New in the Gallery: 1963 Kahn’s Wieners Cards

June 11th, 2011  |  Published in Autographs, New in the Gallery, Silly Stuff

Johnny Unitas 1963 Kahn's Wieners football cardIt 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.)

Team 1962 Won-Lost-Tied Number of 1963 Kahn’s Cards
Green Bay Packers 13-1 14
Washington Redskins 5-7-2 14
New York Giants 12-2 11
Pittsburgh Steelers 9-5 10
Cleveland Browns 7-6-1 8
Detroit Lions 11-3 7
Chicago Bears 9-5 6
St. Louis Cardinals 4-9-1 5
Baltimore Colts 7-7 4
San Francisco 49ers 6-8 4
Dallas Cowboys 5-8-1 4
Philadelphia Eagles 3-10-1 3
Minnesota Vikings 2-11-1 2
Los Angeles Rams 1-12-1 2

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.)

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More Faked Fake Autographs

August 14th, 2010  |  Published in Autographs

In an article in April, I wrote that Lee Folkins had told me that the facsimile signature on his 1964 Kellogg’s stamp was not in his handwriting. Today I noticed that some Kahn’s Wieners cards also have faked facsimile signatures on them. Below are the 1962 and 1963 Kahn’s cards of Fran Tarkenton. I don’t know if either card shows a true representation of Tarkenton’s signature, but you can certainly tell that at least one does not.
1962 Kahn's Wieners Fran Tarkenton football card1963 Kahn's Wieners Fran Tarkenton football card
I looked around on eBay and found other Kahn’s cards of the same player that have obviously different handwriting on them. The facsimile signatures on Ernie Stautner‘s 1961 and 1963 Kahn’s cards are much different from one another (look at the t’s), as are the ones on Lou Michaels‘s 1962 and 1963 cards (look at the leading L). And the signatures on Jim Brown‘s 1961, 1962, and 1963 cards all look different to me. It took me just a few minutes to find these, so I am sure it would be easy to find more examples.

I wonder: did the people who designed these cards intend for people to think that the signatures were copies of the players’ real signatures? If they wanted to fool people, I would think that they would have used the same signatures from year to year. Perhaps they wanted to give the impression that the signatures were copies of the real thing, but it didn’t matter enough to put a real effort into it. After all, the cards came free with wieners.

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