The cards pictured here are Sewell’s rookie card, a 1953 Bowman, and his last card, a 1963 Topps. The 1953 card is evidence that Sewell was highly regarded coming out of college, because it was unusual in the 1950s for a player, especially a lineman, to appear on a card in his rookie season. The 1963 card pictures him still with the Lions, but he played for the Rams in 1963. He also appeared on a 1959 Topps card and a 1962 Post Cereal card.

With these sheets I introduced a new feature: I started highlighting the cards that are scarcest in high grades. This helps illustrate how a card’s position on the sheet affects its availability. As I have time, I will go back and do this for the other sheets, as well.

(Click on the image to see the full sheets.)

Huth’s only football card, the 1963 Topps card pictured here, was issued in his last NFL season. This is the “blue sky” variation of the card; there is also a “purple sky” variation. You can see the variations side-by-side in the PSA Set Registry.

• See Gerry Huth’s NFL stats at pro-football-reference.com.

My favorite Ron Kramer card is the one pictured here, a 1963 Topps card. The Packers cards in the 1963 set have green-and-gold borders, so the borders match the Packers’ uniforms. This appears to have been a coincidence, since the border colors Topps used for the other teams’ cards don’t match their uniform colors.

Kramer’s rookie card is a 1958 Topps, which I featured in a previous article. He also appeared on a 1961 Lake to Lake Packers card and on two Topps cards with the Lions. You can see all of Ron Kramer’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

The Cowboys were an expansion team in 1960, and they obtained most of their players from the other teams via an expansion draft. Each of the other teams made nine players available, and the Cowboys chose three of them. Like the other teams, the Cowboys also obtained players via trades, free agency, and other teams’ waiver lists. Unfortunately, the league approved the franchise too late for the Cowboys to participate in the college draft, and the team also had to compete with the upstart AFL for free agents. The result: a 0-11-1 season.

To see how the Cowboys assembled their original team, check out The Original 1960 Dallas Cowboys Roster at thecowboysguide.com. The page includes pictures of the team-issued photos for most of the players, and it also shows many of the players’ first cards. Very interesting!

1963 Topps Ernie McMillan and 1966 Philadelphia Don Chandler:

1967 Philadelphia Gail Cogdill and 1968 Topps Junior Coffey:

1968 Topps Dan Reeves and 1969 Topps J.R. Wilburn:

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

Just out of curiosity, I did a little search for “miscut” on eBay. Most of the results are ordinary miscuts like my Bettis card, but at the moment there’s a half-and-half baseball card and a hockey card that shows parts of four cards. Here are the searches: baseball, hockey, football.

The helmet-in-hands pose appears to have been used mostly in the 1960′s. That was after facemasks got substantial enough to obscure the players’ faces, but it was before Topps started airbrushing logos away in the 1970′s. The photographers for some teams in particular favored the pose: it is used for several of the 1963 Topps Packers cards, for instance, and for most of their 1969 Topps cards.

Below are a few examples: 1968 Topps Jerry Logan, 1966 Philadelphia Irv Cross, 1964 Philadelphia Guy Reese, 1969 Topps Alex Karras, 1963 Topps Lou Michaels, and 1967 Philadelphia Bob Hayes. For more, see a thread on the topic that I started on the Collector’s Universe message boards. I posted a bunch of pictures there before the discussion, um, went south.

Meador played mostly before my time, and until I read his Awards and Statistics page, I didn’t know how good he had been. Meador’s rookie card, a 1963 Topps, is relatively easy to find, and it is inexpensive for a rookie card of a hall-of-fame candidate. Meador also had three cards issued before his rookie card: 1959 Bell Brand, 1960 Bell Brand, and 1962 Post Cereal, all of which are challenging to find. I can’t think of another other player with three “pre-rookie” cards, so if he does make the hall-of-fame, I’ll have to add a new section to my pre-rookie card page.

Altogether, Meador appeared on at least eleven cards, a large number for a defensive player in the 1960′s. The card pictured here is his 1960 Bell Brand Potato Chips card.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams
• Search eBay for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams