Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

This uncut sheet of 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns cards was on eBay last week. 1946 was the Browns’ first year; they were part of the new eight-team All-American Football Conference. The Browns were the AAFC champions all four years of the league’s existence, 1946-1949, and they joined the NFL when the AAFC folded in 1950. As far as I know, these Sears cards were the only cards printed of an AAFC team.

Conspicuously absent from this set are Marion Motley and Bill Willis, African American stars who later made the Pro Football Hall of Fame. According to Willis’s Wikipedia page, the two did not play in the Browns’ 1946 game against the Miami Seahawks, because they were forbidden by law to play against white players in Miami.

This small Sears set contains pre-rookie cards of three other Hall of Fame players: Otto Graham, Dante Lavelli, and Frank Gatski. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) The black-and-white head shots are nice, but otherwise the cards are unremarkable: all eight have the same ad on the front and the team’s 1946 schedule on the back.

The set is rare–these particular cards are the first I have seen–so it is hard to assign a value to the cards. The highest bid in this auction was $2000, and it did not meet the seller’s reserve. Perhaps the seller will list it again with a better description and a scan that shows the corners of the sheet.

For more interesting auctions, see my other Interesting eBay Auctions articles.

Today a collector on the Collectors Universe message boards posted pictures of 5 uncut panels of 1952 Wheaties Champions cards. From the looks of it, his panels are in great shape. The Wheaties Champions set is a multi-sport set, and it includes women as well as men. There are 10 cards on each panel, so the collector has 50 of the 60 cards in the set.

There are thirty athletes in the set, with each athlete appearing on both a portrait card and an “in action” card. Six of the athletes are football players: Doak Walker, Otto Graham, John Lujack, Tom Fears, Glenn Davis, and Bob Waterfield. I haven’t yet added the football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but since there are only a few of them, I’ll try to do that sometime soon. There is currently a full set listed on eBay, but I’ll probably pick up individual cards as they become available. Surprisingly, though they were hand-cut from the boxes, most of the cards I see are in pretty good condition. I infer from this that people saved the full boxes, and the cards I’m seeing were cut from boxes relatively recently.

Thanks to my friend Pat for pointing out this auction: an ungraded 1969 Topps Bob Brown card that sold for $96.45. Why so much? Well, 1969 Topps is a popular set in the PSA set registry, and I’m guessing that a couple of registry participants wanted this high grade example to submit to PSA. Buying ungraded cards on eBay is risky, since sellers often overgrade them, so the seller of the Brown card must have a reputation for being an accurate grader.

Brown is in the Hall of Fame, but that would account for only a small part of the premium the buyer paid. As you can see on my 1969 Topps virtual uncut sheet page, though, the Brown card is on the edge of the sheet, and edge cards tend to be scarcer in top condition than other cards. Edge cards evidently were damaged more often in the printing and packaging process than cards on the interior of the sheet. There are lots of lower-grade examples of the card on eBay, but apparently high-grade examples don’t appear regularly.

Brown also has a stamp on a 1969 Topps 4-in-1 insert card, but the picture isn’t him, it’s Bob Brown of the Packers.

Here’s an interesting item: a 1966 American Oil Game Sheet. The object of the game was to complete a row of stamps–which I assume you got from American Oil gas stations–to win a prize. One stamp in each row, of course, was rare.

The 1966-68 American Oil Sweepstakes Stamps page on thecowboysguide.com shows some of the stamps and has another view of the game sheet. If you hold your cursor over the game sheet, you can see that most of the stamps are pasted on it. The missing stamps are the key stamps needed for prizes. I can’t tell who is on the missing stamp in the Mustang row. I wonder if any examples of that stamp exist?

You can usually find examples of other American Oil game pieces on eBay.

There’s a fun thread developing on the Collectors Universe message boards: collectors there are posting their worst miscut cards. Here’s my entry, a 1963 Topps Tom Bettis with -5/105 centering. It’s nowhere near as bad as the other cards posted, though. Check out the severely miscut ones.

Just out of curiosity, I did a little search for “miscut” on eBay. Most of the results are ordinary miscuts like my Bettis card, but at the moment there’s a half-and-half baseball card and a hockey card that shows parts of four cards. Here are the searches: baseball, hockey, football.