Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

This week I added 1963 Topps CFL cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This was my first CFL set, so most of the players were new to me. I did find a few familiar faces: Joe Kapp, Dave Mann, Pat Holmes, and Bobby Walden all appear on NFL cards, as well. Walden, I learned, was a running back and kick returner in the CFL, as well as a punter. After he moved to the NFL, he stuck to punting, though it appears from his NFL stats that he faked a few punts and ran instead.

Topps apparently really liked the image on Joe Kapp’s card, because they used the same image on his 1960, 1961, 1968, and 1969 cards, and on his 1969 mini-card. I don’t know why he is in a green jersey, though, because I don’t believe any of his teams wore green. I suspect that the image was originally a black-and-white photo from his days at the University of California, and that someone at Topps colored it. The jersey on his card resembles the one he is wearing in the photo on his College Football Hall of Fame page.

This week I added the twelve football cards from the 1952 Wheaties multi-sport set to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. For details on the cards, see my 1952 Wheaties page. For a survey of other football cards that were distributed with food products, see one of my previous blog articles, W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues.

Yesterday I added a virtual uncut sheet of 1962 Fleer football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. By studying miscut cards from the set, my friend Paul puzzled out the numbering pattern of the cards on the sheet. Most of the cards that are scarce in high grades are grouped together on the sheet, and I added a diagram to show that.

The Gallery now includes virtual uncut sheets for 27 football card sets. For the full list, see one of my previous blog articles, U is for Uncut Sheets.

(Click on the image to see the full virtual sheet.)

Last week I added 1974 Fleer Immortal Roll cards–also called 1974 Fleer Hall of Fame cards– to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The page for the set includes a short description, so I won’t describe again them here. I added a fun fact or two for each card in the set, as well. Take a look!

I hope you like this feature, because it took me awhile: I identified all of the players in the Vintage Football Card Gallery who are members of the College Football Hall of Fame. You can do a search for all of the College Hall of Famers, all of the College Hall of Famers from a certain college (say Ohio State), or all of the College Hall of Famers from a certain pro team (say the Los Angeles Rams). Use the Gallery’s Advanced Search page to specify whatever combinations you like.

What I like most about this feature is that it highlights some cards that you typically find in the commons bin. Some players with stellar college careers had short or not-as-stellar pro careers, and you wouldn’t know from their cards how good they were in college. The player pictured here is one example: Jim Swink was runner-up to Howard Cassady for the Heisman Trophy in 1955, and he was elected to the College Hall of Fame in 1980. Swink played pro football for just one season–1960 for the AFL’s Dallas Texans–and this 1960 Fleer card is his only football card.

This weekend I added 1971 Kellogg’s football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This missing set was the biggest gap in the Gallery, I’d say, since Kellogg’s cards are popular and not too difficult to find. Thanks to Mike Ford for providing many of the images.

I found a few small surprises as I entered the information for the set. First, there is little overlap with the 1970 Kellogg’s set: only five players appear in both the 1970 and 1971 sets. Second, though most of the players in the 1971 Kellogg’s set were among the stars of their teams, two of the players never appeared on a card in a major issue. Finally, the cards apparently were issued–or at least designed–well before the 1971 season, because a number of players either played for a different team in 1971 or didn’t play at all. You can read the details on the Gallery page for the set.

Happy New Year, everyone! Time to start those diets, budgets, and exercise programs! But it’s okay to wait until tomorrow–it’s a holiday, right?

I was thinking about what I want to accomplish in 2012 in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and I decided that my goals follow two themes. The first theme is to finish some of the things I have already started. For example, last year I started identifying players who are in the College Football Hall of Fame, but I haven’t finished because there are way more of them than I thought. On the other hand, in the process of identifying the College Hall of Famers, I have learned some interesting things about them. Did you know, for instance, that Cosmo Iacavazzi, who played in only two games professionally, led the nation in scoring at Princeton in 1963? I love uncovering nuggets like that.

Which brings me to my second theme: doing more with the cards I already have. The Gallery now contains pictures of most of the vintage football cards out there, so now I can work more on depth than breadth. One thing I have started doing in this area is adding trivia for each card. Going back to Mr. Iacavazzi: did you ever notice that his 1965 Topps card pictures him in his college uniform, recolored Jets green? Until yesterday, I didn’t, either, but as I learn such things, I will make note of them. (For more examples, see the 1953 Rams Team Issue cards I recently added to the Gallery.)

Of course, as well as looking ahead to the new year, we should look back and remind ourselves of what we accomplished in 2011. This morning I took a quick look through my “New in the Gallery” blog articles, and it was gratifying to see all of the new cards and virtual uncut sheets I was able to add over the year. Most gratifying, I think, is that I had so much fun doing it.

Enjoy your collections, keep in touch, and have a terrific 2012!

Last week I added 1953 Los Angeles Rams Team Issue football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This was the first of five team sets that the Rams issued in the 1950s. The 1954, 1955, and 1957 cards also have black borders, and the Rams reused some of the images from year to year, so you sometimes have to look at a card’s back to determine its year. If you look through the 1955 Rams Team Issue cards in the Gallery, you can see some of the reused images.

Fans ordered the cards directly from the Rams, evidently. The 1953 set I obtained was still in the original envelope, pictured below.

I tried something new while entering the 1953 cards in my database: I added a note for each card. As I wrote in a previous article, I like it when collectors add notes when registering their graded cards, so I thought I would start entering notes for cards in the Gallery. I’ll never cover all of the cards, but when I learn something interesting about a card or a player, I’ll make a note of it. while researching this set, for example, I learned that most of the 1953 Rams players appeared in the film Crazy Legs, and that two of the players became the first head coaches of expansion teams. Check out my bits of trivia, and let me know what you think.

Yesterday I added 1968 Topps Test Team Photo cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 25 cards in the set, one for each of the NFL and AFL teams except Cincinnati. The Bengals were an expansion team in 1968, and Topps evidently did not yet have a photo of the team.

The back of each team photo card lists all of the players, coaches, and other personnel who are pictured on the front. The Cleveland Browns card actually pictures the 1967 team, and I assume the photos on the other cards are at least a year old, as well.

The team photos were inserts in packs of 1968 Topps Football Patches. (See a wrapper here.) I don’t yet have the patches in the Gallery, but you can see examples on eBay.

Yesterday I added 1969 Topps Mini-Card Albums to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There is one album for each of the 16 NFL and 10 AFL teams of 1969. (The leagues merged in 1970.) The albums, along with panels of mini-cards (now known as 1969 Topps 4-in-1’s), were inserts in packs of 1969 Topps football cards. Each album held ten mini-cards, plus a few stats for each player. The mini-cards had adhesive on the back, like stamps, so kids could separate the cards from the panels, lick the backs, and stick them in the albums. The adhesive was poor, so it wasn’t long before it let go and the cards fell out.

Pictured here are the front, back, and middle of the Green Bay Packers mini-card album.


The Packers mini-card album, with Bart Starr on the cover, is an exception. Most of the albums, strangely, have pictures of players from other teams on their covers. The San Francisco 49ers album, for instance, has a New York Giant on the cover. Commenting on an earlier blog article, a sharp-eyed reader pointed out that the player is Joe Walton, and that the image also appeared on Walton’s 1962 Topps card. Walton joined the Giants in 1961, so the photo must have been taken during the 1961 season.