Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Steve Liskey, from The Cowboys Guide, recently asked me if I planned to add scans of the backs of the cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. My first thought was “Are you out of your mind, Steve?” But then I told him that scanning just the fronts has taken an enormous amount of time, so I will probably never get to the backs. (Another visitor had a more modest suggestion: providing a single example of a card back for each set. Now that sounds like something I can accomplish–someday.)

It turned out, though, that Steve was particularly interested in the backs of 1966 Philadelphia cards. Why? Well, because as shown on the Dennis Claridge card to the right, each card in the 1966 Philly set has a player pictured on the back who is not the player on the front. (That’s Roman Gabriel on the back of the Claridge card.) Steve collects Dallas Cowboys cards, of course, and he wanted to know which cards have a Cowboy on the back.

Now that’s a serious collector, and I understand completely the desire–no, the need–to get every one of whatever type of cards you collect. If you collect a certain team, of course you want the cards that picture your team’s players on the back. So what I will probably do–again, someday–is note which players appear on the backs of the 1966 Philly cards so that the cards show up in searches for the players and their teams.

It had occurred to me even before Steve wrote that a player collector might want any cards on which his player was pictured, whether the player was identified on the card or not. That’s why, for each 1966 Philadelphia team play card, I have added the names of all the players appearing in the action on the front of the card. For example, for the Cowboys play card shown here, I included all five players pictured–three Cowboys and two Giants–in the list of players appearing on the card.

While adding players for the team play cards, I noticed that some of the players don’t appear on cards of their own. For example, to my knowledge, the Cowboys play card above is the only card on which Jerry Rhome appears. (Jerry is the holder for the kick.) I sell a lot of cards to players’ friends and relatives, and I suspect that this extra information will someday help a player’s grandson find his granddad on a card he didn’t know existed.

Search for 1966 Philadelphia cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s cards.

Today I put together another “virtual uncut sheet” page, this time for 1961 Fleer second series sheets. The 1961 Fleer second series contains cards from the eight AFL teams of the time, including rookie cards of Jim Otto and Don Maynard. It also includes one card with a mistaken identity.

While the price guides do not designate any 1961 Fleer cards as short prints, it is clear that some cards are much scarcer than others in high grade. Uncut sheets can show why some cards are tougher than others.

Earlier this week, via the Remember the Rams blog, I came across the Eddie Meador Hall of Fame Nomination site. The site is well-done and thorough–did you know that he worked in an Arkansas pickle plant during college?–and it’s clear that his friends and family are very devoted to him.

Meador played mostly before my time, and until I read his Awards and Statistics page, I didn’t know how good he had been. Meador’s rookie card, a 1963 Topps, is relatively easy to find, and it is inexpensive for a rookie card of a hall-of-fame candidate. Meador also had three cards issued before his rookie card: 1959 Bell Brand, 1960 Bell Brand, and 1962 Post Cereal, all of which are challenging to find. I can’t think of another other player with three “pre-rookie” cards, so if he does make the hall-of-fame, I’ll have to add a new section to my pre-rookie card page.

Altogether, Meador appeared on at least eleven cards, a large number for a defensive player in the 1960’s. The card pictured here is his 1960 Bell Brand Potato Chips card.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams
• Search eBay for: Ed Meador cards, 1960 Bell Brand Rams

Today I put together another “virtual uncut sheet” page, this time for 1963 Fleer cards. More reasons to be skeptical of your price guide!

I spotted an uncut sheet of 1970 Topps Super cards on eBay this week, so I thought I’d create a virtual uncut sheet for that set. My previous virtual uncut sheets have been 1959 Topps and 1960 Fleer.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the cards in this set have attractive fronts and ugly backs. In addition to the photo, each card features the player’s name in script that looks like a signature. It’s not a signature, though: the script is the same on all of the cards. While 1970 Topps Super baseball cards have facsimiles of the players’ actual signatures, the football cards got short shrift.

One of last week’s posts was about a virtual uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards that I created for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I got some nice feedback on that, so today I created another, this time a virtual 1959 Topps uncut sheet. This one was a little less challenging, since I had a picture of a real sheet to look at, but I still learned a few things. For one, you only have to look at a couple of these to see that a card’s position on the sheet greatly affects its availability in high grade. It’s remarkable that the price guides don’t recognize this. They must know what the sheets looked like, since they know which cards are short prints, but to my knowledge none of the guides consider sheet position when assigning prices.

I’ve never seen a full uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards, so I created a page in the Football Card Gallery that shows what I think an uncut sheet looked like. I’m calling it the Virtual 1960 Fleer Uncut Sheet. To piece it together, I looked at some uncut strips like these and filled in the blanks. The page also shows some wrong-back cards from the set.

The 1964 Philadelphia set includes a Play of the Year card for each team. Looking at some of those cards this week, I noticed that the Lions’ Play of the Year was pretty lame. Their play of the year went for only 10 yards?

Looking through the rest of the cards, I found that the other teams’ plays were also unimpressive. The Eagles’ play of the year was a 12-yard pass from Norm Snead to Bobby Mitchell. The Colts’ play of the year was a screen from Johnny Unitas to Jerry Hill that netted 15 yards. The Packers’ play of the year, a run by Tom Moore, was also for 15 yards, but it at least went for a touchdown.

Perhaps the plays came in critical situations or were the teams’ bread-and-butter plays throughout the year. There’s no indication of that on the cards, though. My guess is that because the cards were oriented horizontally, there wasn’t room for diagrams of long plays, so the card designers picked short plays instead.

According to Wikipedia, 0 and 00 are no longer legal uniform numbers in the NFL. That means that the players who wore them effectively have had their numbers retired. Pictured here are cards of five players who wore number 0 or 00: a 1963 Fleer Jim Otto, a 1972 Topps Ken Burrough, a 1961 Fleer Wallet Picture of John Olszewski, a 1968 Topps Obert Logan, and a 1948 Bowman John Clement.

I learned from the Wikipedia article that Jim Otto wore 00 because you could pronounce it like his name: aught-oh. Otto wore number 50 in his first season, 1960, and he switched to 00 for the remainder of his career. Otto’s 1964 Topps card shows a four-year-old image of him wearing number 50.

John Olszewski and Obert Logan also wore numbers other than 0 early in their careers. Olszewski’s cards with the Chicago Cardinals picture him in numbers 33 and 36. Logan’s 1967 Philadelphia card shows him in number 25 for the Cowboys.

Awhile back, a collector called to ask if I had any 1962 Post Cereal cards, because he was interested in the Bob Lilly card from that set. He said he collected pre-rookie cards of hall-of-famers, and that the 1962 Post Lilly was one he still needed. An interesting idea, I thought.

Today I added a page to the gallery that highlights a few pre-rookie cards. I included a few well-known players that aren’t in the hall of fame, in part because I wanted to include a few 1961 Nu-Cards. The Nu-Card set is one of the few vintage college sets, and it contains cards of a lot players who went on to play in the NFL and AFL.