Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Last week, looking at Frank Ryan’s football cards, I noticed that his 1962 Kahn’s Wieners card, his 1963 Topps card, and his 1969 Topps card all picture him wearing number 18 for the Browns. According to his page at pro-football-reference.com, however, Ryan never wore number 18 for any team. I thought maybe he had worn number 18 for his first season with the Browns, and that pro-football-reference had not picked it up. But no, Ryan’s first season with the Browns was 1962, and he is wearing number 13 in the Browns 1962 team photo. See him in the upper right?

So I did a little digging, and I came up with a guess. My guess is that when he was photographed in number 18, Ryan was wearing Len Dawson’s old jersey. Dawson wore number 18 for the Browns in 1960 and 1961 (see his 1961 National City Bank card), and the Browns released him around June 1, 1962. The Browns then acquired Ryan from the Rams on July 12, 1962. Until he got his own jersey, Ryan wore Dawson’s, at least for pictures.

That would explain the number 18 on Ryan’s 1962 Kahn’s card, but what about his 1963 and 1969 Topps cards? My guess is that Topps just used old images for those cards, as they often did. Another old image that jumps to mind is the one on the Len Dawson puzzle on the backs of 1969 Topps cards. Though by 1969 Dawson had quarterbacked the Chiefs for six seasons and taken them to a Super Bowl, Topps chose an image of him with the Browns–wearing number 18!

A friend of mine bought a copy of this card recently; it’s a 1952 Bowman Large card of Bob Waterfield. When I saw his card, I noticed something that I hadn’t before: Waterfield’s helmet has “bone style,” or serrated, ram horns on it. My first thought was that the artist had taken liberties with the image and changed the Rams’ smooth horns to serrated ones. I did a little searching, though, and I found that the Rams actually did wear serrated horns for one season, 1949. I also found a replica of the 1949 Rams helmet.

The L.A. Rams weren’t the only Rams to wear bone style horns: the Colorado State Rams wore them for a few years, too. You can see CSU’s version in a previous blog article. It’s interesting that, though people seem to prefer the bone style horns, both the St. Louis (formerly Los Angeles) and CSU Rams persist with the smooth ones.

I recently put some 1969 Topps football cards up for sale, including this one, Tom Vaughn of the Lions. The Lions logo that Topps used in this set has always looked familiar to me, so yesterday I did some searching. I believe I found what I was thinking of: a Ford Mustang logo from around that time. This might be obvious to Detroit fans, but it appears to me that the designer of the Lions logo gave a nod to the city’s main industry. (The image of the Mustang logo is from motortopia.com.)

This card happens to show Vaughn in my favorite football card pose, where the player is about to put on his helmet. For more examples, see My Favorite Pose, More of My Favorite Pose, and Still More of My Favorite Post.

Here is one last group of players in my favorite pose, about to put on their helmets. (For more of these, see My Favorite Pose and More of My Favorite Pose.)

This time we have a 1969 Topps Joe Scarpati and a 1967 Topps Johnny Robinson:

A 1968 Topps Andy Russell rookie and a 1966 Philadelphia Roger LeClerc:

A 1965 Philadelphia Dick Schafrath and a 1967 Philadelphia Willie Davis:

Unfortunately, the photographers from many teams–notably the AFL teams–never used this pose, so in this series I could feature cards from only about half the teams. That’s a pity: I love Pat Patriot and Denver’s drunk Bronco, and it would have been nice to include them.

This morning I added the ability to search the Vintage Football Card Gallery for members of the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor. Just go to the Advanced Search page, choose Cowboys Ring of Honor in one of the “Honor” menus, and hit the Search button.

Pictured here is one member of the Ring, Don Perkins, on his 1962 Topps rookie card. He’s wearing the Cowboys’ first home jersey, my all-time favorite over all the NFL teams. He doesn’t appear to be wearing it in the black-and-white inset photo, though, so I wonder if that is a college photo. Or maybe it’s not even him: on some 1962 cards, Topps pictured a different player in the inset photo, sometimes altering the image to look like the player on the card. For examples of that, see my earlier blog article on the subject.

Looking through the cards I have of members of the Cowboys Ring of Honor, it’s striking that there are no cards of players who had moved on to different teams. It is possible that I don’t have all of the players’ cards, but the impression I get is that the Cowboys’ best players stayed with the Cowboys.

The 1972 Topps football card set is full of bad airbrushing. (See my earlier posts on John Brockington and MacArthur Lane and on College All-Star jerseys in the 1972 Topps set.) Here’s another example: Deacon Jones in red. The Rams traded Jones to the Chargers in 1972, and Topps apparently didn’t want to show him in his old Rams jersey. But the Rams wore blue, and the Chargers wore blue, so how did Jones end up in red? Did the artist see “Chargers” and think it said “Cardinals”? Did he just finish Randy Vataha and not want to put his pen down? Who knows, maybe he just thought Jones would look good in red. And he does, doesn’t he?

Speaking of the Chargers, the two 1972 Chargers cards below, Dennis Partee and Jerry LeVias, also caught my eye the other day. I thought that the players’ helmets, with just numbers on them, looked strange. So I visited the Helmet Project web site and found that the Chargers helmets of the time had both lightning bolts and the players’ numbers on them. Topps airbrushed the trademarked lightning bolts away, but left the numbers behind.

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.

Ever wonder why all of the Baltimore Colts in the 1950 Bowman set are wearing green? Did Bowman take liberties with the team’s colors, as Topps did with the Houston Oilers in 1961? (See Houston Oilers: Pretty in Pink.) Did the team change colors from green to blue sometime after 1950?

No, the 1950 Colts were actually a different franchise than today’s Colts. The original Colts were members of the AAFC, and they were one of three teams to join the NFL when the AAFC folded after the 1949 season. This Colts team lasted just one year in the NFL before disbanding, and in 1951 the Colts players were made available to the remaining teams via the draft.

In 1953, the NFL awarded a Baltimore group a new franchise and gave it the remnants of the original Dallas Texans, a franchise that had lasted just one year in Dallas. The new Colts wore blue, and they’ve worn blue ever since. A nice article by Bob Carroll on the profootballresearchers.com web site traces the lineage of the two Colts franchises and the other AAFC teams.

Pictured here are cards of two of the Colts cards in the 1950 Bowman set, Y.A. Tittle and Chet Mutryn. You can see the entire 1950 Bowman Baltimore Colts team set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Here’s a bit of trivia: Besides Y.A. Tittle, what Hall of Fame quarterback played for the Colts in 1950?

Answer: George Blanda. The Bears traded Blanda and four other players to the Colts on September 5. Blanda played in one game for the Colts, and the Bears bought him back on September 20.

I picked up this card a couple of weeks ago; it’s an Exhibit card of Marion Motley, printed between 1948 and 1952. Motley was one of the first four African Americans to play professional football, and he was the second African American to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (Em Tunnell was the first.)

This is one of my first Exhibit cards, and I’m finding that there is a lot to learn about them. A good place to start is Adam Warshaw’s page called “Interesting Exhibit Cards.” Adam’s article provides a nice introduction to the cards, along with many, many pictures. According to his article, “Exhibit cards were the first nationally distributed sports card product sold without any ancillary uses or purposes,” meaning that they were not used to help sell some other product. Football players were just a few of the people featured on Exhibit cards: there were other athletes, movie stars, musicians, and, well, just see Adam’s page. Exhibit cards were dispensed from vending machines, and you can see pictures of a few of the machines on photobucket.

When I bought the Motley card, I assumed that it was a pre-rookie card, and I intended to add it to my pre-rookie cards page. I am not sure now, though, that it was printed before his 1950 Bowman rookie card. Exhibit cards don’t have dates printed on them, but by looking for slight variations, you apparently can narrow down the possible printing dates. According to a page at centuryoldcards.com, the size and case of the “MADE IN THE U.S.A.” line on the bottom of Exhibit baseball cards indicates when they were printed. The “MADE IN THE U.S.A.” line on my Motley card is all in upper case, and it measures 5/8 of an inch horizontally, suggesting that the card was printed in 1948–if football cards had the same variations as baseball cards. My old Beckett catalog, though, says that 1948 Exhibit football cards had a line at the bottom describing the player. (See eBay for examples.) In fact, my Beckett catalog distinguishes the 1948 cards from the 1949-1952 cards, saying that the 1948 cards are from the “Exhibit Sports Champion” set. Since the guidelines at centuryoldcards.com don’t appear to jibe with Beckett when applied to football cards, I’m not certain when my card was printed.

I get the sense that Beckett created a separate set for the 1948 Exhibit cards because they were easy to distinguish from the later years. The variations in the text on the 1949-1952 cards are less obvious, and I’m guessing that that’s why Beckett lumped those years together. The other card guides group all of the Exhibit football cards together and call them 1948-1952 Exhibits. To me that makes sense, since there were a lot of variations among the cards, and no one seems to have a firm grasp on which cards were printed with which variations. Besides the variations mentioned above, some cards were printed with different tints, and some were printed with postcard backs. The small images here show some variations from a recent Heritage Auctions listing. (The listing also includes larger images, but you have to register to see them.)


Back to my Motley card: I wondered about his number-less jersey, so I did some searching for it. I thought that maybe it was an old college jersey, or that maybe the Browns didn’t wear numbers in their early days in the AAFC. I didn’t find the image anywhere else, though, and I concluded that it was a Browns practice jersey. Blackpast.com has a photo of Motley in action as a Brown, and the jersey number is the only difference between the uniform he is wearing in that photo and the one he is wearing on my card. It’s curious that the Exhibit card pictures him in a practice jersey, but the all-white uniform does make for a striking image.

You might have noticed that, in the image at blackpast.com, Motley is wearing Chuck Taylors. The Browns evidently wore Chucks when the field was frozen, because I found an image of other team members changing into them during the 1950 Championship game. I believe number 59 is Horace Gillom–check out his monster facemask!

• Search eBay for Marion Motley, 1948-1952 Exhibit football cards

I probably looked at this 1960 Fleer Roger Ellis card a hundred times before I realized that he wasn’t wearing a Michigan helmet. I always assumed that the “winged” helmet design was Michigan’s only, and that it somehow symbolized a wolverine. As I wrote yesterday, though, the design has nothing to do with wolverines; it merely reflects the structural design of leather helmets back in the 1930s. Other teams used the winged design on their helmets in the 1930s, also, but most moved to different designs when they went to synthetic helmets.

Maine is another school that used the winged design, though I don’t know whether they used it on leather helmets or adopted it afterward. And that’s whose helmet Ellis is wearing: he was a Maine Black Bear before joining the AFL’s New York Titans. According to the Colonial Athletic Association page at the Helmet Project, Maine used the winged design until the mid-1970s. And guess what? Delaware, which is also in the CAA, uses the winged design to this day. I had no idea! Henshots.com has lots of recent photos of the Blue Hens in their winged helmets.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for 1960 Fleer football cards
• Search eBay for Roger Ellis

In a comment on my article about Jim David’s helmet last week, a reader pointed out that Ron Kramer’s 1958 Topps card also pictures him in his college helmet. My follow-up comment was that a lot of players appear in their college uniforms on football cards (most of the players in the 1960 Fleer set, for example), but not many are wearing their helmets. So “players wearing their college helmets” is a nice subject for a few articles.

Pictured here is the card the reader mentioned, which shows Kramer in his Michigan jersey and distinctive “winged” helmet. (Topps, thank goodness, did not recolor the jersey and helmet Packers green-and-gold.) I was curious about Michigan’s helmet–was it supposed to somehow symbolize a wolverine?–so I did a web search and turned up an article on its history. No, it turns out, the design has nothing to do with wolverines; it was actually standard on a model of Spalding helmets in the 1930s. The design was functional: the wings and straps helped bind the other pieces of the helmet together, and the additional leather provided more head protection. Michigan’s Coach, Fritz Crisler, merely painted the helmet different colors to dress it up, as he had done at Princeton a couple of years earlier. Several other schools colored their helmets in the same fashion, but they changed their designs when they moved from leather helmets to synthetic ones. Michigan not only kept the winged design, but eventually used it in other sports, too. For a while, even the swim team’s racing caps bore decorations based on the construction of 1930s football helmets!

Getting back to Ron Kramer: it’s appropriate that he appeared on a card in his Michigan uniform, because he was one of Michigan’s great athletes. According to Wikipedia, he earned three letters each in football, basketball, and track, and he led both the football and basketball teams in scoring for two years. As a sophomore, he also led the Big Ten in punting.

Kramer’s 1958 Topps card is his rookie card, though, ironically, he was in the Air Force in 1958 and did not play. He returned to the Packers in 1959 and became a three-time Pro Bowler during their championship years. There is a nice article about Kramer’s football career at Profootballresearchers.org.

• See all of Ron Kramer’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for Ron Kramer, Michigan alumni, Green Bay Packers
• Search eBay for Ron Kramer, 1958 Topps

It seems I’m on a bit of a helmet kick this week. This card caught my eye yesterday: it’s Jim David’s 1957 Topps card. David’s helmet didn’t look familiar, but knowing that he was from Colorado State (Colorado A&M at the time), I thought it might be a CSU Rams helmet. Sure enough, I found it on a page at ColoradoAggies.com. And what a find that was! The site has photos and illustrations of all of the school’s football uniforms from 1922 to present, along with tons of other material on the history of CSU athletics.

The helmet that David is wearing is known as the “bone style” helmet. The team wore it from 1951 to 1956, and it was part of the uniform that Rams fans recently chose as their all-time favorite. David’s image must be from 1951, since by 1952 he was a rookie with the Detroit Lions. Though the Lions didn’t draft him until the twenty-second round, David became a six-time Pro Bowler, playing in the defensive backfield with Hall of Famers Jack Christiansen (also a CSU alumnus) and Yale Lary. Thurman “Fum” McGraw, CSU’s first All-American football player and its athletic director from 1976 to 1986, was also a Pro Bowl defensive player for the Lions in the early 1950s.

Judging by the photos on ColoradoAggies.com, David’s helmet was actually green when the photo was taken, and his pants (shown on the right half of the card) were actually yellow. It was common in the 1950s for a card company to color an old black and white photo of a player to match the colors of his current team. (For another example, see my article on Alan Ameche.) In this case, I’m just happy that Topps kept the horns!

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Jim David, Colorado State Alumni, Detroit Lions
• Search eBay for: Jim David, Jack Christiansen, Fum McGraw

I don’t usually like cards that picture players wearing their helmets, because the helmets cover too much of the players’ faces. Well, here’s an exception: it’s Jim Doran’s 1958 Topps card, where his helmet looks as if it’s been through a battle. What a great image!

I was curious about the color of the helmet, since I thought the Lions had always worn silver ones. Indeed, the Helmet Project web site shows only silver helmets for the Lions. I found a statement on another site, though, that said that in the 1950s, the Lions had to paint their helmets a dark color for night games, so that the players would not confuse the helmets with the white ball. I’m guessing that that’s why Doran’s is blue, and it might also explain why the paint is chipping off. (Also see my earlier article, “What’s with the White Footballs?“)

I was curious about Doran, too, so I looked him up. I learned that he played nine years for the Lions, then two for the Cowboys after they picked him up in the 1960 expansion draft. I also found an article saying that he scored the game-winning touchdown, on a pass from Bobby Layne, in the 1953 NFL Championship game. And, finally, I learned that he was the Cowboys’ first Pro Bowler, in 1960.

You can see all of Jim Doran’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Today I added 1961 Fleer Wallet Pictures (also known as Wallet Photos) to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. When I received them, I was surprised–and disappointed–to see that they aren’t cards, they’re images on thin paper. It turns out that the pictures were hand-cut from a magazine (the 1961-62 issue of Complete Sports Pro-Football Illustrated, to be precise), and they’re on newspaper stock. I should have done my homework.

There are 145 pictures in the set: 133 from the interior pages of the magazine, and 12 smaller pictures that 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?

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

Yesterday I added 1948 Kellogg’s Pep football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The five cards are part of a 42-card sport and entertainment set that was distributed in boxes of Kellogg’s Pep cereal. You can see the composition of the set on PSA’s web site, but you have to look in two places, since PSA split the set into athletes and celebrities. Apparently not many trading card sets contain both.

The cards are small, about half the height of a standard trading card. There is one variation among the football cards: some instances of Charley Trippi’s card have the image reversed, and some have it corrected. The Trippi card shown here has the reversed image, though I’m not sure how to tell. Perhaps by how his chinstrap is fastened?

Trippi’s card shows him in his College All-Star uniform–note the stars on the shoulders. He played in the game five times: four as a college all-star, and one as a Chicago Cardinal, after the Cardinals won the 1947 NFL championship. The College All-Star Game site has a photo of Trippi in action in 1945, the year he was the All-Stars’ MVP.

Another notable card in the 1948 Pep set is a Lou Groza pre-rookie card, pictured here. Groza’s rookie card is a 1950 Bowman. Check out my pre-rookie card page for more pre-rookies.

There is currently an empty Kellogg’s Pep box for sale on eBay that shows some of the 1948 cards on the front. If you squint, you can see some of the football cards listed on one of the side panels. The box, which the seller says is the first cereal box to show a sports figure on the front (namely, George Mikan), is listed for a mere $2599.

• Search eBay for: 1948 Kellogg’s Pep cards
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Charley Trippi, Lou Groza