Nearmint’s Vintage Football Card Blog

Jim Podoley, who played halfback and end for the Washington Redskins from 1957 to 1960, died on January 24. His obituary includes a nice recent photo. Podoley was a Pro Bowler in his rookie season, when he led the NFL with 20.5 yards per reception. Prior to his professional career, he starred in football and track at Central Michigan University. He was one of the inaugural inductees into the CMU Athletics Hall of Fame.

Pictured here is Podoley’s 1959 Topps card. He also has a card in the 1958 Topps set, but that card actually pictures Volney Peters.

You can’t talk about vintage football cards without talking about Topps. Topps printed football cards in 1950, 1951, and every year from 1955 until 2009. Earlier this week, I was a little apprehensive about writing this post, since that’s a ton of sets to cover. Then I realized that since I run this place, I can split the topic up however I want!

Since this is a vintage football card blog, I’ll cover the Topps sets until the mid-1970s. That still leaves over twenty sets to talk about, so I’ll break them down further, by decade. This is part one, the 1950s.

1950 Topps Felt Backs were Topps’s first football cards. They left nowhere to go but up. The Felt Backs are ugly little suckers, especially when compared to Bowman’s attractive 1950 set. (See B is for Bowman.) I have just one Felt Back card, the Ernie Stautner rookie card pictured here.

Since I don’t have more Felt Backs to show you, I’ll refer you to other places: An article on the PSA web site has a description of the set, but no pictures. (I assume the author of the article, Staff Writer, has left the company.) The Redskins Card Museum has nice pictures, both front and back, of the Redskins Felt Backs. The Topps Archives Blog has a picture of a window display for the cards, and a picture of a birthday card with a Felt Back pack attached. The birthday card is kind of cool, and there were birthday cards like it that had other toys attached, such as balloons.

I do like one thing about the Felt Backs: the whimsical adjectives describing some of the players. James Murphy is a “deft passer and quarterback.” Bimbo Cecconi is a “blazing halfback.” Bob Bucher is a “tough guard.” And so on. And the bitty pennants on the back are interesting. Who knows, maybe if I get more, they’ll grow on me.

Topps’s next offer, 1951 Topps Magic, was more standard than the Felt Backs, but still innovative. As I wrote in S is for Scratch-Offs, the magic part of the cards was the scratch-off section on the back. Most of the cards I see have been scratched, and unscratched cards carry a premium, price-wise.

Like the 1950 Felt Backs, the 1951 Magic set featured college players. Several of the players–Bill Wade, Babe Parilli, and Marion Campbell, for example–went on to have long pro careers, and they appeared on numerous cards in later years. Parilli had the longest career of any of them, playing nineteen seasons for six NFL, CFL, and AFL teams!

After 1951, Topps took a break, and Bowman continued to print cards of NFL players. When Topps returned, in 1955, they produced the 1955 Topps All-American set. This classic and popular set has its own place in the ABC’s, so I won’t discuss it here. See A is for All-Americans.

In 1956, after buying out Bowman, Topps was finally able to print cards of NFL players. Sandwiched between the 1955 All-Americans and the equally classic 1957 set, the 1956 Topps set is somewhat overlooked. I like the cards, though. As I wrote in B is for Bowman, the 1956 Topps cards have elements of both the Topps and Bowman issues from 1955. Like the 1955 Bowmans, they have colored backgrounds and auras around the players, and like the 1955 Topps All-Americans, the have the team name and logo in a little box on the front.

The 1956 Topps cards are also the same size as 1955 Bowman and Topps cards. 1956 was the last year Topps printed cards in this large size, though. To my knowledge, except for the 1965 Topps “tall boys,” all of the Topps sets since 1956 have been the smaller standard size. I assume they made the change to save cardboard.

The 1956 Topps set was the first to include team cards, a nice feature. To my knowledge, it’s also the only set that identified the players on the team cards. I wish all sets did. I sell a lot of team cards to friends and families of the players, especially players who did not appear on cards of their own. Because the images of the players are small on team cards, it is sometimes hard to tell the players apart.

As I mentioned above, the 1957 Topps set is another classic. Like the 1955 All-Americans, 1957 Topps cards have both a portrait and an action shot, a design that collectors find appealing. (Topps would use it again in their 1962 set, another popular issue.) There are six rookie cards of Hall of Famers in the 1957 set, including Bart Starr and John Unitas, the league’s premier quarterbacks for the decade to follow.

1957 Topps was the first football card set to be released in two series. The second series cards are significantly scarcer than the first, and many are poorly centered. The challenge of finding the cards in high grades, combined with the attractive design and big names in the set, make the 1957 Topps set fun to collect.

In 1958, Topps took a step backward, in my opinion. The 1958 Topps cards are darker than in 1957, and their images are not as clear. The dark colors–such as the black on Jim Brown’s rookie card–tend to show snow and scuffing, as well. And I think the “matting” covers too much of the images: the effect is like looking at the players through a telescope, or a knothole.

The 1958 Topps set is also smaller than its predecessor: 132 cards, released a single series. To me, it is like the 1953 Bowman set, a letdown after a classic. Unlike the 1953 Bowman set, it has a couple of key rookie cards–Brown and Sonny Jurgensen–and those are the cards that save it.

Rounding out the decade is the 1959 Topps set, a return to bright, colored backgrounds, and two series of cards. For a fun summary of the set, see T.S. O’Connell’s article on the Sports Collector’s Digest web site. For a discussion about some of the cards that are tougher to find, see my virtual uncut sheet page for the 1959 Topps set. I can’t add much to what’s written on those pages, so I’ll just let you check those out.

• Previous: S is for Scratch-Offs
• Next: T is for Topps, Part 2: 1960-1963
• All of the ABCs

In the 1950s and 1960s, when the card companies were still marketing to kids, they tried to make the cards interactive and fun to play with. They made cards you could punch out and stand up, they put puzzles on the backs of the cards, and they inserted stamps, stickers, and decals into the packs with the regular cards. They also liked to put scratch-off cartoons and quizzes on the card backs.

1951 Topps Magic cards were the first football cards with scratch-off backs, the scratch-offs accounting for the “magic” in the name. The material Topps used for the scratch-offs was similar to that used on today’s lottery tickets: a silver-gray coating that crumbled off when you scratched it. Scratching off the crumbly coating revealed a picture of the player’s school, and the school’s name. The feature was evidently a hit, because most 1951 Topps cards I see have been scratched.

The next football cards with scratch-off backs were 1958 Topps cards. Topps used a different material this time, a white substance that revealed a gray picture when rubbed, but that didn’t come off of the card. All of the player cards in the set had scratch-off backs, but, as shown on this Sonny Jurgensen rookie card, the questions and answers were not about the players on the cards. Even now, I’m disappointed.

Unlike the 1951 Topps cards, most of the 1958 Topps cards I see have not been rubbed. Perhaps it’s because the pictures were not as clear as on the 1951 cards. Or perhaps scraping the little silver-gray pellets onto the floor had been part of the fun. For whatever reason, after 1951, the magic was gone.

The scratch-offs on 1959 Topps football cards were also unrelated to the player, but they differed a bit from 1958’s. Part of the picture on each card was visible before rubbing, and you rubbed the card to reveal the rest. Maybe Topps exposed part of the picture to entice kids to rub the card, but I don’t see many 1959 Topps cards that are rubbed, either. To my knowledge, this was the only set in which parts of the pictures were already showing.

The backs of player cards in the 1960 Topps football set also had scratch-offs, but this time there were no questions and answers, just “Football Funnies” cartoons. I have just one rubbed card, the Matt Hazeltine card pictured here, and the cartoon on it isn’t even related to football. I know they were selling to kids, but I think Topps should have just printed the players’ stats, instead.

Topps persisted with the scratch-offs in 1961. Rubbing the back of a 1961 Topps card revealed a generic cartoon of a player in action, labeled with the name of the player on the card. Though the cartoons were generic, Topps at least took care to get the players’ numbers right. Elbert Dubenion, whose card is shown here, indeed wore number 44.

After 1961, Topps took a break from scratch-offs, instead simply printing cartoons on the card backs. The Philadelphia Gum Company picked up the slack, using the scratch-off feature on their cards in 1965 and 1967. Scratching a 1965 Philadelphia card revealed a picture of one player, and the name of another. To find the name of the pictured player, the card back directed you to a different card, which had the answer. This was a bit convoluted for a kid, I’d say. Philadelphia dispensed with the scratch-offs in 1966, but retained the picture-on-one-card, name-on-another quiz.
In 1967, Philadelphia again put scratch-offs on their cards, but this time they used simple questions and answers related to the player on the card. I don’t know how well the scratch-offs worked back then, but I recently rubbed the Dale Hackbart card shown here, and I can barely see the answer. (It’s “He teaches school.”)

Topps returned to scratch-offs in 1968, but they didn’t put them on every card. Only about 20% of the cards have the “Coin Rub” on the back, and the other 80% have cartoons about the players printed on them. I imagine that limiting the number of scratch-offs was a cost saving measure: someone at Topps wanted the scratch-offs, and someone else said “Why? The kids don’t scratch them, anyway.” And so they compromised. Rubbing the Coin Rub backs reveals cartoons like those on the other cards.

Cards with Coin Rub backs appear in both series of 1968 Topps cards. I thought that Topps might have arranged the Coin Rub cards in a pattern on the uncut sheets–perhaps all in the same row or column, for instance–but they appear to have scattered them randomly on the sheets.

In 1969 and 1970, Topps again put scratch-offs on only a small number of cards. As in 1968, the scratch-offs revealed cartoons about the players, like those on the other cards. In 1969 and 1970, though, the scratch-offs appeared only in the second series of each set. Perhaps this was an effort to boost interest in the second series, after kids had burned themselves out trying to complete the first series. To my knowledge, 1970 Topps is the last set containing cards with scratch-off backs.

Considering how few scratch-offs actually got scratched after 1951, I am surprised that Topps put them on cards for as long as they did. Maybe they assumed that kids were busy scratching them, and didn’t know otherwise until years later, when old cards started coming out of attics. Collectors today don’t appreciate the scratch-offs, either: customers often ask me whether the backs of cards I am selling have been scratched.

I am also surprised, considering collectors’ aversion to scratched cards, that PSA is not harsher when grading them. I often see PSA 7s that have been rubbed, and the 1958 Topps Sonny Jurgensen card above is a PSA 8 OC. To me, a rubbed card ought to grade excellent at best, since an exposed cartoon is certainly more distracting than, say, a quarter-inch hairline crease. What do you think?

• Previous: R is for Rookie Cards
• Next: T is for Topps, Part 1: the 1950s
• All of the ABCs

Continuing our little quiz:

Question #3: What do the four quarterbacks pictured on these vintage football cards have in common?

Scroll down slowly; the answer is after the sponsored links. For more information on a card, click on it or hold your cursor over it.

Sponsored Links

Answer: All of them were #1 overall NFL draft picks in the 1950’s.

From Wikipedia:

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In previous posts I’ve shown you that the images of Bill Wade and Doug Atkins are reversed on their 1960 Topps football cards. Here’s another reversed image in the same set, Frank Varrichione. I’ve included his 1959 Topps card for comparison–notice his jersey number. Remarkably, on all of Varrichione’s cards, the card companies spelled his name correctly.

To learn more about errors on vintage football cards, see E is for Error Cards.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Frank Varrichione, 1960 Topps, 1959 Topps
• Search eBay for: Frank Varrichione, 1960 Topps, 1959 Topps

Talk of senior Hall of Fame candidates made me think of Alex Karras, who went from an almost-Hall-of-Fame football career to a successful acting career. According to The Internet Movie Database, he was even nominated for a Golden Apple Award. (No, I hadn’t heard of it, either.) Karras’s IMDB page has a long list of the films and TV shows in which he appeared. He is best known for playing George Papadapolis on TV’s Webster, and for playing Mongo in the movie Blazing Saddles.

Pictured here is Karras’s rookie card, a 1959 Topps. Below is a clip of Mongo.

• Search for Alex Karras cards on: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay

A couple of weeks ago I added a search for error cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and since then I have been documenting the error cards in my database. Here are a couple more I never noticed: the 1959 Topps Jim Ray Smith and Dave Middleton cards have the wrong team logos on the front. In fact, the logos appear to be switched! I thought that if I looked at the cards’ placement on an uncut sheet, I might see how their logos could have been swapped, but the two cards are not close together on the sheet. Perhaps it is just coincidence that Smith got Middleton’s Lion and Middleton got Smith’s Brown.

The 1959 Topps set has a large number of errors besides these swapped logos: misspelled names, incorrect player positions, a card picturing the wrong player, typos in the stats, and so on. I’m not sure how far to go with documenting the errors. Does anyone care if Bill Glass is a center on the front of the card and a tackle on the back?

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: 1959 Topps
• Search eBay for: 1959 Topps football cards

Last month I posted examples of my favorite pose on football cards, the pose in which the player is sitting, holding his helmet. This month I thought I’d post my favorite action shot: the quarterback throwing a jump pass. Shown here are 1960 Fleer Tom O’Connell, 1959 Topps King Hill, 1956 Topps George Shaw, and–complete with blockers!–1958 Topps Lamar McHan. Want more? The 1960 Fleer set uses the shot for at least five quarterbacks.

I couldn’t recall ever seeing a jump pass–or at least an intentional one–in a game, so I did a little YouTube search. I turned up a couple: Ralph Guglielmi of Notre Dame (at about 1:20) and Tim Tebow of Florida.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: George Shaw, Lamar McHan, King Hill
• Search eBay for: George Shaw, Lamar McHan, King Hill

In previous posts and in some of my uncut sheet pages, I’ve noted bits of conventional wisdom that the price guides employ that don’t hold up in practice. For example, the price guides assign a premium to the first and last cards in a set, because presumably those cards got more wear and tear from being on the top and bottom of kids’ stacks. In practice, I don’t find the first and last cards of a set to be scarcer in high grade than the rest, unless they happened to be on the corner of the sheet before it was cut into individual cards. See my 1959 virtual uncut sheet page for some discussion on this.

The guides sometimes also price short prints much higher than they should. See the 1963 Fleer uncut sheet page for examples of this. They even get entire series wrong. For example, the guides price 1961 Fleer and 1961 Topps second series football cards higher than first series cards, but the second series cards in both sets are actually more plentiful.

On the other hand, we can see that a card’s position on a sheet often affects its availability in high grade. Apparently, cards on the corners and edges of the uncut sheets were often damaged in printing and processing. The price guides don’t appear to acknowledge this, even when the guide has an accompanying population report showing that some cards are much scarcer than others.

What other factors affect a card’s value that the price guides don’t consider? The player’s team comes to mind. I find that Packers, Raiders, and Cowboys cards in general will fetch more than vintage cards from the other teams. I assume that this is because these teams have more of a national following: the Packers’ long tradition, the Raiders’ bad-boy image, and the Cowboys’ “America’s Team” label have made them popular outside their regions. Their success in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when a lot of vintage cards were printed, made their players more recognizable, as well.

Conversely, vintage cards from some teams sell poorly compared to others, and thus do not command as high a price. Cards of Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals, for example, don’t sell as well as cards from other teams. Except for the Oilers’ early AFL days, these teams had limited success in the 60’s and 70’s, and both teams have moved since their vintage cards were printed.

The price guides assign these cards the same value. I’ll take the Jeter.

A lot of people treat their price guide as Gospel, as if the guide should dictate card values, rather than the other way around. In reality, the price guides are very rough: they assign value to factors they shouldn’t, they don’t acknowledge factors they should, and they don’t keep up with the market–even after years. Sure, consult your price guide when buying, but don’t use it as your only source when determining value.

eBay is one place to consult when estimating a card’s current value. You need to look at completed auctions, though, not current ones. See my page on sports card values for instructions on finding completed eBay auctions for your cards.

My football card gallery has been getting some notice of late, and a few publications have asked to chat with me about the hobby. Most recently it was Maribeth Keane at The Collectors Weekly who called to talk. After our conversation, Maribeth and Jessica Lewis put together this article, a nice overview of the hobby. Collectors Weekly also honored me by putting the gallery in their Hall of Fame.

Prior to that, I talked with T.S. O’Connell at Sports Collectors Digest, who was writing an article on 1959 Topps football cards. I didn’t know what I could tell T.S. about cards that he didn’t already know, but I guess I managed to give him a few bits of trivia about the set. He gave me credit for them, anyway!

I don’t recall ever being interviewed prior to putting together my web sites, and it’s definitely an interesting experience. Though of course I knew why I was being interviewed, it was still surprising to see what I said actually end up in print! I must say, I’m happy I only have to talk about football cards, and not the economy or national security. If I’m off by a decade or I mispronounce a player’s name, probably no one will get too offended.