oddballs), so one of these days I’ll buy a set of the Sunoco stamps. PSA’s set registry shows the composition of both the base set and the update set.

Discs

1976 was the year of the disc. Five sets of football discs were printed that year: Coke Bears Discs, Crane (potato chip) Discs, Buckman Discs, Saga Discs, and Pepsi Discs.

1976 is newer than I typically deal with, and I have never had much interest in the discs, so I don’t know a lot about them. I assume that the same company printed all of them, since I don’t know of any others printed before or since 1976. A friend sent me a couple of Crane Discs once; they’re about the size of a beer coaster. Pictured here is one of them, Charley Taylor.

The PSA registry shows all of the players in the disc sets, and you can see lots of examples on eBay.

• 1976 Buckmans Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Coke Bears Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Crane Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Pepsi Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Saga Discs: composition, examples

Other Oddballs

As I said at the top, I don’t own many oddball items, and my knowledge of them is limited. Here are a few more, along with links to the set compositions and some examples. As I learn more about them, I’ll give these oddballs sections of their own. If I am missing your favorite, let me know and I’ll add it here.

• Previous: N is for National Chicle
• Next: P is for Philadelphia
• All of the ABCs