Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

The Philadelphia Gum Company printed football cards from 1964 to 1967. For those four years, Philadelphia had the rights to NFL players, and Topps had the rights to AFL players. The contrast between the companies’ products is striking: the Topps sets of those years are colorful and varied, and the Philadelphia sets are simple and conservative.

All four of the Philadelphia sets are similar. Each of them has 198 cards, grouped by team, and the last two cards in each set are checklists. The teams are ordered alphabetically by city, with Baltimore first in 1964 and 1965 and Atlanta first in 1966 and 1967. Each set contains a team photo card for each team.

I find the 1964 Philadelphia set to be the most attractive of the four, because the colored nameplates with the white borders around them make the cards brighter than the other years. Most of the 1964 cards are easy to find in high grade, though, and that takes some of the fun out of it. A few cards–the checklists come to mind–are challenging because of centering. (See C is for Checklists.)

The Play of the Year cards are the plainest in the 1964 set, and in truth they feature some pretty ordinary plays. They do include photos of the coaches, though, and among the coaches are Vince Lombardi and Don Shula, who had not appeared on cards before. My Beckett catalog does not recognize the Lombardi and Shula cards as their rookie cards, but I don’t know why. The back of each Play of the Year card also lists the offensive players involved in the play. Some of these players never appeared on cards of their own, but at least their names appear here in print.

The 1964 Philly set includes the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players–Herb Adderley, John Mackey, Willie Davis, Jim Johnson, and Merlin Olsen. Philadelphia misspelled Adderley’s name on his card, and they misspelled it the next three years, too. Other bits of 1964 Philadelphia trivia are that Jim Brown’s Cadillac appears in the background on all of the Browns’ cards, and that the player pictured on Garland Boyette’s card is actually Don Gillis.

1965 Philadelphia is the dullest of the four sets. It has essentially the same composition as the 1964 set–single-player cards, team cards, play cards, and checklists–but it has little color because the nameplates have a black background. Most of the players even look unhappy.

The one bit of innovation in the set is the “Who Am I?” rub-off quiz on the card backs. Oddly, rubbing the card reveals a player’s picture and the answer for a different card, so you have to rub one card to get the question and rub another card to get the answer. Also, my friend Steve from thecowboysguide.com said that not all of the rub-offs work. In Steve’s words, “You’ll get some duds because of age and condition.”

On a positive note, the set holds the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players: Paul Warfield, Mel Renfro, Paul Krause, Carl Eller, and Charley Taylor. And Renfro is actually smiling!

Perhaps collectors noticed that the 1965 set was dull, because the next year Philadelphia shook things up a bit. The 1966 Philadelphia set returned to colored nameplates, for play cards it had action photos instead of X-and-O diagrams, and it even had two cards–Morrall and Scholtz and Gabriel and Bass–with two players on them. The set also gave the Atlanta Falcons a proper introduction. Since the Falcons were new to the league, the card company could not include an action card for them from the year before, so instead they included a Falcons insignia card. The insignia was big and bold, and it happened to be the first card in the set.

One thing I noticed about the 1966 action photos is that they were all shot in New York and Los Angeles. As a result, the action cards picture a lot of Giants and Rams defensive players. Each of the action cards has a referee signal on the back, and card #196 is dedicated to referee signals. Compared to Topps’s cards, which had cartoons and fun facts on the back, Philadelphia’s cards were all business.

The 1966 Philadelphia set is much tougher than its predecessors to complete in high grade. While some cards are plentiful, others are scarce, and I suspect that a lot of them are undocumented short prints. I found a picture of an uncut sheet that suggests why. For a 198-card set, I would expect there to be three 132-card sheets, with each sheet containing two-thirds of the set. Between the three sheets, there would then be two of each card. The sheet I found, though, contains 110 of the 198 cards, and the top two rows are repeated. There had to be at least another sheet that held the remaining 88 cards, but I can’t think of how a small number of additional sheets could have been configured to even out the distribution of cards. Rows 3 through 6 on the sheet I found contain some of the tough cards in the set, so I’ll wager that those rows did not appear on another sheet.

Like the two earlier Philadelphia sets, the 1966 set contains the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players. Six years ago it contained only two, Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus. The other three–Bob Brown, Gene Hickerson, and Bob Hayes, have all been inducted in the past five years.

For more details on the 1966 Philadelphia set, you can read Jim Churilla’s article on the PSA web site.

In 1967, Philadelphia printed their last set of football cards. Like the 1966 set, it has a funky distribution: some cards are plentiful in high grades, and some are downright scarce. The company got a bit less conservative in 1967, coloring the borders yellow and adding colorful cards of the team insignias. 1967 was the year that New Orleans joined the NFL, so a bit more color was fitting.

Two bits of trivia are worth mentioning: Raymond Berry’s 1967 Philadelphia card actually pictures Bob Boyd, and Paul Hornung appears on a Saints card, but he retired before the start of the season. The 1967 Philly set contains three rookie cards of Hall of Fame players: Leroy Kelly, Jackie Smith, and Dave Wilcox.

Though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, it seems that in the Philadelphia years, the Philadelphia and Topps issues reflected the images of the leagues they represented. The Philly sets were conservative, consistent, and unadorned. The 1964-1967 Topps sets were colorful and innovative, with stars and tall boys and TVs. Philadelphia had the talent, and Topps had the flash. Philadelphia’s run was too short to draw conclusions, but by 1967 it seems as though Topps was prompting Philadelphia to lighten up, just as the AFL was pressuring the NFL to enliven its game.

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I was putting some 1967 Topps cards up for sale the other day, and I noticed that one of them, the Tom Day card shown here, had a bit of brown along the top border. I remembered that 1967 Topps football cards had been included in a board game with 1968 Topps baseball cards, so I did a little web searching to refresh my memory. Here’s what I found:

According to an auction on the Heritage Auctions web site, the board game was called “Win-A-Card,” from Milton Bradley. The auction says that there were 132 cards in the game: 76 1968 Topps baseball cards, 33 1967 Topps football cards, 22 1965 Topps Hot Rod cards, and an instruction card. The 132 cards were printed on a single sheet created specially for the game. The bit of brown on the top of my Tom Day football card is part of a 1968 Topps baseball card. The baseball cards included a Nolan Ryan rookie card, Brooks Robinson, Tom Seaver, Ed Mathews, Rod Carew, Gaylord Perry, Bob Gibson, and Hank Aaron. You can usually find a few of them on eBay.

BoardGameGeek.com has a picture of the game box and a photo of some of the baseball and Hot Rod cards. BoardGameGeek says that the game included a total of 50-70 cards, but that has to be incorrect. If each game contained a partial sheet of cards, and if there were only one instruction card per sheet, not all games would have gotten an instruction card. I believe Heritage’s statement that the game included all 132 cards.

Joe Namath is one of the football cards in the game. You can see the full list of football cards in the Win-A-Card game in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Today I put together another virtual uncut sheet page, this time for 1969 Topps football cards. The page includes both the first and second series sheets. These are the first sheets I’ve seen where half of the cards were printed upside down.

(Click on the image to see both full sheets.)

The Leaf Gum Company printed football cards in 1948 and 1949. The cards from the two years are very similar. In fact, except for the variations in the 1948 cards, for players who appear in both sets, the fronts of the cards appear identical. The backs are different for the two years, fortunately, and the copyright date on the bottom of the back tells which year a card is from. Shown here are Leaf’s two Herb Seigert cards, the first from 1948, and the second from 1949.

The images on the Leaf cards started as black and white photos, and then someone colored the images’ backgrounds and the players’ uniforms. On some cards, such as the Harry Szulborski card below, the coloring makes it look as if the player’s head was cut out and pasted on a colored background.

My favorite feature of the Leaf cards is that many have both the player’s first name and nickname on the front: ‘Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, ‘Bullet’ Bill Dudley, Charlie ‘Choo Choo’ Justice, and so on. A quick bit of trivia: which player’s nickname is in double quotes? Answer: Clyde “Bulldog” Turner‘s.

The 1948 Leaf set consists of 98 cards, with cards 1-49 being easier to find and cards 50-98 being difficult. The set features both pro and college players, with slightly more than half of the cards being pros. The bigger stars of the day–mostly pros–are concentrated in the first half of the set, and most of the college players are in the second half.

The set contains many variations: mostly in the colors used, but in the players’ names as well. The 1948 Leaf set composition page on PSA’s web site lists most of the variations, but I don’t believe it is complete. It lists two variations of the Pete Pihos rookie card, for example, one with yellow numbers and one with blue. I have also seen a variation with greenish numbers, though. It is pictured here with the yellow-numbered version for contrast.

Because there had been no major football card issues since 1935 National Chicle, all of the 1948 Leaf football cards are rookie cards. Fourteen of the players in the set are of Hall of Famers, making it a key set for Hall of Fame rookie card collectors. Fortunately for those collectors, only two of the Hall of Fame players–namely Leo Nomellini and Chuck Bednarik–are in the tougher second half of the set. (Nomellini and Bednarik were both still in college at the time.) An article by Kevin Glew on the Collectors Universe web site lists the Hall of Famers and describes the other challenges facing 1948 Leaf collectors.

Compared to the 1948 Leaf set, the 1949 Leafs are not very interesting. The 1949 set contains only 49 cards, all pro players, and there are no new players in the set. Also, as I wrote above, there is no perceptible difference in the card fronts for players who appear in both sets. So Leaf’s 1949 offer was essentially half of 1948’s cards, but with different backs.

One odd thing about the 1949 set is that it is skip-numbered, with the numbers of its 49 cards scattered between 1 and 150. When I first learned this, I wondered if Leaf had intended to release more cards to fill in the gaps. It turns out, though, that they also skip-numbered their 1949 baseball set. That suggests to me that they were trying to trick kids into buying more cards, even if they already had the whole set. I’d call that just plain mean. It’s not surprising that this was Leaf’s last football set.

You can see all of the 1948 Leaf and 1949 Leaf cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

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A couple of months ago I wrote about the white footballs you sometimes see on old Bowman cards. Naturally, after writing that post, I started noticing more and more white footballs. Here are a few that I came across while adding 1950’s cards to my sales site the last couple of days: 1953 Bowman Emlen Tunnell, 1954 Bowman Emlen Tunnell (apparently from the same photo session as 1953), 1955 Bowman Tom Fears, 1956 Topps Adrian Burk, and 1957 Lenny Moore.

The 1954 Tunnell card is the corrected version, with two L’s in his last name. The second L looks as if it’s been penciled in: it’s a bit fainter and wider than the first L, and the spacing isn’t quite right. I don’t know anything about printing, but it looks like someone improvised to fix the spelling error.

It appears that Adrian Burk was another jumping quarterback, or at least he’s up on his tip-toes.

According to the Oldest Living Pro Football Players web site, Ralph Kerchival is the oldest living pro player, at nearly 98 years old. He was a back and kicker with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the NFL from 1934 to 1940. In a 1993 interview, Kercheval said that he played on both offense and defense for the Dodgers, and in his rookie year he played for all but five minutes of the entire season. (Don’t miss the cartoon clipping from the Additional Photos section of the interview page.)

Pictured here is Kercheval’s 1935 National Chicle rookie card. He also appeared on a 1955 Topps All-American card.

• Search eBay for Ralph Kercheval cards.

Shortly after I added 1962 Post Cereal cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, a customer pointed out to me that Mike Henry, who appears on one of the cards, later had a successful acting career. After seven seasons at linebacker for the Steelers and Rams, Henry went on to play Tarzan, Junior Justice, and Donald Penobscot! Brian’s Drive-In Theater has a nice acting biography of Mike Henry.

Shown here is Henry’s 1962 Post Cereal card. To my knowledge, this is his only card, but he did also appear on a 1963 Salada Coin. There are usually one or two available on eBay.

Here’s a clip of Mike Henry as Tarzan. I like how the helicopter goes behind the bushes to blow up!

If you browse through the 1952-1954 Bowman cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, you will find a few that show the player with a white football. Two are pictured here: a 1953 Bowman Fran Polsfoot and a 1954 Bowman Doak Walker. According to profootballresearchers.org, the NFL and AAFC used a white football in night games from 1929 to 1956, to help the players see the ball in poor lighting. Wikipedia’s article on the Cleveland Browns says that in the 1950s, the NFL also prohibited teams from wearing white helmets and jerseys in night games, so that the white ball could be seen against the players’ uniforms. Some teams thus had different helmets and jerseys for day and night games.

The other mysterious white football is the big, ugly one with the player’s name in it that is part of the design of 1953 Bowman cards. To me, the big football overwhelms the rest of the card and makes the 1953 set the least attractive of the early Bowmans. Might it have been inspired by the NFL’s use of the white ball? On Pete Pihos’s card, Bowman actually put the big white ball in his hands!

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Fran Polsfoot, Doak Walker, 1953 Bowman
• Search eBay for: Fran Polsfoot, Doak Walker, 1953 Bowman

In a post last month I showed that the image on Bill Wade’s 1960 Topps card is reversed. Looking at my Beckett’s catalog this week, I found that the image on Doug Atkins’s 1960 Topps card is reversed as well. It’s not obvious when you look at that card by itself, but it is when you put it alongside his 1961 Fleer card. It’s funny how you can look at a card a hundred times and not notice an error like this.

I did a little ‘net search to look for bits of trivia about Atkins, and I found that he has an official site. The quotes by John Unitas and Jim Parker are worth a look.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Doug Atkins, 1960 Topps, 1961 Fleer
• Search eBay for: Doug Atkins, 1960 Topps, 1961 Fleer

This might be common knowledge among old football fans, but I learned today that the man on this 1974 Topps card, Brian Dowling, was the inspiration for the character B.D. in the Doonesbury comic strip. Dowling was the star quarterback at Yale during the time that Gary Trudeau, Doonesbury’s creator, attended school there.

Though Dowling had a stellar high school and college career, he got significant playing time only one season in the NFL. To my knowledge, this is his only football card.

According to his Wikipedia article, B.D. never removed his helmet, making excuses that his ears stuck out or that he had bad hair. Perhaps this was inspired by Dowling, too: his hair indeed looks a bit unruly!

Search for Brian Dowling cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s Cards