Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Happy Halloween! Here is this year’s scary card, a 1955 Rams Team Issue photo of Art Hauser. It’s not quite as scary as last year’s Ed Cooke card, but I would definitely have gotten out of Art’s way. (Click on the image–if you dare!–for a life-size, scarier version.)

There are a lot of great poses in the 1955 Rams photo set. Perhaps the Rams’ proximity to Hollywood induced the players to ham it up a bit. You can read more about the set in an earlier blog article.

Enjoy trick-or-treating!

Don’t ask me how I got there, but the other day I found myself thinking about players with “Mad” nicknames. Here are four I thought of: Daryle “Mad Bomber” Lamonica, on his 1968 Topps Stand Up insert; Ted “Mad Stork” Hendricks, on his 1975 Wonder Bread card; Alex “The Mad Duck” Karras, on his 1966 Philadelphia card, and Jim “Mad Dog” Mandich, on his 1976 Topps card.

Can you think of more?

The holiday made me think of the movie, and thinking of the movie made me wonder what NFL players were born on the Fourth of July. I found the full list at pro-football-reference.com; the eight who appear in the Vintage Football Card Gallery are shown below. Wish them a happy birthday!

Six-time Pro Bowler Erich Barnes was born on July 4, 1935. Barnes’s rookie card, shown here, is a 1960 Topps. Two-time Pro-Bowler Emerson Boozer was born on July 4, 1943; he is shown here on his 1971 Topps card. (Boozer also appeared on my all-party team.)

Two-time Pro Bowler Rosey Taylor was born on July 4, 1937; he is pictured here on his 1965 Philadelphia card. 1963 Pro-Bowler Lee Folkins was born on July 4, 1939; his rookie card, a 1964 Philadelphia, is shown here. (I heard from Mr. Folkins once. He told me that the signature on his 1964 Wheaties Stamp is not in his handwriting.)

Five-time Pro-Bowler Rick Casares was born on July 4, 1931. His rookie card, shown here, is a 1955 Bowman. Hall of Famer Floyd Little was born on July 4, 1942; he is shown here on his 1968 Topps Stand Up insert card.

1981 Pro Bowler Frank Lewis was born on July 4, 1947; his rookie card, a 1973 Topps, is shown here. And, finally, Fred Forsberg was born on July 4, 1944. I don’t believe Forsberg appeared on a card, but I do have his 1972 Sunoco Stamp.

Enjoy your picnics!

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.)

For Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d give you a bunch of Flowers. As always, you can click on any image to get more details.

First is Keith Flowers, on a 1952 Bowman Small card. Flowers had a short NFL career, playing nine games in 1952 for the Dallas Texans and Detroit Lions. Bowman issued two sets of football cards in 1952, identical except for their size, so Flowers appeared on a 1952 Bowman Large card, as well. Not bad for a few games.

Next is Stan Flowers, who appeared on a 1960 Fleer card with the Patriots but never saw playing time. (I’m inferring this because he does not have a page at pro-football-reference.com.) Fleer apparently chose the players for their 1960 set well before the season started, because I’d guess that a third of the players in the set never actually played in the AFL.

Charlie Flowers is also in the 1960 Fleer set, and he did see playing time: two seasons at fullback with the Chargers, and one with the New York Titans. He appeared on several cards with the Chargers, one being the tough 1961 Golden Tulip Chargers card shown here.

Unlike the guys above, Richmond Flowers actually played awhile before he appeared on a card. He was a defensive back and kick returner for the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants from 1969 to 1973, and he made his debut on a 1973 Topps card. In 1973, Topps increased the size of their football card set from 351 to 528, so they were able to include many players who had not appeared on cards earlier.

Finally, we have Tom Flores, a longtime quarterback and coach for the Oakland Raiders. (He also played a couple of years for the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs.) This is one of his rookie cards, a 1961 Topps; the other is a 1961 Fleer. Flores appeared on a bunch of other colorful 1960s cards, as well.

That’s it! If you haven’t gotten your sweetie something yet, maybe you can dig through your collection and find a couple of these guys. But first I’d see if Hallmark is still open.

Merry Christmas! What better way to celebrate than with a few Carrolls? Here we have a 1962 Topps Carroll Dale, a 1951 Topps Magic Carroll McDonald, and a 1955 49ers Team Issue Carroll Hardy. I tried putting little Santa hats on them, but that didn’t go very well, so I left them hat-less.

Enjoy your families, feasts, and football games!

I didn’t buy just football cards as a kid; I bought lots of Wacky Packages and other stickers, too. I can’t say I collected them, though, because I mostly stuck them on stuff: notebooks, bicycle, little brother, dog. At any rate, I thought I remembered an old Wacky Packages sticker that parodied Topps football cards, so yesterday I went looking for it. I didn’t have to look hard: the sticker is called “Sootball,” and there are lots of them on eBay. Oddly, there is no mention of cards on the sticker.

Though the Sootball sticker is from the 1975 series of Wacky Packages, it was modeled after the 1974 Topps football card wrapper pictured here. I don’t remember, but I’d guess that Topps released the 1975 Wackys before football season, so they had to use the prior year’s football card wrapper.

Speaking of wrappers, I recently tidied up my wrapper page, added an image or two, and linked the images to the cards that came in the wrappers. If you haven’t seen the page recently, take a look!

Also, if you’re an old Wacky Packages fan, you must visit wackypackages.org. It appears that the site creator, Greg Grant, has images of just about all of them.

Here’s a Merlin Olsen card I’ll bet you don’t have. It’s a Spanish Little House on the Prairie card that I dug up on eBay. (Olsen, as Jonathan Garvey, is the big guy on the right.) The seller, The Bubblegum Hall of Fame, has other Little House cards with Olsen on them, too: a large French card with the same image as this one–except reversed–and a couple of portraits among an assortment of Little House cards.

After Little House, Olsen starred in another TV show, Father Murphy. I couldn’t find any Father Murphy cards, though–even foreign ones. The show aired from 1981 to 1983. Perhaps, by then, bubblegum cards for TV shows were no longer in fashion?

Olsen, of course, appeared on a lot of football cards, too.

Did you know that the card companies sometimes hired photographers from the DMV to take pictures for sports cards? As you can see from these examples, it’s true. Those DMV folks are experts at catching people with their eyes closed. At least driver’s licenses expire after a few years. People keep sports cards forever!

So, who are our sleepy players, and what cards do they appear on? From the top, we have:

• 1950 Bowman Bob Kelly, of the original Baltimore Colts (also see Baltimore Colts in Green?)
• 1951 Bowman Al Derogatis
• 1967 Topps Babe Parilli
• 1969 Topps Don Maynard (Maynard is also sleepy on his 1967 Topps and 1968 Topps cards)
• 1970 Topps Mike Tilleman
• 1971 Topps Gerry Philbin

I am undoubtedly missing some. If you know ‘em, post ‘em!

Happy Halloween! This is the scariest vintage football card I can think of, easily topping last year’s Don Hutson card. It’s a 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins card of Ed Cooke, which I recently added to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. (See my earlier article about the Royal Castle Dolphins cards.) The image appears to have been cropped from a 1966 Dolphins press photo, an example of which I found on eBay. The seller of the press photo, historicimages01, has other sports photos on eBay, as well.

I believe that this is Cooke’s only card, though he played in the NFL and AFL for ten seasons. He got around, spending time on six different teams. His longest stint was with the New York Titans/Jets, where he spent four seasons. There is a slightly less scary photo of Cooke at fanbase.com.

So, what’s your favorite scary football card?

Since 1976, the last player selected in the NFL draft has been dubbed Mr. Irrelevant and invited to a celebration called Irrelevant Week. The event, which was started by Paul Salata, a former receiver for the San Francisco 49ers and original Baltimore Colts, raises money for Orange County charities. You can read about the this year’s Mr. Irrelevant and the 2010 festivities at IrrelevantWeek.com.

The Vintage Football Card Gallery has pictures of cards only up to 1976, so it includes only one card of an official Mister Irrelevant. It also, however, includes a few cards of players who would have been named Mr. Irrelevant if the title had been awarded earlier. Most of these players turned out to be relevant, after all, or they would not have made it onto football cards. Here are all of players in the Gallery who were chosen last in the NFL draft:

Bill Fischer, 1948

Bill Fischer was the final player chosen in the 1948 draft; the Chicago Cardinals picked him in the 32nd round. Unfortunately, according to an article on buzzle.com, Fischer was ineligible for the NFL in 1948–perhaps because he was only a junior? So the Cardinals drafted him again in 1949, this time in the first round. Fischer played five seasons for the Cardinals and went to three Pro Bowls.

This is his rookie card, a 1950 Bowman. He also appeared on Bowman cards in 1951 and 1952.

John Schweder, 1949

John “Bull” Schweder was the 251st and last player chosen in the 1949 draft. The Philadelphia Eagles picked him, but he apparently did not make their roster in 1949. In 1950 he joined the Baltimore Colts, but the Colts folded after the season, and the team’s players were made available in the 1951 draft. In 1951, Schweder was again drafted, this time at pick number 103, by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He played for the Steelers from 1951 to 1955.

Pictured here is one of Schweder’s rookie cards, a 1952 Bowman Small. He also appeared on several other 1950s Bowman cards.

Sisto Averno, 1951

Sisto Averno was another member of the 1950 Baltimore Colts team who ended up in the draft when the team disbanded. Averno was the last player chosen in 1951, by the Cleveland Browns in the 30th round. He played for the New York Yanks in 1951, and the Yanks folded at the end of that season. The NFL gave the remnants of the Yanks to a new franchise in Dallas in 1952, and–guess what?–that franchise also folded at the end of the season. In 1953, the league awarded the remains of the Dallas team to another Baltimore Colts franchise, and Averno spent two years with the new Baltimore team before calling it a career. (See Bob Carroll’s article at profootballresearchers.com for a detailed description of the churn in the NFL in the early 1950s.)

Averno appeared on just one card, this 1953 Bowman. He looks tired from all the moving.

Jacque MacKinnon, 1961

Jacque MacKinnon was the last player chosen in the 1961 NFL draft. The Philadelphia Eagles chose him with the 280th overall pick. He instead went to the AFL’s San Diego Chargers, and in nine years with the Chargers, he made the Pro Bowl twice.

The card pictured here is MacKinnon’s rookie card, a short print in the 1964 Topps set. He also appeared on several other Topps cards in the late 1960s. (On his 1969 Topps card, he looks like Emilio Estevez!)

Stan Hegener, 1975

Stan Hegener was the last player chosen in the 1975 NFL draft. The Pittsburgh Steelers chose him with the 442nd overall pick, but he apparently did not make the team. The card pictured here is a 1973 Nebraska playing card, from his college days. He also appeared on a 1974 Nebraska playing card.

Jim Kelleher, 1977

Jim Kelleher is the only official Mr. Irrelevant in the Gallery. The Mr. Irrelevant title was first awarded in 1976, and Kelleher was the last player chosen in the 1977 NFL draft. The Minnesota Vikings chose Kelleher with the 335th overall pick, but he did not see playing time in the NFL. The card here pictures Kelleher on his 1974 University of Colorado playing card.

The Mr. Irrelevant page on Wikipedia lists all of the players chosen last in the NFL draft, before and after 1976.

So you think you know your vintage football cards? Give this a try: for each jersey number below, see if you can guess:

1. The player who is wearing the jersey, and
2. The card (year and company, e.g., 1962 Fleer) on which the jersey appears.

After guessing, click on the picture to see the whole card.

Happy Independence Day! It took me awhile, but I found just the right three cards for the occasion. First we have Red Grange on his 1955 Topps All-American card. Then there’s Daryl White on a 1973 Nebraska Playing Card. (Note that its card #4.) And, finally, Forrest Blue on his 1975 Wonder Bread card. Between the three, we even have a star and a few stripes!

In case you aren’t familiar with the three sets, you can read about them in earlier blog articles:

• A is for All Americans
• New in the Gallery: 1973 Nebraska Playing Cards
• New in the Galley: 1975 Wonder Bread Cards

Enjoy your picnics and fireworks!

Don’t you hate it when picture day comes around and you’ve got a big ol’ scab? Or maybe these guys were sponsored by Johnson & Johnson?

Here’s John Cappelletti on his 1977 Topps card and Dave Lloyd on a 1970 Topps.

Here are two 1974 Topps cards: Calvin Hill sporting two bandages, and Dan Goich modeling the XL model.

Topps used images from the same photo session for six of Joe Namath’s cards from 1968 to 1970. Unfortunately, he had a bandage on his head. Here are Namath’s 1968 Topps Stand Up and 1970 Topps cards; see his gallery page for the whole array.

Topps used images from the same photo session for a couple of Roger Staubach’s cards, too. Steve Liskey, from thecowboysguide.com, pointed out the bandage on Staubach’s 1975 Topps card. (Thanks, Steve!) I thought the image looked familiar, so I looked through Staubach’s earlier cards and found that the bandage had made its debut on his 1974 Topps card.

Here’s Les Richter with a boo-boo on his forehead on his regular 1961 Fleer card and on his 1961 Fleer Wallet Picture. Fleer used the same images for players who appeared in both sets.

Finally, we have Doug Cunningham on his 1972 Topps card. Remove his bandage, add some eyeliner, and he’s Gomez Addams!

To all my customers, readers, and gallery browsers: Happy New Year! To help us ring it in, here’s the Vintage Football Card All-Party Team. Did I miss anyone?

If you’re going out tonight, be careful out there. See you all in 2010!