Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Last week the Chicago Bears announced that the team will retire Mike Ditka’s number in December. This prompted me to add a page to the Vintage Football Card Gallery that shows all of the NFL players whose jersey numbers have been retired. For the players who appear on cards in the Gallery, I tried to find cards that showed them wearing their numbers. Check out the new page!

Yesterday I added 1979 Kansas City Chiefs Police cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This is the one of the first NFL police sets ever produced, and it is the first one in the Gallery. I anticipate adding more police sets, so I created a new category for them. You guessed it, it’s called Police Sets.

Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Marv Levy’s first card is in the 1979 Chiefs Police set. Levy coached the Chiefs for five seasons before going to the Buffalo Bills.

Last week I added 1969 Drenk’s Green Bay Packers pins to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The Bart Starr and Ray Nitschke pins are pictured here. See the Gallery for the rest of the pins and a description of the set. I filed the pins under Oddball.

The newest interactive team cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery are the 1956 Topps Baltimore Colts and New York Giants team cards. Click on the images pictured here to see the interactive versions.

Both cards show the 1955 teams. Three future Hall of Fame coaches appear on the cards: Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry are pictured on the Giants card, and Don Shula is a player on the Colts card. Leroy Vaughn, the father of major league baseball’s Mo Vaughn, also appears with the Colts.

These are my sixth and seventh interactive 1956 Topps team cards; I have five more to go. Next up: the Washington Redskins.

The newest interactive team card in the Vintage Football Card Gallery is the 1956 Topps Cleveland Browns team card. Clicking on the image pictured here will take you to the interactive version.

The card pictures the 1955 Cleveland Browns, who won the NFL championship. Remarkably, at least six of the players on the team later became head coaches in the NFL: Otto Graham, Abe Gibron, Mike McCormack, Walt Michaels, Chuck Noll, and John Sandusky.

This is my fifth interactive 1956 Topps team card; I have seven more to go. Next up: the Baltimore Colts.

The newest interactive team card in the Vintage Football Card Gallery is the 1956 Topps Philadelphia Eagles team card. Clicking on the image pictured here will take you to the interactive version.

At least one of the players on the card will be familiar to CFL fans. After three seasons with the Eagles, Ralph Goldston played nine seasons for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, and in those nine seasons, he played in seven Grey Cups. Goldston appeared on several cards with the Tiger-Cats.

I will continue to work on the remaining 1956 Topps team cards as I have time. Next up: the Cleveland Browns.

This week I added 1977 Touchdown Club cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The set contains fifty cards of players who were former NFL stars when the cards were issued. According to Beckett’s description of the set, the addresses of the players were included with the cards, so that collectors who bought the cards could mail them to the players for autographs.

The best thing about this set is that it includes some stars who had not appeared on cards during their playing careers. One of those stars, Bill Willis, is pictured here. Willis played on five AAFC and NFL championship teams with the Cleveland Browns, and he was voted first team All-NFL three times in the early 1950s. Somehow he didn’t appear on a card before this one, though. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977, the year this card was issued.

I couldn’t decide whether to list the Touchdown Club cards under Regular Issues or Oddball, but for now they are under Regular Issues. Perhaps they belong in a new category, called Tribute Sets, along with sets like 1974 and 1975 Fleer Immortal Roll cards and 1963 Stancraft playing cards. Any opinions?

The newest interactive team card in the Vintage Football Card Gallery is the 1956 Topps Chicago Cardinals card. Clicking on the image pictured here will take you to the interactive version.

This card took awhile, because the image includes a lot of players that I didn’t yet have in my database. It also includes a bunch of owners, managers, coaches, and other non-players. As usual, I found some people I wasn’t expecting: Frank Bernardi, who later appeared with the Broncos on a 1960 Fleer card, and coaches Bob Nowaskey and Tommy Thompson, who had appeared on earlier football cards as players.

I will continue to work on the remaining 1956 Topps team cards as I have time. Next up: the Philadelphia Eagles.

Over the weekend I added 1979 Coke Saints cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Nearly all of the 1979 Saints players appear in the set. Two of them, Archie Manning and Chuck Muncie, are pictured here. I filed the set under Food and Regional Issues.

Yesterday I noticed that the player pictured on Fred Brown’s 1969 Glendale Stamp is actually Timmy Brown. Timmy Brown played for the Eagles until 1967, then played one season for the Baltimore Colts, then went on to a long acting career. Unfortunately, this is the only Fred Brown card or stamp I know of, so I don’t think his picture ever made it onto a card.

For many other cards and stamps that picture the wrong player, see the Mistaken Identities page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.