Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

It seemed like a good week to add another set of wiener cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. So I added 1963 Kahn’s Wieners, a set of 92 black-and-white cards distributed in the Cincinnati region by Kahn’s Meats. (Kahn’s is still in operation; it is now a Sara Lee company.)

All fourteen of the 1963 NFL teams are represented in the set, but the distribution of the cards among the teams is very uneven. I thought that the distribution might be related to how the teams finished in 1962, so I looked up the 1962 NFL standings. I found that, except for the Redskins, there is a strong correlation between the teams’ 1962 records and the number of players representing them in the 1963 Kahn’s set. Why so many Redskins? I dunno, maybe they were expected to do better in 1963. (They didn’t; they finished 3-11.)

Like earlier Kahn’s cards, the 1963 cards have facsimile signatures printed on them. However, as I pointed out in a previous article, at least some of the facsimile signatures are not in the players’ handwriting. The signature on the John Unitas card pictured here, for example, does not look like any of his autographs that appear in a Google image search. Most obvious is that on all of the items I found with his actual autograph, he signed his first name “Johnny,” not “John.”

Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided the images for this set.

(Feel free to Twitter this article.)

A few weeks ago, when I added 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, I wrote that I had seen only one example of the Bob Griese card, an autographed copy in the SGC set registry. Well, now I’ve seen two. My friend Steve at thecowboysguide.com emailed to tell me about this one, another autographed copy, which just sold on eBay for $1007.75. Because the card has writing on it, and because it has paper stuck to the back, my guess is that it would get about the same grade as the one on the SGC site, fair to good.

What, you say, “because it has writing on it”? It’s his autograph! Well, when grading cards, the grading companies treat signatures like any other pen marks: harshly. You might not expect it, but an autograph on an otherwise high-grade card can actually hurt the card’s value. I don’t know the value of a Bob Griese autograph, but I suspect that this is one card that would be worth more unsigned.

So, why $1007.75 for a “fair to good” card? The buyer could be a big Dolphins fan, he could be a vintage collector who wants everything, or–my guess–he could be a pre-rookie card collector. It is generally accepted that Griese’s rookie card is his 1968 Topps card, so this Royal Castle card pre-dates his rookie card by a year. See my pre-rookie card page for more examples.

It is interesting that both of the Griese cards I have seen from this set have been autographed. I wonder if he did a promotion at one of the restaurants and signed both of the cards the same day. I haven’t seen examples of the other short prints, but if some autographed ones turned up, I might conclude that the only way to get the short prints was in person.

For more interesting football card auctions, see my Interesting eBay Auctions tab, above. For more on regional vintage football card sets, see K is for KDKA Steelers–and Other Regional Sets.

Yesterday I added 1968 Browns Team Issue 7×8 photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The set contains just seven players, the team’s offensive stars at the time. The photos are printed on lightweight cardboard, and the backs are blank. The “7×8” in the set name is to distinguish it from a second 1968 Browns team issue, in which the photos are 8-by-10. The 8-by-10 set, according to Beckett’s site, contains twelve photos, with some overlap with the 7-by-8’s.

There are facsimile autographs on the photos, and as far as I can tell, they are copies of authentic signatures. (This isn’t always the case on vintage cards; see my article on the facsimile signatures on Kahn’s Wieners cards.) At first I thought that the signatures on the Browns photos might be real, not facsimiles, because Ernie Green’s extends into the border. But then I noticed white fisheyes in the “F” and “k” of Frank Ryan’s signature, which I don’t believe would appear in an original.

Today I added 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery–or two-thirds of them, anyway. All of the cards in this regional set are scarce, and ten of them are short prints, so they’re doubly scarce. The short prints are the ones that I don’t have yet. The backs of the cards say that two cards were made available each week of the season, and I can only guess as to why some were short-printed. Perhaps the promotion didn’t get the response the restaurants expected, so they didn’t print as many cards in the later weeks. Or perhaps the promotion was more popular than the restaurants anticipated, so they increased their print runs after five weeks, and the cards printed earlier became short prints.
According to a Miami Herald article, Royal Castle restaurants were modeled after White Castle, and at one time there were at least 185 Royal Castles in the Miami area. By 2008, only one or two were still in operation. A message board thread on roadfood.com includes pictures of the last two Royal Castles and their fare.

The card pictured here is Wahoo McDaniel, who wrestled professionally in the off-season and after his football career. I don’t remember McDaniel as a football player, but I do remember watching him battling Baron von Raschke on Saturday nights. There is a nice photo of him flexing his muscles on the onlineworldofwrestling.com web site.

The key card in the Royal Castle set is a pre-rookie card of Bob Griese. It is a short print, so I don’t have it yet, but there is a picture of one on SGC’s web site. Oddly, it appears that Griese dedicated his signature to “Alan,” but the signature on the card is a facsimile.

In an article in April, I wrote that Lee Folkins had told me that the facsimile signature on his 1964 Kellogg’s stamp was not in his handwriting. Today I noticed that some Kahn’s Wieners cards also have faked facsimile signatures on them. Below are the 1962 and 1963 Kahn’s cards of Fran Tarkenton. I don’t know if either card shows a true representation of Tarkenton’s signature, but you can certainly tell that at least one does not.

I looked around on eBay and found other Kahn’s cards of the same player that have obviously different handwriting on them. The facsimile signatures on Ernie Stautner‘s 1961 and 1963 Kahn’s cards are much different from one another (look at the t’s), as are the ones on Lou Michaels‘s 1962 and 1963 cards (look at the leading L). And the signatures on Jim Brown‘s 1961, 1962, and 1963 cards all look different to me. It took me just a few minutes to find these, so I am sure it would be easy to find more examples.

I wonder: did the people who designed these cards intend for people to think that the signatures were copies of the players’ real signatures? If they wanted to fool people, I would think that they would have used the same signatures from year to year. Perhaps they wanted to give the impression that the signatures were copies of the real thing, but it didn’t matter enough to put a real effort into it. After all, the cards came free with wieners.

One of the perks of this business is that I often get notes from players’ relatives and friends. Occasionally I even hear from the players themselves. Yesterday I got an email from Lee Folkins, who played for the Packers, Cowboys, and Steelers from 1961 to 1965. What he told me was interesting: he said that the signature on his 1964 Wheaties Stamp is not his. Pictured here is the stamp in question.

The signatures on the Wheaties Stamps are facsimiles, printed right on the stamps, but because the handwriting is different from stamp to stamp, I presumed that they were copies of the players’ actual signatures. Apparently not all of them are. This isn’t too surprising: Topps printed the stamps for Wheaties, and Topps was known to alter players’ images, even before the 1970s airbrushing era. (For some examples, see my article on the inset photos on 1962 Topps cards.) It’s not much of a stretch to go from altering images to faking simulated autographs.

I had actually wondered how Topps got signatures for all of the players in a large set, considering that they often didn’t even seem to have good photos of all the players. For at least one set, 1970 Supers, Topps didn’t even attempt to obtain the players’ real signatures: they used the same script for the facsimile signature on every card. (See my article on the 1970 Topps Super set.) For other sets–the 1964 Wheaties Stamps, for example–I suppose that they used whatever authentic signatures they had, then employees created signatures for the rest.

I don’t know much about autographs, so I did a quick internet search to see if it’s commonly known that some of the facsimile signatures on vintage cards were faked. I didn’t find anything that explicitly said so, but I did find this paragraph on thehistorybank.com:

Finally, remember that Topps’ player facsimile autographs on cards are just that—facsimiles with no intent of looking real. Interestingly, Topps put facsimile signatures on cards for years, but don’t try to “authenticate” using those signatures. They often do not match the real thing. Note here that Marshall’s and Averill’s hand-signed signatures match the facsimile signatures fairly closely, but Narleski’s ballpoint signature bears no resemblance to the printed signature on the card.

Unfortunately, the image in the History Bank article is too small to compare the two Ray Narleski signatures, but perhaps Narleski’s ballpoint signature bears no resemblance to the printed signature because the printed signature isn’t his. An autograph collector would certainly know more about this than I do. Can anyone else provide comments or examples?

Back to Mr. Folkins. Besides his Wheaties stamp, he appeared on one card that I know of: the 1964 Philadelphia card shown here. Both his stamp and card were issued the year after he made the Pro Bowl. All of the players on the 1964 Wheaties Stamps, in fact, were 1963 Pro Bowlers. You can read more about the Wheaties Stamps and accompanying album in a previous blog article.

Last Saturday evening I was drinking beer and cruising the web, and I saw this autographed 1963 Fleer Billy Shaw card on eBay. That’s cool, I thought, and the price seemed right, so I hit the Buy-it-Now button. So now I have the beginning of an autograph collection.

This is Billy’s second card, his first being his 1962 Fleer rookie card, a tough one to find in high grade. Billy is the only pro football hall-of-famer to have played only in the AFL. Other AFL players have made it to the hall-of-fame, of course, but each of them also played in the NFL at some time, mostly after the AFL-NFL merger.

My new Shaw card happens to be the version with the red stripe on the bottom on the reverse. 1963 Fleer cards with numbers divisible by four were printed both with and without the stripe, and Shaw is card #28. I don’t have a Shaw without the stripe, unfortunately, but I do have one of each of card #40, Jim Norton, pictured below. Like the purple and blue variations of 1963 Topps cards, the striped vs. non-striped variations of 1963 Fleers are not recognized by Beckett, PSA, or any other football card authority that I am aware of.