Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Yesterday I added 1978 Country Kitchen Vikings photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Pictured here is one of them, Tommy Kramer, who happens to be one of this year’s College Football Hall of Fame inductees. (The full list of 2012 inductees is here.) I listed the Country Kitchen set under Food and Regional Issues.

Can you think of cards that look more like bookends than Bobby Bell and Buck Buchanan‘s 1964 Topps cards? Not only did the players’ rookie cards mirror each another, so did their careers:

• Bell played from 1963 to 1974, all with the Chiefs. Buchanan played from 1963 to 1975, also all with the Chiefs.
• Bell played in nine AFL All-Star and NFL Pro Bowl games; Buchanan played in eight.
• Bell was inducted into the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 1980, Buchanan in 1981.
• Bell was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983; Buchanan was inducted in 1990. Buchanan was also a finalist four times previously, starting in 1984.
• Finally, both are members of the College Football Hall of Fame. Bell was inducted in 1991, Buchanan in 1996.

Yesterday I added 1976 Buckmans Discs to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The discs were distributed by Buckmans Ice Cream and Bakery (now out of business) in Rochester, New York. Oddly, though Rochester is only about 75 miles from Buffalo, there are no Buffalo Bills in the 20-disc set. There are no New York Giants or Jets, either. See my Gallery page for the discs for more details. I filed the discs under “Oddball.”

Tom McCormick, who played halfback from 1953 to 1956 for the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers, passed away on September 20. According to his obituary at legacy.com, McCormick served as an assistant coach with Minnesota and Green Bay after retiring as a player.

McCormick did not have a football card in a major issue, but he did appear on Rams team issue cards in 1953, 1954, and 1955. His 1953 Rams team issue card is pictured here. The back of the card says that he set school records at the College of the Pacific for yards rushing in a season, yards rushing in a career, and touchdowns in a season.

This week I added 1962 Topps Bucks (most of them, anyway) to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These were inserts in wax packs of 1962 Topps football cards. See my gallery page for a short description of the set.

Error card collectors, here are two more error cards that are not marked in my Beckett catalog: Bob Hendren’s 1948 and 1949 Leaf cards have his name spelled “Hendreen.” Hendren’s name is also misspelled on the back of his 1948 card, but Leaf corrected the spelling on the back in 1949.

Tip of the day: when you search eBay for a card with a misspelled name, search for both the correct and incorrect spellings. Some sellers use the correct spelling of the player’s name, and some use the name on the card.

For more information on the 1948 and 1949 Leaf sets, see L is for Leaf. To see all of the error cards in a certain set, use the Advanced Search page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

This week I added 1973 Auburn playing cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. One of the cards, picturing Mike Fuller, is shown below. Fuller is one of four players in the deck who later played in the NFL.

The Auburn cards are among several sets of college playing cards that were printed in the early 1970s. See the Gallery’s playing card page for the others I have collected.

Error card collectors, here’s one you might have missed: I noticed last week that Carl Brettschneiders’ last name is misspelled on his 1958 Topps rookie card. The error is not identified in my Beckett catalog. Topps got it right on Brettschneider’s later cards.

I have added the Brettschneider to the long list of error cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. If you know of others I haven’t marked, send me an email.

This week I added 1975 Fleer Immortal Roll football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 84 cards in the set, one for each Pro Football Hall of Famer as of 1975, except for Jim Brown. The set includes cards of several early players who, to my knowledge, had not appeared on a card before. Here are two of them, Joe Guyon and Mike Michalske.

George Savitsky, who played tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1948 and 1949, passed away on September 4. The Eagles won two of their three NFL titles in the seasons that Savitsky played. (Their third championship was in 1960.) Savitsky played college football at University of Pennsylvania, and he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1991. He and Chuck Bednarik were teammates both at Penn and with the Eagles. The csnphilly.com web site has a story about Savitsky and a nice photo of him as a player.

The card pictured here is Savitsky’s rookie card, a 1948 Leaf. It is one of the scarce high-numbered cards in the set. He also appeared on a 1949 Leaf card (identical to the 1948 Leaf card, except for the back), and on a 1955 Topps All-American card.