Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Today I added another “interactive” team card to the Vintage Football Card Gallery: a 1959 Topps New York Giants team card. By placing the cursor over a player, you can see who the player is, and by clicking on him, you can see all of his cards. (It doesn’t work on the card pictured here–you have to go to the gallery page.)

Each time I do one of these, I find a surprise or two. This time it was Don Maynard, who was a rookie with the Giants in 1958, when the photo on this card was taken. Maynard caught only five passes in 1958, and in 1959 he did not play. In 1960 he joined the New York Titans (later the Jets) of the AFL, and he gained over 11,000 yards receiving in thirteen years with the team. He is one of six Hall of Famers on this Giants card.

Art Faircloth, a back for the New York Giants in 1947 and 1948, passed away on April 1. In his two years with the Giants, Faircloth played in a total of five games, doing a little of everything: he had eleven career rushes, three passes, three interceptions, four punts, and two kick returns.

Though his career was short, Faircloth appeared on a football card, the 1948 Bowman pictured here.

Cliff Livingston, who played linebacker twelve years for the Giants, Vikings, and Rams, died on March 13. He played in four NFL championship games with the Giants, and they won one of them, in 1956. Livingston was an All-Pro in one season, 1961.

Though he had a long, successful career, Livingston appeared on only one regular issue card, the 1962 Topps card shown here. He also appeared on a 1962 Post Cereal card.

Livingston’s brother, Howie Livingston, also played in the NFL.

Ralph Starkey, who appeared on this 1954 Bowman football card, passed away on January 24. Starkey played college football for West Virginia University and was drafted by the New York Giants in 1954. Pro-football-reference.com doesn’t have a page for him, so I assume he didn’t see playing time for the Giants.

At West Virginia, Starkey played in the 1954 Sugar Bowl, which the Mountaineers lost to Georgia Tech. Joe Marconi, Bruce Bosley, and Sam Huff, who all became Pro Bowl players in the NFL, were also members of the 1953 West Virginia team. Ironically, they didn’t appear on their first cards until years after Starkey.

Randy Johnson, the first quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, died on September 16. Along with Tommy Nobis, Johnson was a first round draft choice for the Falcons in 1966. Johnson played for five years with the Falcons, then went on to play for the Giants, Hawaiians (of the World Football League), Redskins, and Packers. In his last professional game, Johnson started for the Packers and led them to a win over his first team, the Falcons.

Pictured here is Johnson’s rookie card, a 1967 Philadelphia. You can see all of his cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Steve Liskey, from The Cowboys Guide, recently asked me if I planned to add scans of the backs of the cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. My first thought was “Are you out of your mind, Steve?” But then I told him that scanning just the fronts has taken an enormous amount of time, so I will probably never get to the backs. (Another visitor had a more modest suggestion: providing a single example of a card back for each set. Now that sounds like something I can accomplish–someday.)

It turned out, though, that Steve was particularly interested in the backs of 1966 Philadelphia cards. Why? Well, because as shown on the Dennis Claridge card to the right, each card in the 1966 Philly set has a player pictured on the back who is not the player on the front. (That’s Roman Gabriel on the back of the Claridge card.) Steve collects Dallas Cowboys cards, of course, and he wanted to know which cards have a Cowboy on the back.

Now that’s a serious collector, and I understand completely the desire–no, the need–to get every one of whatever type of cards you collect. If you collect a certain team, of course you want the cards that picture your team’s players on the back. So what I will probably do–again, someday–is note which players appear on the backs of the 1966 Philly cards so that the cards show up in searches for the players and their teams.

It had occurred to me even before Steve wrote that a player collector might want any cards on which his player was pictured, whether the player was identified on the card or not. That’s why, for each 1966 Philadelphia team play card, I have added the names of all the players appearing in the action on the front of the card. For example, for the Cowboys play card shown here, I included all five players pictured–three Cowboys and two Giants–in the list of players appearing on the card.

While adding players for the team play cards, I noticed that some of the players don’t appear on cards of their own. For example, to my knowledge, the Cowboys play card above is the only card on which Jerry Rhome appears. (Jerry is the holder for the kick.) I sell a lot of cards to players’ friends and relatives, and I suspect that this extra information will someday help a player’s grandson find his granddad on a card he didn’t know existed.

Search for 1966 Philadelphia cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s cards.