Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Today I added 1958 49ers Team Issue Photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are forty-four 4-by-6 black-and-white photos in the set, including players, coaches, the head of personnel, and even the 49ers announcers. Pictured here are my two favorites, Bill Stits and Jerry Mertens, both making (or faking) spread-eagle receptions.

Some of the players in the 1958 set also appear in the 1955 49ers Team Issue set. The team reused the images for those players, but they updated the text on the backs of the photos. Pictured here is the text from the back of Matt Hazeltine’s 1955 photo, along with that from his 1958 photo. (I added the years in red.) In three years he gained ten pounds, a wife, and a daughter!

Several players in the 1958 photo set never appeared on cards of their own–at least not to my knowledge. They are Gene Babb, John Gonzaga, Bill Herchman, Bill Jessup, Jim Pace, Lou Palatella, and John Wittenborn. As always, it’s good to add new faces to the Gallery. The set also includes a photo of John Brodie, issued three years before his 1961 Fleer and 1961 Topps rookie cards.

I am continuing to identify players in the Vintage Football Card Gallery who have been honored by the individual teams. Today I added the members of the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame. There were a lot of members to add!

Pictured here is one of them, Tobin Rote, on his 1950 Bowman rookie card. I learned today that in 1956, Rote led the league in passing yards and passing touchdowns, led the Packers in rushing, and finished second in the league in rushing touchdowns.

You can use the Advanced Search page of the Gallery to find members of the Packers Hall of Fame and recipients of other honors.

Earlier this week I enhanced the Vintage Football Card Gallery to let you find the cards of players and coaches who received various honors, such as membership in the Denver Broncos Ring of Fame. Now, for each such honor, I just have to add the honorees to my database. Over the past couple of days I added the members of the Washington Redskins Ring of Fame and the Minnesota Vikings Ring of Honor. The exercise has been interesting: I am familiar with most players who have made the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and now I am learning who was in the next level of great players for each team.

Pictured here are the rookie cards of two players I added to my honors database this week. The first is a 1964 Philadelphia card of Bill Brown, a member of the Vikings Ring of Honor, and the second is a 1955 Bowman card of Gene Brito, a member of the Redskins Ring of Fame. To see the other honors I’ve done so far–and to do more complex searches–see the Advanced Search page of the Gallery.

This week I enhanced the Vintage Football Card Gallery so that I can easily add searches for players who received various honors. Prior to the enhancement, you could search only for Hall of Fame members and Heisman Trophy winners. With the enhancement (and after I do some data entry), you can search for cards of College Hall of Famers, Most Valuable Players, members of each team’s hall of fame, and so on.

To test the enhancements, I added searches for CFL Hall of Famers, Broncos Ring of Famers, and members of the new Jets Ring of Honor. Over time, I will add the recipients of other awards, as well.

The change appears in two places. The first place is the Advanced Search page, which now has drop-down menus containing all of the various honors. You can pick up to three honors, and the search will find the players who received all of the honors you chose.

The second place the change appears is the search results page. That page now has a column that lists each player’s honors, regardless of the search you did.

Try it out! If you have any requests–or if you find a bug–let me know.

Today I added 1960 Eagles Team Issue Photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are eleven 5-by-7 prints in the set, and the prints have blank backs.

The composition of the set is easily the oddest I’ve seen. First, Nick Skorich, an assistant coach in 1960, appears in the set, but Buck Shaw, the head coach, doesn’t. (Skorich took over as head coach in 1961.) Second, there are no quarterbacks, running backs, or receivers in the set! Hall of Famers Norm Van Brocklin and Tommy McDonald were both established starters in 1960, but neither is included. Finally, the Eagles had six Pro Bowlers in 1959 (Van Brocklin, McDonald, Jess Richardson, Marion Campbell, Bill Barnes, and Tom Brookshier), they were all still with the team in 1960, and not one of them appears in the set! It’s like the photographer was in a hurry, and he just grabbed the first eleven guys who showed up for practice.

(Speaking of Van Brocklin, this wasn’t the only set from which he was conspicuously absent. In 1958, after nine seasons and six Pro Bowls with the Rams, Van Brocklin was traded to the Eagles. He played three seasons for the Eagles, making the Pro Bowl in each of them, but he did not appear in any of the 1958-1960 Topps football sets. The only card I know of that shows him as an Eagle is his 1963 Stancraft playing card.)

As I’ve said in previous articles, one reason I like team sets is that they usually include players who never appeared on cards in mainstream issues. In this set, those players are Howard Keys and John Wittenborn, both offensive linemen. Keys was a rookie in 1960, and he played for the Eagles for four seasons. Wittenborn spent ten years in the NFL and AFL, with the 49ers, Eagles, and Oilers.

My favorite photo in the set is the one shown here, Jimmy Carr. Carr was a defensive back, but he could have been the drum major!

Oh, and incidentally, the Eagles won the NFL championship in 1960.

Yesterday I added 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These are patches that you could (and still can!) iron onto your clothes to impress your friends. Beckett calls them “Fabric Cards,” but they aren’t cards at all: they’re cloth, not cardboard, and they’re floppy.

There are 35 patches in the set, with 22 of the 26 NFL teams represented. Oddly, there are no Bengals, Oilers, Eagles, or Rams in the set, but there are four Chargers, and the Chargers were a losing team at the time. Perhaps Deacon Jones was supposed to represent the Rams in the set, but he was traded to the Chargers before the 1972 season.

Most of the NFLPA patches have a blue background, but there are six with a pink background, one with white, one with yellow, and one with green. I don’t think the colors are significant, but the distribution is odd, so perhaps I am missing something. There are no logos or trademarks on the patches, but John Brockington and Jim Plunkett appear in their College All-Star jerseys, complete with stars on the shoulders. Brockington and Plunkett also appear in their All-Star jerseys on their 1972 Topps cards, but Topps airbrushed the stars off of them.

According to Beckett, the NFLPA patches were sold from vending machines. When researching them, I found a couple of related items on eBay: a promo package and a vending machine display, pictured below. Interestingly, the list of players on the vending machine display does not match the list of players in the set: some players in the set are not on the display, and some players on the display are not in the set. Pity the poor young Bob Lilly fan, who kept chucking quarters into the machine, trying to get a patch of his hero!

• Find 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons on eBay.

Today I put together another virtual uncut sheet, this time for 1958 Topps football cards. Once again, the cards that are scarcest in high grade are on the edges of the sheet.

(Click on the image to see the whole sheet.)

Over the weekend I added most of the 1950 Topps Felt Back cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. As I wrote in T is for Topps, Part 1, these are homely cards, and they are even homelier in lower grades. Because they are colored to the edges, any wear on the edges stands out, and even cards in good shape can have loose threads hanging off the felt.

The cards do have their positive qualities, though: that they actually have felt on the back is kind of cool, and the terms describing the players (e.g., “Brainy Quarterback”) are unique and fun. The set includes the rookie cards of two Pro Football Hall of Famers, Ernie Stautner and Lou Creekmur; and two famous college coaches, Joe Paterno and Darrell Royal.

The cards were printed twenty-five to a sheet, with all red cards on one sheet, all blue cards on another sheet, etc. You can see a complete red sheet and a complete brown sheet, as well as their backs, on the Memory Lane Inc. web site.

• Search Nearmint’s Cards for 1950 Topps Felt Backs.
• Search eBay for 1950 Topps Felt Backs.

Today I added another “interactive” team card to the Vintage Football Card Gallery: a 1959 Topps New York Giants team card. By placing the cursor over a player, you can see who the player is, and by clicking on him, you can see all of his cards. (It doesn’t work on the card pictured here–you have to go to the gallery page.)

Each time I do one of these, I find a surprise or two. This time it was Don Maynard, who was a rookie with the Giants in 1958, when the photo on this card was taken. Maynard caught only five passes in 1958, and in 1959 he did not play. In 1960 he joined the New York Titans (later the Jets) of the AFL, and he gained over 11,000 yards receiving in thirteen years with the team. He is one of six Hall of Famers on this Giants card.

Yesterday I added an “interactive” 1963 Topps Dallas Cowboys team card to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. By placing the cursor over a player, you can see who the player is, and by clicking on him, you can see all of his cards. (It doesn’t work on the card pictured here–you have to go to the gallery page.) As the gallery page says, this 1963 card actually pictures the 1960 Cowboys team, and only eight of the players were still with the team when the card was issued.

The Cowboys were an expansion team in 1960, and they obtained most of their players from the other teams via an expansion draft. Each of the other teams made nine players available, and the Cowboys chose three of them. Like the other teams, the Cowboys also obtained players via trades, free agency, and other teams’ waiver lists. Unfortunately, the league approved the franchise too late for the Cowboys to participate in the college draft, and the team also had to compete with the upstart AFL for free agents. The result: a 0-11-1 season.

To see how the Cowboys assembled their original team, check out The Original 1960 Dallas Cowboys Roster at thecowboysguide.com. The page includes pictures of the team-issued photos for most of the players, and it also shows many of the players’ first cards. Very interesting!