Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Today I added 1964 Wheaties Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. When I bought my first group of these stamps, I assumed that they would be the thickness of a card, like the 1969 Topps 4-in-1 inserts. I found, though, that they’re like postage stamps, only much bigger: 2 3/4 by 2 1/2 inches. Because they’re so big and on such thin paper, they are fragile, and bending one can leave an indentation, even if it doesn’t leave a crease.

There are 74 stamps in the set: 70 player photos and 4 team emblems. The player photos are sharp and bright. Most of the photos are waist-up or head-and-shoulders shots, and Y.A. Tittle is the only player whose face is obscured by his helmet. (Tittle must have preferred posing in his helmet. Most of his cards picture him wearing it.) My two favorite stamps, Jerry Kramer and John Henry Johnson, are shown here.

The stamps go with a magazine-sized booklet called the Wheaties NFL Pro Bowl Football Player Stamp Album and Fact Book–or WNPBFPSAFB for short. You could buy the album for 50 cents via a mail-in offer from General Mills. The stamps were originally part of the album, most of them on pages just inside the back and front covers. There were 6 pages of stamps, with 12 stamps on each page. That makes 72 stamps, and there were 2 more on a small panel adhered to the inside of the front cover. In my album, the tab from the small panel is still there, and there are remnants of the stamp pages along the album’s spine.

The 6 full pages were printed on a single master sheet, as you can see on the Topps Vault web site. (Evidently Topps supplied the stamps and album for General Mills.) The master sheet is missing two stamps, Norm Snead and Jack Pardee, the two that came on the small panel stuck to the inside of the album’s front cover. This small panel seems odd, when Topps could have fit Snead and Pardee on the master sheet by displacing two of the team emblem stamps. Perhaps it was just poor planning: “Oh, crap, we forgot Snead and Pardee. Quick, make a little two-stamp panel!”

The non-stamp pages of the album include a short writeup for each player, and a place to stick his stamp. The players are grouped by conference, first the Eastern Conference players, then the Western Conference players. (The Pro Bowl back then matched the East against the West.) Within each conference, the players appear in alphabetical order–almost. I wonder how many kids noticed that Mitchell came before Michaels, and Promuto came before Pottios? Also, the album shows Jim Ringo in transition from the Packers to the Eagles: his writeup says Eagles, but he’s still on the Western Conference side of the album. (According to Packers legend, after the 1963 season, Ringo appeared with his agent in Vince Lombardi’s office, asking for a raise. Lombardi left the room, returned in five minutes, and told Ringo he’d been traded to the Eagles.)

All of the players on the stamps played in the 1963 Pro Bowl. According to pro-football-reference.com, there were 71 players in the Pro Bowl that year, so one Pro Bowler didn’t get a stamp. Who went stampless? It was Frank Gifford, but I don’t know why he was excluded.

Oddly, though there are 70 player stamps, the album has writeups for only 68 of the players. Joe Schmidt and Y.A. Tittle appear on stamps, but they were omitted from the album. It’s not like there wasn’t room: the creators of the album included several pages of Pro Bowl history, facts, and records, and they could easily have squeezed in another couple of players. Unless I am missing a page, though, there is no place for Schmidt and Tittle.

It’s also odd that there are only four team emblem stamps. The Vikings, 49ers, Cardinals, and Giants are the only teams with stamps, a pity because the team emblems are colorful and fun. There is no place in the album to stick the four team stamps, either.

• See all of the 1964 Wheaties Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery
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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.

A page at pro-football-reference.com called “Cups of Coffee” lists all of the pro football players who appeared in only one NFL, AFL, or AAFC game. Of course, when I discovered the page, I wondered if any of the players had appeared on football cards. I perused the list and came up with these:

Ronnie Knox

Ronnie Knox played in one game for the Chicago Bears in 1957, but he did not throw a pass. It appears that he was the fourth-string quarterback, a rookie playing behind three veterans. Topps, oddly, printed cards of all four Bears quarterbacks in 1957. Knox also spent a few seasons in the CFL, and he appeared on a few CFL cards. You can usually find them on eBay.

Buddy Allen

Buddy Allen had three carries in one game for the Denver Broncos in 1961. He apparently at least tried out for the Oakland Raiders the year before, because his only card is the 1960 Fleer card shown here. It is possible that he was on the Raiders’ roster in 1960, but the rosters I have found online show only the players who actually played in regular season games.

Jim Yeats

Jim Yeats appeared in one game for the Houston Oilers in 1960, but he did not have any stats. The card pictured here is his 1960 Fleer card. Unfortunately, on his only card, Fleer misspelled his name. I heard from one of Yeats’s relatives a few years ago, and she told me that he was with the Packers in 1958 and 1959, and that he was still with the Oilers in 1961. He evidently did not see playing time those years.

1960 was the first year of the AFL, and the teams’ rosters apparently were not final when Fleer chose the players to include on their cards. Many of the players on 1960 Fleer cards did not see playing time in the AFL.

Don McKissack

Don McKissack played in one game for the NFL’s Dallas Texans in 1952, two years after he was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams. If you count variations, he appeared on two cards in the 1950 Felt Backs set: a brown one and a yellow one. (The price guides assign higher prices to the yellow 1950 Topps Felt Backs, but the brown ones are actually scarcer.)

Mark Burke

Mark Burke saw playing time for the Philadelphia Eagles in the last game of the 1976 season. He returned one punt for fourteen yards, not too shabby. He appeared on the 1974 West Virginia playing card pictured here.

Steve Haggerty

Steve Haggerty played in one game for the Denver Broncos in 1975, but he did not get any stats. Here he is on a 1974 Colorado Playing Card, though he had transferred to UNLV for the 1974 season.

Larry Joe

Larry Joe played one game for the AAFC’s Buffalo Bills in 1949. He had a pretty good game, gaining 82 all-purpose yards. Joe appeared on a 1948 Leaf football card–one of the tough high numbers–with Penn State. I did a quick web search for Joe and found that he still holds the Penn State record for career kickoff return average.

Pictured here are all of the Green Bay Packers in the 1953 Bowman football card set. That’s right, it’s just the two quarterbacks, Tobin Rote and Babe Parilli. What happened to the rest of the players?

When I saw that the set had only two Packers, I thought it must be a mistake, but I double-checked and found that it was correct. Why, I wondered? Had the Packers been terrible in 1952? No, according to pro-football-reference.com, they went 6-6. Were Rote and Parilli the only good players on the team? Well, no, Bill Howton had 13 touchdowns and 1231 yards receiving in 1952. Bob Mann had a respectable 517 yards receiving in 1952, and he had had a 1000-yard season with the Lions in 1949. Deral Teteak was a Pro Bowl linebacker in 1952. These guys were certainly worthy of being on cards.

What other reason might there be? If it wasn’t that the Packers were bad, might Bowman have allocated most of the cards to the top few teams? No, that’s not the way it broke, either. The largest number of cards for a team–12–went to the Chicago Cardinals, who were 4-8 in 1952. Here are the number of cards each team had in the 1953 Bowman set, along with their 1952 record:

Looking at the 1952 league leaders, other omissions stand out: Dan Towler, who led the league in rushing in 1952, did not have a 1953 Bowman card. Joe Perry was third in rushing, and he did not have a card, either. Dick Lane (also see D is for Defensive Players) had 14 interceptions in 1952–still a record–and he did not have a card.

So I’m mystified: Did Bowman have contract problems with the Packers, Rams, and 49ers? Was it difficult to deal with remote teams? (Bowman was based in Philadelphia.) There were only 96 cards in the set, compared to 144 in Bowman’s 1952 sets–had they expected to print another series?

Oh well, I have never been fond of this issue, anyway. (See my posts on the early Bowman sets and the NFL’s use of white footballs.) The odd player selection is just another reason to dislike it. The 1952 Bowman Large set is a classic, and I continue to be surprised that the 1953 set fell so far.

I have always thought that these were odd: they’re boyhood photo cards that were part of the 1973 Topps football card set. It’s a 528-card set, so why are there only three boyhood cards? Why did Topps pick Anderson, Gabriel, and Garrett? Were they the only players whose moms responded to requests for old photos? Did the other moms respond, but their kids weren’t cute enough? Did Topps intend to have a Boyhood Photo insert set and fail to turn up enough photos? Every time I encounter one of these, I wonder how they came to be.

An article in the Topps Archives blog has a nice description of the 1969 Topps 4-in-1 stamps and albums. (Scroll to the bottom of the article.) I was looking through some 4-in-1’s today, and I noticed a few odd things worth mentioning:

First, though there is an mini-album for each team, most of the albums have players from other teams pictured on their covers. The 49ers album pictured here shows number 80 from the Giants scoring a touchdown, and there are no 49ers to be seen, just the referee with his hands in the air. Surely they could have found an action photo of a 49er?

Second, the Topps Archives article mentions that several players appear in the 4-in-1’s (and thus in the mini-albums), but they do not appear in the main 1969 Topps set. But it’s odder than that: five of the players in the 4-in-1’s don’t appear on a card of their own in any major set! The five who appear only on these bitty stamps are Reg Carolan, Solomon Brannan, Carl Cunningham, Dennis Randall, and Jim LeMoine.
Third, as the article mentions, 65 cards were needed to yield 260 stamps, 10 for each team, but there are 66 cards in the 4-in-1 set. One card–Johnson, Katcavage, Triplett, and Lewis–is repeated, with the labels for the player names colored differently. When I think about it, the double print makes sense, since there are 264 cards on a typical uncut sheet, and 66 is a quarter of 264. I’m guessing that each of the 66 cards appeared four times on the sheet.

Finally–and this is just an error–the stamp of Bob Brown says it’s Bob Brown of the Rams, but it’s really Bob Brown of the Packers. To see this error and a lot more like it, check out my Mistaken Identities page.

I also find it a bit odd that PSA will grade individual stamps in this set. (There are usually a few on eBay.) I don’t know why anyone would want an individual stamp graded, since they don’t sell for much, but PSA will oblige and take the grading fees. Perhaps people submit individual stamps when the 4-in-1 card as a whole is damaged. Because of the perforations around the stamps, the cards bend easily, and you will often see small creases emanating from the perforations to the edges of the cards.

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