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.

To my knowledge, Guy had only one football card, the 1961 Topps card pictured here. He also appeared on five New York Giants team cards and three Dallas Cowboys team cards. This happened because Topps used a photo of the 1958 Giants team on all of the Giants team cards from 1959 to 1963, and they used a photo of the 1960 Cowboys team on all of the Cowboys team cards from 1961 to 1963. (See my interactive 1959 Topps Giants team card and 1963 Topps Cowboys team card. Guy is number 60 on both of them.)

Guy also appeared on a Cowboys team issue photo in 1960, the team’s first year in the NFL. You can see that photo at thecowboysguide.com.

• Weeb Ewbank – Ewbank coached the Jets from 1963 to 1973; before that he coached the Baltimore Colts from 1954 to 1962. I don’t believe Ewbank appeared by himself on a card in his coaching days, but he did appear on some of the Colts team cards (he’s named on the 1956 Topps card), and probably on the 1964 Topps Jets team card–if Topps didn’t use an old photo. It’s usually hard to pick out coaches on team cards, unfortunately, since the coaches don’t wear numbers. Ewbank did appear on some cards in tribute sets in the 1980s and later, though. You can find a lot of the tribute cards on eBay.
• Winston Hill – Hill’s rookie card is the 1965 Topps card pictured here, and he also appeared on a bunch of cards after that. You can see most of Hill’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
• Joe Klecko – Klecko’s rookie card is a 1978 Topps, and he appeared on a lot of cards in the 80s. As I wrote in an earlier post, I once bought a bunch of his rookie cards from Teletrade, and I sold them recently for next to nothing. Will they jump in price now that he’s in the Ring of Honor? Probably not. You can find most of Klecko’s cards on eBay.
• Curtis Martin – Martin appeared on a billion cards between 1995 and 2006. I don’t handle modern cards, so I’m afraid I can’t say much about them. You can find a nice selection on eBay.



• Don Maynard – Maynard has two rookie cards, a 1961 Topps (pictured here) and a 1961 Fleer, and he appeared on cards every year through his last season, 1973. (His 1973 Topps card has him still with the Jets, but he played for the Cardinals that season.) You can see most of Maynard’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
• Joe Namath – Namath’s rookie card, a 1965 Topps, is one of the most familiar cards in the hobby. (See J is for Joe Namath–and the 1965 Topps Tall Boys.) From 1965 to 1973, he appeared on numerous regular issue cards, oddballs, and inserts. Oddly, though he was still playing, he did not appear on any cards from 1974 to 1977. After he retired, he appeared on cards in a lot of tribute sets. You can see most of Namath’s cards from his playing days in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and a lot of the rest on eBay.

In the process of looking up the players, I learned a few things:

• Ray Nitschke wore number 33 in his rookie season.
• Hall of Famer Len Ford spent the last year of his career with the Packers.
• Billy Kinard was a Packer before joining the AFL’s Buffalo Bills in 1960.
• Steve Meilinger appeared on a 1958 Topps card with the Redskins, but he actually played for the Packers that year.
• Joe Johnson, who appears on this team card, also appeared on a (very bright) 1951 Topps Magic card. I don’t believe he appeared by himself on any other cards.

For more gallery features, see A Tour of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

A little Googling turned up these facts about Ameche:

• He played on the 1952 Wisconsin team that won the Big Ten Championship and played in the Rose Bowl. The Badgers lost 7-0 to USC. There is a nice photo of the 1952 team on the University of Wisconsin web site. (Ameche is number 35, second from the left in the second row.)
• He won the Heisman Trophy in 1954. (I knew this.)
• He made the Pro Bowl his first four years with the Colts.
• He scored the winning touchdown in the 1958 Championship Game against the Giants, “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” The SI Vault has a photo of him scoring the touchdown.
• Academy award winner Don Ameche was his cousin.

The card pictured above is Ameche’s rookie card, a 1955 Bowman. Though the card shows him in Colts blue, I’m pretty sure his jersey was red when the photo was taken. The image matches a 1954 photo in the University of Wisconsin Archives. It appears he was running right out of his socks! (There’s also a less flattering photo that appears to be from the same session.)

Ameche played only six years with the Colts, retiring after the 1960 season because of an Achilles tendon injury. The card companies apparently didn’t get the word, because he appeared on two cards the year after his retirement: the 1961 Topps and 1961 Fleer cards below.

You can see all of Ameche’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There is also a nice article about him in the University of Wisconsin Archives.

The five-cent wrapper features an illustration of a cloth emblem insert. I presume that these inserts were included in five-cent packs, but not in one-cent packs–a bonus for kids who splurged and spent a nickel. Somewhere along the line we started calling these inserts “flocked stickers.” Why? Just a guess, but I’d say some price guide writer needed a name for them, hadn’t seen a wrapper or a checklist, and decided to show off his vocabulary. See I is for Inserts for a description of the cloth emblems and a picture of one.

Thanks, Andy!

Question #7: What do the four players pictured here 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: They are all members of the Canadian Football League Hall of Fame.

Here are their bios on the CFL Hall of Fame web site:

• Martin Ruby
• Dick Huffman
• Sam Etcheverry
• Joe Kapp

• Previous question

Fleer was the card company of the early AFL. From 1960 to 1963, Fleer produced three AFL-only sets and one AFL/NFL set. In the same time period, Topps produced three NFL sets and one AFL/NFL set. Both companies produced their combined AFL/NFL sets in 1961.

In 1964, Philadelphia Gum Company obtained the rights to print cards of NFL players, and they did so until 1967. Topps countered with AFL-only sets from 1964 to 1967.

In 1968, after the NFL and AFL agreed to merge, Topps obtained the rights to both leagues. By the early 1970s, without competition, Topps’s creativity began to wane. That rant is for a later post, though. This week we’ll look at Topps’s offerings from 1960 to 1963, the years they competed with Fleer.

1960 Topps

1960 Topps is my least favorite 60s Topps set, probably because it is less colorful than their later sets. I am not fond of the big footballs with the players’ names in them, either: they remind me of the big white footballs on 1953 Bowman cards. Though Topps evidently had the rights to use the teams’ logos, they put them only on the team cards, which is unfortunate. I do like that the images of the players cover most of the cards, unlike the peephole views on 1958 Topps cards.

The 1960 Topps set was printed on a single 132-card sheet. There is a virtual 1960 Topps sheet, and a few notes about the set, in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. One bit of trivia about the set is that three of the cards–Bill Wade, Doug Atkins, and Frank Varrichione–have reversed images. Another is that, to my knowledge, this was the first Topps set to contain inserts in the packs. The inserts were metallic stickers: novel, but homely.

1960 Topps was the first major set in which all cards from a given team were grouped together numerically. I always liked this feature. Topps continued the practice until 1968, then abandoned it. Coincidentally–or was it?–1968 was the year they no longer had competition.

Finally, the 1960 Topps set was the first in which the Dallas Cowboys appeared. The Cowboys joined the NFL in 1960. Doyle Nix is the only Cowboy in the 1960 Topps set who did not appear on an earlier card for a different team.

1961 Topps

The 1961 Topps set was released in two series, the first containing NFL players, and the second containing AFL players. This is how Fleer released their 1961 set, as well. Though the price guides give higher values to the second series cards in both sets, the second series cards are in fact more plentiful than the first series cards. Be skeptical of your price guides.

1961 Topps was the first set to contain action cards, like the Eddie LeBaron card shown here. Each action card was framed by a woodgrain TV, a precursor to the 1966 Topps cards. The 1961 Topps and Fleer sets were the first to contain Minnesota Vikings cards. The Vikings were an expansion team in 1961.

Oddly, most of the Houston Oilers in the 1961 Topps set are shown in pink jerseys, though their team color was powder blue. Only George Blanda was spared the pink treatment.

1962 Topps

I love the design of the 1962 Topps set. Each player card shows two images of the player: an above-the-waist still image, and a black-and-white inset photo of the player in action. Some of the inset photos show the wrong players, however. It turns out that Topps even altered some of the photos to give the impostors different numbers.

The 1962 Topps set is tough to assemble in high grade, because the black borders show wear easily. I think high grade is the only way to go, though, since even a little wear can make the cards look bad.

I have seen a few recolored cards from this set, where someone tried to touch up a corner or an edge with a black marker. You can often detect recoloring by looking at the edges of a card, because the ink from a black marker will bleed onto the edge.

Other than the unique design, I can’t think of any remarkable features of this set. The unique design is enough for me, though.

1963 Topps

The 1963 Topps set is another tough one. Its colored borders are slightly more forgiving of wear than 1962′s black borders, but this is another set I would try to get in high grade.

There are a lot of short prints in the 1963 Topps set; they are marked in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. That tells only part of the story, though. Many of the short prints–in particular some of the Steelers and Redskins–are practically impossible to find well-centered. Most of the problem cards were on the edges of the sheets. You can see what the sheets looked like on my 1963 Topps virtual uncut sheet page.

There is one bit of innovation in the 1963 Topps set. The backs have questions with hidden answers, like some scratch-off cards. (See S is for Scratch-Offs.) You don’t scratch them to see the answers, though. Instead, you hold a piece of red cellophane over them. I used to have a bit of the red cellophane, which I assume came in a pack with the cards, but I can’t locate it now. I might never know the answers to these questions.

One last thing worth mentioning is that the backgrounds of many 1963 Topps cards vary in color: you can find them with either a blue sky or a purple one. There used to be a good article on geocities about the variations, but the article is no longer there. Someday maybe I’ll write about the variations myself. Until then, you can see the purple and blue variations of Willie Wood’s rookie card in one of my previous blog articles.

• Previous: T is for Topps, Part 1: the 1950s
• Next: T is for Topps, Part 3: 1964-1969
• All of the ABCs

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, along with the school’s name. The feature apparently was 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. 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