Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Here are some interesting items that were recently listed on eBay: print blocks that were used to print 1961 Lake to Lake Packers football cards. The 1961 Lake to Lake Willie Wood card is a short print and also a pre-rookie card of Wood. (His rookie card is a 1963 Topps.) The Lake to Lake Emlen Tunnell card is his only card with the Packers, though he spent three years with the team. Tunnell, who is now in the Hall of Fame, had been a star with the Giants, and it is odd that neither Topps nor Fleer printed a card of him in his last years in the league.

I don’t know much about printing, so I don’t know how people printed cards with these blocks. I do know that half of the Lake to Lake cards were severely short-printed, and four of the five blocks the seller had for sale were for short prints. Why the cards were so short printed is a mystery to me; unfortunately, the print blocks aren’t giving me any clues.

A couple of months ago I wrote about the white footballs you sometimes see on old Bowman cards. Naturally, after writing that post, I started noticing more and more white footballs. Here are a few that I came across while adding 1950′s cards to my sales site the last couple of days: 1953 Bowman Emlen Tunnell, 1954 Bowman Emlen Tunnell (apparently from the same photo session as 1953), 1955 Bowman Tom Fears, 1956 Topps Adrian Burk, and 1957 Lenny Moore.

The 1954 Tunnell card is the corrected version, with two L’s in his last name. The second L looks as if it’s been penciled in: it’s a bit fainter and wider than the first L, and the spacing isn’t quite right. I don’t know anything about printing, but it looks like someone improvised to fix the spelling error.

It appears that Adrian Burk was another jumping quarterback, or at least he’s up on his tip-toes.

Yesterday I added a stack of sharp 1950′s football cards to my football card sales site. Included is this gorgeous 1956 Topps Em Tunnell card. Though the card says he was a halfback, Tunnell was actually a hall-of-fame defensive back. Until 1959 the card companies did not distinguish between offensive halfbacks and defensive backs, nor between offensive and defensive tackles, nor between offensive and defensive ends. A player was simply a halfback, tackle, or end.

Until I looked at Tunnell’s page on the pro football hall-of-fame site, I had not realized that he played with the Packers for three years. I knew he was with the Packers in 1961, since he appears on a 1961 Lake to Lake card. But he also was on the team in 1959 and 1960. Oddly, though he had appeared on Bowman and Topps cards every year from 1951 to 1958, Topps did not print a card of Tunnell in his three years with the Packers.