Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Last week I added 1953 Los Angeles Rams Team Issue football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This was the first of five team sets that the Rams issued in the 1950s. The 1954, 1955, and 1957 cards also have black borders, and the Rams reused some of the images from year to year, so you sometimes have to look at a card’s back to determine its year. If you look through the 1955 Rams Team Issue cards in the Gallery, you can see some of the reused images.

Fans ordered the cards directly from the Rams, evidently. The 1953 set I obtained was still in the original envelope, pictured below.

I tried something new while entering the 1953 cards in my database: I added a note for each card. As I wrote in a previous article, I like it when collectors add notes when registering their graded cards, so I thought I would start entering notes for cards in the Gallery. I’ll never cover all of the cards, but when I learn something interesting about a card or a player, I’ll make a note of it. while researching this set, for example, I learned that most of the 1953 Rams players appeared in the film Crazy Legs, and that two of the players became the first head coaches of expansion teams. Check out my bits of trivia, and let me know what you think.

As I wrote last week, one of my readers pointed out that the player on the cover of the San Francisco 49ers 1969 Topps Mini-Card Album is Joe Walton, and that the same image appeared in the inset photo of Walton’s 1962 Topps football card. This made me curious, so I checked to see if other inset photos from 1962 Topps cards had been reused on 1969 Mini-Card Albums. Sure enough, I found a few:

First, the image of Bart Starr on the Green Bay Packers Mini-Card Album appeared in the inset of Starr’s 1962 Topps card.

Next, the image of John Unitas on the Baltimore Colts Mini-Card Album was also used in the inset photo of Zeke Bratkowski’s 1962 Topps card. Topps changed Unitas’s number 19 to Bratkowski’s number 12 on the 1962 Topps card, as I noted in an earlier article.

The image on the Minnesota Vikings Mini-Card Album also appeared in the inset photo of Don Perkins’s 1962 Topps card, but the player’s number is different. I’m guessing that the image was altered for the 1962 card, so the player probably isn’t Perkins.

The image on the Denver Broncos Mini-Card Album is the same one used in the inset photo on Ollie Matson’s 1962 Topps card, but again, the player’s number is different. Matson was number 33 with the Rams, so it appears that the image on his 1962 card was altered. Does anyone recognize the player?

Finally, the image on the Washington Redskins Mini-Card Album is the same as the inset on John Aveni’s 1962 Topps card. Again, the player’s number appears to have been changed on the 1962 Topps card. I believe that the player is Dick James, who wore number 47 for the Redskins in 1961.

Given that there are so many altered jersey numbers on the 1962 Topps cards, I wonder how many of the inset photos actually picture the right player. Not many, I’ll bet.

Every wonder how many players in the 1961 Nu-Card college football card set went on to play in the NFL or AFL? I wondered, so I looked them up. I also marked them in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Before you look, what is your guess? There are a total of 80 cards in the set.

Here’s a hint: it’s at least two. John Hadl played sixteen seasons for the San Diego Chargers, Los Angeles Rams, Green Bay Packers, and Houston Oilers. He is a member of the San Diego Chargers Hall of Fame. Curtis McClinton played eight seasons for the Dallas Texans and Kansas City Chiefs. (The Texans moved to Kansas City and became the Chiefs in 1963.) McClinton is a member of the Chiefs Hall of Fame.

Have your guess? See my 1961 Nu-Card page for the answer.

I was scanning 1976 Topps football cards for the Gallery yesterday, and I came across this Dan Ryczek rookie card. What do you suppose he’s looking at? The scoreboard? The Blue Angels? A Ray Guy punt? Ryczek was a center, so I wondered if Topps mistakenly turned the image 90 degrees. But no, the players behind him are right side up. It’s just a bad photo, not the first one Topps put on a card.

1976 was Tampa Bay’s first season in the NFL, and Ryczek’s card got me looking at the rest of the 1976 Topps Buccaneers cards. I noticed a few interesting things:

• Eight of the ten Buccaneer player cards are rookie cards, though all of the players had been with other teams in years prior. The players all appear in their old teams’ jerseys, so I presume Topps had the photos on file.
• Four players–Ira Gordon, Harold Hart, Durwood Keeton, and Larry Ely–never played in a regular season game for Tampa Bay. John Ward played in just four games before going to the Bears. (See the career stats for Gordon, Hart, Keeton, Ely, and Ward at pro-football-reference.com.)
• The back of the Buccaneers team checklist has a list of the players they chose in the expansion draft, a nice feature.

For an entertaining read, check out the Wikipedia article on the 1976 Buccaneers–especially coach John McKay’s quotes.

I noticed this week that eBay seller bmw_cards2 has a bunch of 1948 Bowman wrong-back cards for sale. Pictured here is one of them, a Joe Muha card with a Harry Gilmer back.

I was curious about how the cards got the wrong backs, so I looked at where they were positioned on the uncut sheets. (See my 1948 Bowman virtual uncut sheet page.) It turns out that the fronts of all of BMW’s cards are from the first sheet, and the backs are all from the corresponding positions on the third sheet. (The Muha card is fourth from the right in the bottom row.) I don’t know much about printing, but it looks to me like the printer printed the front of the sheet, then used the wrong plate when printing the back.

Searching eBay further, I found a 1948 Bowman Art Faircloth card with a similar problem, only the Faircloth card has both the correct back and an incorrect back printed on it. Again, the front of the card is from the first sheet, and the incorrect back is from the corresponding position on the third sheet.

I recently put some 1969 Topps football cards up for sale, including this one, Tom Vaughn of the Lions. The Lions logo that Topps used in this set has always looked familiar to me, so yesterday I did some searching. I believe I found what I was thinking of: a Ford Mustang logo from around that time. This might be obvious to Detroit fans, but it appears to me that the designer of the Lions logo gave a nod to the city’s main industry. (The image of the Mustang logo is from motortopia.com.)

This card happens to show Vaughn in my favorite football card pose, where the player is about to put on his helmet. For more examples, see My Favorite Pose, More of My Favorite Pose, and Still More of My Favorite Post.

While putting some 1957 Topps cards up for sale yesterday, I noticed some details that I hadn’t before. First, I noticed that, on every card, the background color behind the player’s name is the same as the background color on the right half of the card. This ties the two halves of the card together.

Second, I noticed that the player’s name is white on first series Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns, and Detroit Lions cards, but it is black on those teams’ second series cards. (Mike McCormack’s card is the only exception: it is a first series card, but his name is in black.) Apparently, Topps decided between series that black names looked better, so they changed the white names to black. Or, perhaps, when designing the first series cards, they thought that white names looked better for these teams, but when they got to the second series, they forgot and left them black.

When I started this article, I intended just to point out these trivia, but then I realized that someone actually sat down and made decisions about these details. Though the cards were meant for kids, an artist took the time to match the background colors and tweak the font colors to make the cards look their best. You have to appreciate that. (My initial title for this article was “Dumb Stuff I Noticed,” poking fun to my own card-geekiness, but I decided that that was insulting to whoever designed the cards.)

Finally, you have probably noticed that, in the 1957 Topps set, the cards for each team all have the same background colors. I have always liked this feature, and most of the major companies used it for at least one set. (Other examples are 1955 Bowman, 1962 Fleer, and 1967 Philadelphia.) If you look at the Lions team set, you can see that this coloring scheme highlights an error: the 49ers traded John Henry Johnson to the Lions in 1957, but Topps listed Johnson as a Brown. Topps even recolored Johnson’s uniform to put him in Browns colors. You can see this recoloring in a previous article.

In 1968, after the NFL and AFL decided to merge, Topps became the sole major producer of American football cards for the first time since 1959. The 1968 Topps football card set was the first since 1961 to contain cards of both NFL and AFL players. To mark the occasion, Topps decided to honor the teams who had participated in the first two NFL-AFL World Championship Games–or, as they came to be known, the first two Super Bowls.

First, Topps honored the Super Bowl II contestants, the Green Bay Packers and Oakland Raiders, by using a horizontal format and alternate design for their cards. The two examples pictured here are Donny Anderson, on his rookie card, and Daryle Lamonica. You can see all of the horizontally-oriented 1968 Topps Packers cards and 1968 Topps Raiders cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Second, Topps honored the quarterbacks of Super Bowl I, Bart Starr of the Packers and Len Dawson of the Kansas City Chiefs, by putting puzzles of them on the backs of some of the 1968 second series cards. The piece pictured here, Dawson’s right eye, is on the back of Ernie Wright’s card. A page in the gallery shows both assembled puzzles. Oddly, for Dawson’s puzzle, Topps chose a seven- or eight-year-old photo from when he was still with the Browns, though they had been picturing him in his Chiefs uniform since 1965.

• See my 1968 Topps virtual uncut sheets
• See 1968 Topps football cards for sale at nearmintcards.com

Yesterday, while I was adding the Eagles Honor Roll to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, I did a web search for “Whitey Wistert.” Al Wistert is a member of the Eagles Honor Roll, and some of his cards say “Al ‘Whitey’ Wistert.”

My search results were interesting: they included a lot of references to Al’s football cards and a lot of references to Al’s older brother, Francis “Whitey” Wistert. Only a couple of non-football-card references, which appeared way down in my search results, referred to Al as “Whitey.” Most references to Al said his nickname was “Ox.”

According to an article on profootballresearchers.org, both Francis and Al were called “Whitey.” I’m guessing, though, that if people called Al “Whitey,” they did so out either out of confusion or as a tribute to Francis. Francis was a football and baseball star at Michigan, and he played major league baseball for Cincinnati.

Anyway, since Al’s brother Francis was well-known as “Whitey,” since Al was more often called “Ox,” and since mistakes are far from unusual on old football cards, I would say that calling Al “Whitey” was just another card company mistake. I suspect that some writers referred to Al as “Whitey” because that’s what it said on his cards.

Pictured here is one of Al’s error cards, a 1951 Bowman. His 1948 Leaf and 1949 Leaf cards also say “Whitey.”

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for Al Wistert football cards
• Search eBay for Al Wistert football cards

Ralph Kercheval, who had been the oldest living pro football player, passed away on October 6. He was 98 years and 10 months old. I wrote a short article about Kercheval and his football cards last year.

With Kercheval’s passing, Ace Parker, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, became the oldest living pro football player. According to his Wikipedia page, Parker is 98 years and 5 months old. To my knowledge, the 1955 Topps All-American card pictured here is Parker’s only vintage card, though he appeared in a few modern tribute sets, as well. You can find many of his tribute cards on eBay.

Parker also played two seasons for baseball’s Philadelphia Athletics, but I don’t know if he is also the oldest living major league baseball player. I did a quick net search for Ace Parker baseball cards, but I didn’t turn any up.

The Oldest Living Pro Football Players web site has a long, long list of the current oldest living pro players. Glancing through the first couple dozen players on the list, I see that only a few them appeared on football cards. Most of the oldest players played in the 1930s and 1940s, and only a few sets of football cards were printed during those decades.