W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues

April 30th, 2010  |  Published in ABCs of Vintage Football Cards, General Collecting Info

Old football cards weren’t packaged just with bubble gum. They also came in and on packages of cereal, bread, hot dogs, potato chips, and dairy products. Some food issues were regional: they included players from a single team and were distributed only in that team’s part of the country. I covered most of those issues in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets. In this article I’ll cover the food issues that were distributed nationally and included players from multiple teams.

1974-1976 Wonder Bread and Town Talk Bread

1974 Wonder Bread Willie Brown football cardIn 1974, 1975, and 1976, Topps printed small sets of football cards for distribution by Wonder Bread. The cards from all three sets are plain, plentiful, and cheap. The 1974 Wonder Bread set includes thirty cards of star players, and its design closely resembles 1971 Topps. The cards of the offensive players, punter, and kicker have red borders, and the cards of the defensive players have yellow ones. Some of the images on the Wonder Bread cards–such as the Willie Brown pictured here–also appear in Topps sets.

The 1975 and 1976 Wonder Bread sets each contain twenty-four cards. Each set represents an all-star starting lineup: offense, defense, kicker, and punter. I described these sets on their Gallery pages, so I’ll just point you to those: 1975 Wonder Bread Cards and 1976 Wonder Bread Cards.

Topps also printed a variation of each Wonder Bread set for Town Talk Bread, a brand that was distributed only in Western Pennsylvania. I did a little research, and I found that in 2005, the Town Talk and Wonder Bread brands were owned by the same company. Apparently, the two companies were already affiliated in the mid-1970s.

The differences between the Wonder Bread and Town Talk cards are trivial. According to Beckett, the 1974 Town Talk cards “are distinguished from the Wonder Bread issue by the absence of a credit line at the top of the cardback.” On the 1975 and 1976 Town Talk cards, the credit line on the back reads “Town Talk Bread All-Star Series,” rather than “Wonder Bread All-Star Series.”

Because they were distributed in only one area, the Town Talk cards are much scarcer than the Wonder Bread cards. Most of the Town Talk cards I see are priced ten times higher than their Wonder Bread counterparts.

1962 Post Cereal

1962 Post Cereal was a large set for its time, with 200 cards. The cards came on the backs of cereal boxes, several to a box, so they are all hand-cut. The set contains several pre-rookie cards of Hall of Fame players; one of them is the Bob Lilly pictured here. You can see the rest on my pre-rookie card page.

The images on the Post cards are amusing. Most show the players in fake action shots, and the players appear to be hunching over to fit into the frame. Y.A. Tittle is wearing his helmet, of course, and I believe he is the only helmeted player in the set. (See Y.A. Kept His Hat On.) As I wrote in a previous article, the Post cards used footnotes to indicate which players had been traded during the off-season. Each card of a traded player shows both his old team and his new one. I can’t think of another vintage football card set that explicitly identifies the traded players.

Two of the cards in the Post set have variations. Both cards, Jim Ninowski and Sam Baker, have footnotes because the players had been traded. On each of these cards, the asterisk for the footnote can be either black or red. Yes, we nutty card collectors need to have them both.

1952 Wheaties

The 1952 Wheaties set is a sixty-card, multi-sport set. It contains two cards each for thirty athletes, and the cards came ten to a box on Wheaties boxes. The cards are slightly smaller than standard trading cards, at 2 by 2 3/4 inches.

Six of the thirty athletes in the set–and hence, twelve of the cards–are football players: Doak Walker, Otto Graham, John Lujack, Tom Fears, Glenn Davis, and Bob Waterfield. You can see the football cards in the 1952 Wheaties set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

1970 and 1971 Kellogg’s

Lance Alworth 1970 Kellogg's football cardYet another cereal company, Kellogg’s, got into the football card game in 1970. Kellogg’s included small, plastic-on-paper “3-D” cards in their cereal boxes in both 1970 and 1971. The Lance Alworth card pictured here is a 1970 Kellogg’s card; the Jim Hart is a 1971 Kellogg’s.

The Kellogg’s cards came in thin paper wrappers that you could see through, and I know at least one person who collects the cards still in the wrappers. I make fun of him, but I actually think it’s cool. The 1970 Kellogg’s cards were available as a complete set via mail order, but the 1971 cards weren’t, so the 1971 cards are scarcer. The plastic coating on the cards makes the corners sturdier than cardboard, so the cards are easy to find in high grades. The plastic is susceptible to cracking, however.

Both sets feature facsimile signatures on the front, and lots of stats and detailed personal information in tiny print on the back. They’re pretty cool cards, and I imagine that kids made their moms buy lots of cereal to get them.

You can see both 1970 Kellogg’s and 1971 Kellogg’s football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Other Food Issues

As I said at the top, several other food issues were distributed regionally. These regional issues include 1959 and 1960 Bell Brand Rams, 1960 Mayrose Cardinals, 1961 Lake to Lake Packers, and 1961 Golden Tulip Chargers. You can read about them in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets.

One group of food issues I haven’t covered yet is the run of 1959-1964 Kahn’s Wieners sets. I’ll write about those in a separate article.

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J is for Joe Namath–and the 1965 Topps Tall Boys

October 9th, 2009  |  Published in ABCs of Vintage Football Cards, General Collecting Info

Joe Namath’s 1965 Topps rookie card is easily the most expensive regular issue football card of the 1960s. Come to think of it, it might also be more expensive than any regular issue 1950s card. Why is it so valuable? Well, just being a rookie card of a Hall of Fame player is enough to make it expensive, since collecting Hall of Fame rookie cards is a popular endeavor. (See H is for Hall of Famers.) The 1965 Topps “tall boy” set is also a classic, and one of the most popular vintage sets. And Namath himself, of course, was a flamboyant personality playing on a large market team. Remember his “guarantee” that the Jets would beat John Unitas and the Colts in Super Bowl III? How about his pantyhose ad, and his Noxema ad, with Farrah Fawcett?

Still, I have a hard time justifying the price of the Namath card, and it might be another card whose price is inflated by the price guides. (See the Jim Lansford discussion in B is for Bowman.) Just compare Namath’s rookie card to Bart Starr’s 1957 Topps rookie card: the Starr card is only slightly easier to find in high grade than the Namath, 1957 Topps is also a classic set, the Packers won a lot more championships, and most people think Starr was a better quarterback. Yet the Namath sells for two or three times more than the Starr? It seems that either the Namath is overvalued or the Starr is undervalued.

Might the Namath be more valuable because it is a short print? Well, it’s possible that the price guides added a premium for that, but I am not convinced that it even is a short print. The guides say that there are 132 short prints in the set (or 44 double prints, depending on how you look at it), but that sounds fishy to me. Assuming that the 176 cards were released in a single series–and I haven’t read anything to the contrary–my guess is that they were printed on a 198-card sheet, with 22 double prints. I don’t know why Topps would have used more than one sheet if the cards all fit on one. My Beckett catalog isn’t much help; it says merely that “Since this set was not printed in the standard fashion, many of the cards were printed in lesser quantities than the others.” Well, gee, Dr. Beckett, what fashion was it printed in?

To see what I’m talking about, you can look at a half-sheet of 1969 Topps basketball cards on the sportscards.info web site. The basketball cards are also tall boys, and the half-sheet of tall boys holds 9 rows of 11 cards, or 99 in total. A full sheet of tall boys would thus hold 198 cards.

Ben Davidson 1965 Topps rookie football cardAn article on the PSA web site sings the praises of the 1965 Topps set and describes the challenges in finding high-grade cards: poor centering, print marks, etc. Since that article covers the basics, I won’t repeat them here. One point in the article is inaccurate, though, or at least outdated: it says that the set’s two checklists are scarce, and that one of the checklists is the second-most valuable card in the set. PSA’s own population report, however, shows that many of the other cards in the set are scarcer than the checklists in high grades, and some of them sell for more than the checklists. (The last PSA 8 Jim Colclough to sell on eBay, for example, went for $909.) If what I have observed in other sets holds true, the cards most difficult to find in high grades are the ones that were on the corners and edges of the sheets.

The PSA article doesn’t mention that there were only eight AFL teams in 1965, so the 1965 Topps set has over 20 cards for each team. That is far more cards per team than most vintage sets provided, and it allowed Topps to print cards for players who typically would not have appeared on a card. In particular, the set contains an unusual number of cards of linemen and defensive players, and many of those are the players’ rookie cards. Pictured here is one example: the only card of defensive back Gerry Bussell. (Thanks to Pastor Scott for this observation–see his comment on D is for Defensive Players.)

Gerry Bussell 1965 Topps football cardAs they did every year from 1960 to 1967, in 1965 Topps grouped the cards by team. I like this feature: first in the set come all of the Patriots, then come all of the Bills, and so on. Also, if I know a player’s team, I can locate his card quickly, even if I don’t know his card number. This is because the teams are in alphabetical order by city, and the players are in alphabetical order within each team. I wonder if it is coincidence that 1960 through 1967 were also the years that Topps had competition in the football card market, and, except in 1960, their competitors grouped the cards by team, as well. In 1968, when Topps again had no competition, they reverted to the random ordering they had last used in 1959.

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