Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

A lot of you liked the interactive 1956 Topps Packers team card I told you about yesterday, so I thought I would knock out another interactive card. This time I did the 1956 Topps 49ers team card. Clicking on the card pictured here will take you to the interactive version.

This card went faster, since most of the players also appear on 1955 49ers team issue photos, and I didn’t have to enter the data for them. Only two players, Frank Mincevich and Lowell Wagner, were not already in my database. Also, there are no coaches or staff in the picture, so I didn’t have to find their information.

I will work on the remaining 1956 Topps team cards as I have time.

I recently added another interactive team card to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, the 1956 Topps Green Bay Packers card. Clicking on the card pictured here will take you to the interactive version.

I enjoy working on these team cards because it gives me an opportunity to acknowledge the players who never appeared on cards of their own. On this card, for instance, there are two members of the Packers Hall of Fame who never had their own cards. One is Deral Teteak, who starred at linebacker and guard for the Packers from 1952 to 1956. The other is Bud Jorgensen, who, after a brief playing career, served as an equipment manager and trainer for the Packers for 47 years.

Over time, I hope to make all of the team cards in the Gallery interactive. For those of you who haven’t seen them, here are the others I have done so far: 1958 Topps Baltimore Colts, 1959 Topps New York Giants, 1961 Topps Green Bay Packers, 1963 Topps Dallas Cowboys, 1964 Topps Oakland Raiders, and 1967 Philadelphia Cleveland Browns.

Last week I picked up few of the short prints from the 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins football card set. One of them, Abner Haynes, is pictured below. You can see all of the new cards and a description of the set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

The lot I purchased included a “Jr. Dolphin” card, also pictured below. This card is not listed in the price guides, but it looks like the rest of the Royal Castle cards, so I would consider it part of the set. I called it card #28 and added it to the Gallery, as well.

I am in the market for the cards I don’t yet have from this set: Frank Emanuel, Tom Erlandson, Norm Evans, Bob Griese, Jerry Hopkins, and Jim Warren. If you happen to have any of them for sale, please send me an email.

Yesterday I added 1974 USC Discs to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The set includes discs of 25 USC players and one of coach John McKay. Remarkably, 17 of the 25 players in the set went on to play in the NFL. One of them, Pat Haden, is pictured here. Haden was a quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams from 1976 to 1981.

I filed the discs in the Oddball section of the Gallery.

A couple of weeks ago I bought this 8-card panel of 1966 Philadelphia football cards in an eBay auction. It provided another piece to the 1965-1967 Philadelphia virtual uncut sheets I have been working on. The project is a little (okay, a lot) geeky, but you can see my progress here.

As it says on my uncut sheet pages, I have concluded that card numbering scheme was the same on 1965, 1966, and 1967 Philadelphia sheets, so finding a piece of one helps with all three. (The 1964 Philadelphia sheet was numbered differently from the other three years, so I have to do that one independently.)

I have also mentioned before that there must be double prints in all four Phildelphia sets, because a full sheet held 264 cards, and there are only 198 cards in each set. That means 66 cards must have been printed twice on each sheet. I have not seen the double prints documented in any price guide, but I am reasonably sure that I know which 1965-1967 cards were double printed, so I have marked the them in the Gallery pages for those sets. Since the numbering scheme was the same on the 1965-1967 Philadelphia sheets, it follows that the same numbers were double prints in all three sets.

Over the weekend I added 1950 Bread for Health Labels to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. My favorite, Charley Conerly, is shown here. I listed the labels in the Oddball section of the Gallery. A huge thanks to my friend Jeff Payne for providing the images for this set. Check ’em out!

You learn something every week. This week I learned from a post in the Collectors Universe forums that the player pictured on Bob Odell’s 1955 Topps All-American card is not Bob Odell. The impostor is Howard Odell, Bob’s older brother, who played at the University of Pittsburgh. For details–and to see many more cards that picture the wrong player–see the Mistaken Identities page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

In a recent Interesting eBay Auctions article, I pointed out a 1957 Baltimore Colts team photo, and I said that the image was reused a year later on the 1958 Topps Colts team card. This week, using the photo as a reference, I made an interactive version of that team card. On the interactive card, you can move your cursor over the players to see their names, and you can click on a player to see all of his cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Give it a try!

As I was mapping the names on the photo to the image on the card, I found that a lot of the players didn’t appear on the team’s 1957 roster. I concluded that the photo must have been taken well before the 1957 regular season started. The Colts picked up several of the players in the photo in the 1957 draft, but apparently some of them did not make the team. One of the 1957 draftees who appears in the photo but not on the roster is Joe Unitas, Johnny Unitas’s cousin.

I was unable to find the first names of three of the players in the photo: Welch, Stephenson, and Pollard. The Colts didn’t draft them in 1957, and I couldn’t find matches in the online NFL player databases. My guess is that the players were walk-ons whom the Colts gave tryouts. If you happen to know any of their first names, let me know, and I’ll add them to the interactive card.

Yesterday, via an eBay purchase, I obtained another card that will help me figure out how 1962 Topps football cards were arranged on uncut sheets. The John Unitas card shown here has a sliver of Bill Forester’s card on the left. This bit of information let me add the Unitas to a piece of the uncut sheet I already had. To see where the new piece fit, scroll toward the bottom of the 1962 Topps virtual uncut sheet page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Another ten years, and I should have it finished!

For other virtual uncut sheets, some completed and some not, see a previous article, U is for Uncut Sheets.

As I wrote in a previous article, I am converting some of my more popular blog articles into standard web pages and moving them to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I am finding that blog articles work best for news, and standard pages work better for information that is not time-sensitive.

This weekend I converted my Fathers and Sons and Teammate Brothers blog articles into gallery pages. In the process, I added a few fathers, sons, and brothers who are new to the Gallery since I wrote the original articles. The new pages are in the Fun Pages section of the Gallery home page. While you’re over there, check out the other pages to see if you’ve missed any new ones.

What is your favorite father/son or brother/brother football card pair? Here’s mine: George Sauer Sr. on his 1955 Topps All-American card, and George Sauer Jr. on his 1969 Glendale Stamp. There’s quite a resemblance, don’t you think?