There are 35 patches in the set, with 22 of the 26 NFL teams represented. Oddly, there are no Bengals, Oilers, Eagles, or Rams in the set, but there are four Chargers, and the Chargers were a losing team at the time. Perhaps Deacon Jones was supposed to represent the Rams in the set, but he was traded to the Chargers before the 1972 season.

Most of the NFLPA patches have a blue background, but there are six with a pink background, one with white, one with yellow, and one with green. I don’t think the colors are significant, but the distribution is odd, so perhaps I am missing something. There are no logos or trademarks on the patches, but John Brockington and Jim Plunkett appear in their College All-Star jerseys, complete with stars on the shoulders. Brockington and Plunkett also appear in their All-Star jerseys on their 1972 Topps cards, but Topps airbrushed the stars off of them.

According to Beckett, the NFLPA patches were sold from vending machines. When researching them, I found a couple of related items on eBay: a promo package and a vending machine display, pictured below. Interestingly, the list of players on the vending machine display does not match the list of players in the set: some players in the set are not on the display, and some players on the display are not in the set. Pity the poor young Bob Lilly fan, who kept chucking quarters into the machine, trying to get a patch of his hero!

• Find 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons on eBay.

The two stamps in the photo marked “NEW PLAYER” are from the update set. The NEW PLAYER part detaches from the rest of the stamp along a perforation. You can see this in better detail in an earlier article.

I am still slowly adding pictures of the stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I am about halfway finished now–Atlanta through Miami!

Click on any card to see a larger image. Here are the eBay listings: Buck Buchanan, Sid Blanks, Ben Davidson, Ernie Ladd.

A page on Wikipedia summarizes the 1973 Cornhusker season in detail. According to that page, twenty-four members of the 1973 Nebraska team went on to play professionally: fourteen in the NFL, three in the CFL, and seven in the World Football League. Nineteen of those players are included in my deck of playing cards. Coach Osborne had also spent some time in the NFL: he was a receiver for the Washington Redskins for two seasons in the early 1960s.

Of the 1973 Huskers who made the NFL, John Dutton, a defensive end, was the most successful. Dutton played fourteen seasons for the Baltimore Colts and Dallas Cowboys, and he went to the Pro Bowl three times. He appeared on a lot of football cards as a professional, too. I don’t have any of them, since they are newer, but a lot of them are listed on eBay.

As far as I know, Bob Martin is the only other player in the 1973 playing card set who also appeared on a card as a professional. Martin played linebacker for four years for the Jets and 49ers, and he appeared on a 1980 Topps football card. You can find that card on eBay, too.

Two more players, Bob Nelson and Dave Humm, had ten-year NFL careers, and Nelson was a member of two Raiders teams that won the Super Bowl. Both played in reserve roles, though, and they did not make it onto cards as pros. They and several other 1973 Huskers later appeared in the 1989 Leesley set, however. I am not familiar with the Leesley cards, but they appear to be a Nebraska all-time star set. You guessed it: you can find them on eBay.

In my research for this set, I also turned up a site called HuskerJ’s Collectibles. HuskerJ has pictures of a few more decks of Nebraska playing cards–as well as many more Cornhusker toys. The other decks of playing cards don’t appear to feature individual players, but they’re worth a peek.

• Search eBay for 1973 Nebraska Playing Cards
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for Nebraska alumni
• Search the Vintage Football Card Gallery for Nebraska alumni

There are 145 pictures in the set: 133 from the interior pages of the magazine, and 12 smaller pictures that Beckett says were on the back cover. Most of the players also appear in the regular 1961 Fleer set; one example, Lionel Taylor, is shown here. Fortunately–or I’d be really disappointed–a few of the players on the Wallet Pictures don’t appear in the 1961 Fleer set or any other set I’ve seen. At least I got to see some new faces.

(Why are they called Wallet Pictures? I’m guessing the most obvious answer: that kids could cut them out and put them in their wallets.)

The composition of the set is heavily weighted toward AFL players, though the 12 pictures from the back cover are all NFL players. The backs are as plain as plain can be, showing just the player’s name and team. Many of the backs have typos: Don Manoukian’s picture says he’s Dan Manoukin, for example, and Alan Miller is Alan Millis. I suspect that whoever worked on the backs of the pictures was also in charge of the Packers logos on the regular 1961 Fleer cards.

Pictured here are the four players in the set who, as far as I know, don’t appear in other sets: Monte Crockett and Willmer Fowler of the Bills, Bobby Gordon of the Oilers, and Don Deskins of the Raiders. Check out the huge numerals on Deskins’s jersey–and see the other Raiders, also. I believe that the extra-extra-large numerals were for fans watching grainy images on little black-and-white TV screens, but I can’t find a reference that says so. Anyone have one I can point to?

Oh, and by the way: for people who like to use images from the gallery, I should point out that I’ve written some guidelines about that. Basically, the guidelines say no problem, just give credit where it’s due, and don’t be a pig. You know, stuff that most of our moms taught us. See the Gallery’s About page for specifics.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1961 Fleer football cards
• Search eBay for: 1961 Fleer Wallet Pictures, 1961 Fleer football cards

The signatures on the Wheaties Stamps are facsimiles, printed right on the stamps, but because the handwriting is different from stamp to stamp, I presumed that they were copies of the players’ actual signatures. Apparently not all of them are. This isn’t too surprising: Topps printed the stamps for Wheaties, and Topps was known to alter players’ images, even before the 1970s airbrushing era. (For some examples, see my article on the inset photos on 1962 Topps cards.) It’s not much of a stretch to go from altering images to faking simulated autographs.

I had actually wondered how Topps got signatures for all of the players in a large set, considering that they often didn’t even seem to have good photos of all the players. For at least one set, 1970 Supers, Topps didn’t even attempt to obtain the players’ real signatures: they used the same script for the facsimile signature on every card. (See my article on the 1970 Topps Super set.) For other sets–the 1964 Wheaties Stamps, for example–I suppose that they used whatever authentic signatures they had, then employees created signatures for the rest.

I don’t know much about autographs, so I did a quick internet search to see if it’s commonly known that some of the facsimile signatures on vintage cards were faked. I didn’t find anything that explicitly said so, but I did find this paragraph on thehistorybank.com:

Finally, remember that Topps’ player facsimile autographs on cards are just that—facsimiles with no intent of looking real. Interestingly, Topps put facsimile signatures on cards for years, but don’t try to “authenticate” using those signatures. They often do not match the real thing. Note here that Marshall’s and Averill’s hand-signed signatures match the facsimile signatures fairly closely, but Narleski’s ballpoint signature bears no resemblance to the printed signature on the card.

Unfortunately, the image in the History Bank article is too small to compare the two Ray Narleski signatures, but perhaps Narleski’s ballpoint signature bears no resemblance to the printed signature because the printed signature isn’t his. An autograph collector would certainly know more about this than I do. Can anyone else provide comments or examples?

Back to Mr. Folkins. Besides his Wheaties stamp, he appeared on one card that I know of: the 1964 Philadelphia card shown here. Both his stamp and card were issued the year after he made the Pro Bowl. All of the players on the 1964 Wheaties Stamps, in fact, were 1963 Pro Bowlers. You can read more about the Wheaties Stamps and accompanying album in a previous blog article.

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 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.

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.

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.