Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

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.