Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Last fall, when I wrote in the Collectors Universe forums that I was starting the ABCs, I said that I hadn’t yet thought of a topic for Z. One of the participants there (thanks, nam812!) suggested “Z is for Zebras.” Great idea, I thought, but only a few vintage cards of officials came to mind, and all of them were in the 1966 and 1967 Philadelphia sets. If I had only those to write about, “Z is for Zebras” would be a short article.

I learned last week, though, that Bruce Alford was a longtime NFL official who had appeared on a card as a player. I wondered if other officials had appeared on cards as players, too. Wikipedia happens to have an all-time list of NFL officials, so I perused the list, looking for names I recognized from cards. Including Alford, I found four. That was better, now I could include them in this article, as well.

First, the Philadelphia cards. The 1966 and 1967 Philadelphia sets each include a Referee Signals card and a few cards that have referee signals on the back. In the 1966 set, the referee signals appear on the backs of the “play” cards; in the 1967 set, they appear on the backs of the team cards. The Referee Signals cards and the back of the 1966 Philadelphia Vikings Play card are shown here.

Except for an occasional official in the background (thanks, revmoran!) or random striped shirt in an action photo, that’s really about it for officials on vintage cards. But then we have the zebras who appeared on cards in their pre-zebra days:

Bruce Alford, who recently passed away, spent six years as a player in the AAFC and NFL, then officiated in the NFL for twenty years. He officiated Super Bowls II, VII, and IX. Alford appeared as a player on a 1951 Bowman card.

Al Conway was the Eagles’ first-round draft pick in 1953, and he appeared on a 1953 Bowman card. According to pro-football-reference.com, he never played a league game, but he went on to officiate for 28 years in the AFL and NFL.

Pat Harder played eight years for the Cardinals and Lions, and he appeared on four cards in that span: 1948 Bowman, 1948 Leaf, 1950 Bowman, and 1953 Bowman. His 1948 Bowman card is pictured here. After retiring as a player, Harder was an official for seventeen years. One game he officiated was the Raiders-Steelers playoff game in which Franco Harris made his Immaculate Reception.

Finally, Frank Sinkovitz was a center and linebacker for the Steelers for six years. He appeared on the 1950 Bowman card pictured here, and a 1951 Bowman card. After his playing days, he officiated for 26 years. One game he officiated was Super Bowl XV.

So there you have it, the NFL officials rookie card collection. If you can think of additions, let me know.

Now I know my ABCs…

• Previous: Y is for Yale
• All of the ABCs

• Search eBay for: Bruce Alford, Al Conway, Pat Harder, Frank Sinkovitz
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1948 Bowman, 1950 Bowman, 1951 Bowman, 1953 Bowman

American football began in the colleges, and the first football cards were of college players. The very first football card, the 1888 Goodwin Champions tobacco card shown here, pictures Henry Beecher, captain of the Yale football team. The scan of the Beecher card is from a recent Huggins & Scott auction; a big thanks to them for letting me use it.

There are fifty cards in the 1888 Goodwin Champions set, ranging from jockeys to oarsmen to chess players, and Beecher is the only football player. The 1888 N162 Goodwin Champions page on obaks.com shows the composition of the full set. According to Wikipedia, the 1888 Champions set was “the first Goodwin set to use colored chromolithography.” As I understand it, this allowed mass production of the colored cards. It also made Henry Beecher appear to be wearing lipstick.

Six years after Beecher’s card, the first football-only set of trading cards was introduced, and it also featured Yale players. The 35-card 1894 Mayo Cut Plugs set contains players from the Big Three football schools of the time: Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. One of the cards, Brinck Thorne, is pictured here. See M is for Mayo Cut Plug for details on the Mayos.

Yale also produced the first professional football player, Pudge Heffelfinger, who was paid $500 for playing a game in 1892. (According to the Inflation Calculator, that’s $11787 in 2009 dollars.) And Yale produced two of the first three Heisman trophy winners, Larry Kelley in 1936 and Clint Frank in 1937. Heffelfinger and Kelley both appear on 1955 Topps All-American cards, pictured here.

After 1937, Yale began losing more games than it won, and only a handful of Yale alumni from after that season have appeared on football cards. There are (five Yale alumni in the 1955 Topps All-American set, but none of them played there after 1937.) One notable alumnus was Brian Dowling, who was the inspiration for B.D. in Doonesbury. You can read about Dowling in an earlier blog article.

For much more on Yale football, see the Harvard-Yale Football Gallery.

• Previous: X is for X’s and O’s
• Next: Z is for Zebras
• All of the ABCs

• Search eBay for: 1888 Goodwin Champions, 1894 Mayo Cut Plug, 1955 Topps All-Americans
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1955 Topps All-Americans

Yesterday I added 1894 Mayo Cut Plug cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Goodwin and Co. Auctions recently auctioned off the “Anonymous” card and the rest of the set, and they kindly allowed me to use their scans. Thanks, Bill!

Pictured here is the card of Princeton’s Neilson Poe, a relative of Edgar Allan Poe. See M is for Mayo Cut Plug for a short description of the set and links to other sites.

• Search eBay for: 1894 Mayo Cut Plug cards

As I wrote in R is for Rookie Cards, the term “rookie card” is a misnomer. Pictured here is an extreme example: Ken Iman’s rookie card, a 1971 Topps, which was printed in his twelfth year as a pro. Offhand, I can’t think of any another rookie card that was issued that far into an active player’s career. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some, though. If you can think of an example, leave a comment.

I would not have realized that Iman had been in the league a long time by 1971, except that he also appeared on a card ten years earlier, in the 1961 Lake to Lake Packers set. (See K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets.) I actually had to look him up to verify that it was the same Ken Iman on both cards. Collectors generally agree that a player’s rookie card has to come from a major set, so his Lake to Lake card doesn’t count as his rookie card.

Iman apparently had established himself as a solid player by the 70s, because he also appeared on 1973, 1974, and 1975 Topps cards. (It helped that Topps started producing monstrous 528-card sets in 1973.) Ironically, though he appeared on a card in 1975, he did not play that year.

In a previous post, I said that John Brockington’s 1972 Topps card pictured him in what looked like his College All-Star jersey with the stars airbrushed away. Browsing through the rest of my 1972 Topps football cards, I found four other players, all rookies, in the same jersey: Jim Plunkett, Lyle Alzado, Ron Hornsby, and Julius Adams. Here are pictures of them.

I checked Marc Bolding’s College All-Star Game site and found that the five players indeed appeared on the roster for the 1971 game. Adams and Brockington also appear in photos on the game summary page. I assume that the jerseys Adams and Brockington are wearing in the game photos are the very same ones they are wearing on their cards.

At least two more players on the 1971 All-Star roster have rookie cards in the 1972 Topps set: John Riggins and Dan Pastorini. These two appear in their new pro uniforms, Riggins with the Jets and Pastorini with the Oilers.

One of my readers, Steve, recently called my attention to the card shown here, a 1949 Silber’s Bakery Colts Y.A. Tittle card. Huggins & Scott has the card up for sale in their current auction, and they kindly let me copy the image.

I hadn’t seen this Tittle card before, and I hadn’t heard of the Silber’s Bakery issue. Reader Steve also sent me a link to a book, called Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, that contains a description of the Silber’s Bakery set and pictures of two more of the cards. (One of the cards pictured in the book is Rex Grossman, grandfather of Redskins quarterback Rex Grossman III. The elder Grossman played for the Colts and Lions from 1948 to 1950.) There are also pictures of a few Silber’s cards on the SGC web site, along with a full list of the cards in the set.

Tittle’s Silber’s Bakery card is a pre-rookie card; his rookie card is a 1950 Bowman. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) It is also one of the few cards on which Tittle appears bareheaded. As I wrote in an earlier article, Tittle apparently preferred to wear his helmet for photos. The image on his Silber’s card is the nearly the same as the one on his 1951 Bowman card, shown here. I imagine that whoever colored his jersey 49ers red enhanced the trees in the background, as well.

In 1949, when the Silber’s Bakery cards were issued, the Colts were still in the All-America Football Conference, or AAFC. The Silber’s set is now the second set of AAFC cards I have learned about, the other being the 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns set I wrote about a few weeks ago.

In 1950, the AAFC folded, and three teams from the AAFC–the Colts, Browns, and 49ers–joined the NFL. This Colts team disbanded after the 1950 season, and Tittle joined the 49ers. Three years later, the Dallas Texans moved to Baltimore and changed their nickname to the Colts. The second Colts franchise stayed in Baltimore until 1984, when they moved to Indianapolis.

Over the weekend I added 1974 Parker Brothers cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These fifty cards were pieces in a game called Parker Brothers Pro Draft. They were printed by Topps for Parker Brothers, and they closely resemble 1974 Topps regular issue cards. A message board thread at tradingcardcentral.com has some nice photos of the game. (Note that the box cover pictures 1973 Topps cards, not 1974.)

The object of the Pro Draft game was to assemble a complete starting offensive lineup, so the set of Parker Brothers includes only offensive players: five quarterbacks, five tight ends, five centers, ten running backs, eight guards, eight tackles, and nine wide receivers. (Topps labeled Dan Dierdorf a guard, though he played tackle from 1972 to 1981.) The cards are not ordered sequentially; they have the same numbers as the corresponding cards in the regular 1974 Topps set. The only differences between the Parker Brothers cards and the Topps cards are:

• Six of the Parker Brothers cards have different images on the front than their counterparts in the Topps set.
• Cards from early editions of the Pro Draft game have 1972 stats on the back instead of 1973 stats.
• Cards from early editions of the game also have two asterisks in the copyright line on the back, whereas their counterparts in the regular Topps set have just one asterisk. (Complicating matters, some of the regular 1974 Topps cards also have two asterisks in the copyright line, but those cards don’t have counterparts in the Parker Brothers set. According to Beckett.com, the regular Topps cards with two asterisks are 26, 129, 130, 156, 162, 219, 265-364, 367-422, and 424-528.)
• Cards from late editions of the Pro Draft game have 1973 stats and one asterisk on the back. Except for the six that have different pictures on the front, the late edition Parker Brothers cards are indistinguishable from the regular 1974 Topps cards.

Here are the six cards whose fronts differ between the Parker Brothers set and the regular 1974 Topps set. Click on any picture to see a slightly bigger image.

Number	1974 Parker Brothers	1974 Topps
23
49
116
124
126
127

Here are examples of the backs. The back on the left appeared on Parker Brothers cards in early editions of the game. The back on the right appeared on regular 1974 Topps cards and on Parker Brothers cards in late editions of the game.

This is a picture of an uncut sheet of 1974 Topps cards that my friend cardbender posted on photobucket. The cards in the block marked in orange correspond to the fifty cards in the Parker Brothers set. You can see that three cards in the block are All Pro cards, and three are action cards, oriented horizontally. These are the six cards that Topps changed for the Parker Brothers set.

Though the Parker Brothers cards are less common than the regular 1974 Topps cards, they don’t appear to sell for a premium. I’m sure that collectors often don’t recognize them; in fact, before writing this article, I went through my own 1974 Topps set and found that three of the cards were actually Parker Brothers cards. You can find some Parker Brothers cards correctly identified on eBay, and you can also find some hiding among the 1974 Topps cards. For most of the cards–all but the six pictured above–you need to see the backs to identify them. Wheatstatecards is one seller who has some unidentified Parker Brothers cards. He includes scans of the card backs in all of his listings, so you can peruse his 1974 Topps listings and look for Parker Brothers cards.

A few weeks ago, when I reported that Cliff Livingston had passed away, Pastor Scott pointed out that Livingston’s 1962 Post Cereal card showed him with the Giants, and his 1962 Topps card showed him with the Vikings. Scott also named four other players who appeared on different teams on their 1962 Post and 1962 Topps cards. In all five cases, the player had been traded in the off-season, Post listed him with his old team, and Topps listed him with his new one. Post apparently was aware of the trades, because on four of the five cards, they added a footnote showing the player’s new team. Perhaps the cards were already close to production, and it was easier to add footnotes to the cards, rather than change their text.

Here are the cards that Pastor Scott pointed out:

The Browns traded Bobby Mitchell along with Leroy Jackson to the Redskins for Heisman winner Ernie Davis. (Davis contracted leukemia and never played.) Mitchell’s 1962 Post Cereal card shows him with the Browns; his 1962 Topps card shows him with the Redskins.

The Browns traded Milt Plum, Tom Watkins, and Dave Lloyd to the Lions for Howard Cassady, Bill Glass, and Jim Ninowski. Post had both Plum and Cassady with their old teams.

The Eagles traded Bill Barnes to the Redskins with Bob Freeman for Jim Schrader and Ben Scotti. Barnes’s Post Cereal card shows him still with the Eagles; his Topps card shows him with the Redskins.

Finally, the Giants traded Cliff Livingston to the Vikings for Dick Pesonen and a draft pick. Here are Livingston’s two 1962 cards:

Here is the answer to a trivia question that Pastor Scott asked a few weeks ago. The question was “What player appeared on two different cards in one year for two different teams and two different leagues? Both cards were major card companies.” Scott had to tell me: it’s Corky Tharp.

Pictured here is Tharp’s 1960 Topps CFL card. He played for the Toronto Argonauts in 1955 and from 1957 to 1959, and Topps evidently expected him to stay with the team in 1960. He didn’t, though. He instead joined the New York Titans (later the Jets) of the new American Football League, and he appeared on a 1960 Fleer AFL card, as well. He spent one season with the Titans, playing nine games at defensive back.

While the fronts of 1960 Topps CFL cards are much different than their NFL counterparts, the backs of the cards in the two sets are alike. The only difference is that the text on the CFL cards is repeated in French. Even the text in the cartoon, which you can faintly see on this card, appears in both French and English. You can also see that repeating the text didn’t leave much room for detail.

I really like the fronts of the cards, with the colored portraits over the black and white action photos. Topps had used black and white photos for backgrounds in their classic 1955 Topps All-American set, and they would use them again as insets on their 1962 NFL cards. In 1962 they matched the inset photos with the players on the cards–or most of them, anyway–but they did not do that on the 1960 CFL cards. The photos on the CFL cards appear to be random, and Topps used each photo on multiple cards.

There are 88 cards in the 1960 CFL set, and for vintage AFL and NFL card collectors, it includes a few familiar names. Veryl Switzer, Ken Carpenter, and Tobin Rote had played in the NFL in the 50s, and Rote went on to play for the Chargers and Broncos in the 60s. Randy Duncan, Ernie Warlick, and Gerry McDougall also joined AFL teams in the 60s. And Joe Kapp and Sam Etcheverry later quarterbacked in the NFL.

I was putting some 1955 Bowman cards on eBay yesterday, and I realized that the Lee Riley in that set was the same Lee Riley who appears on a 1963 Fleer card. Riley had only these two cards, eight years apart, and I had not made the connection.

I looked up Riley on pro-football-reference.com, and I discovered that the timespan between his two cards was actually greater than the length of his career. How’s that, you ask? Well, Riley was a rookie in 1955, making his Bowman card a true rookie card. But he didn’t actually play in 1963; his last year was 1962. His entry in the All-Time Jets Roster confirms that.