Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Yesterday I added virtual uncut sheets of 1954 Bowman cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I have not seen an actual sheet of 1954 Bowmans, but I followed the numbering patterns on sheets of older Bowman cards and made an educated guess as to what the 1954 sheets looked like.

Bowman apparently printed the third 1954 sheet in smaller quantities than the others, because most of the scarcer cards are from that sheet.

(Click on the image to see all four sheets.)

Last week, while I was scanning 1969 Glendale Stamps for the Vintage Football Card Gallery, I noticed that the Bob Griese and Mel Farr stamps have reversed images. The players’ jersey numbers were what clued me in: Griese wore number 12 for the Dolphins, and Farr wore number 24 for the Lions. I’ll bet that there are more reversed images in the set, but most of the players’ jersey numbers are not visible, so it is hard to tell.

There are several other reversed images in the Gallery: Charley Trippi on one variation of his 1948 Kellogg’s Pep card; Bill Wade, Doug Atkins, and Frank Varrichione on their 1960 Topps cards, and Dick Butkus and Joe Namath on variations of their 1972 NFLPA Vinyl Stickers.

Last week I added 1969 Glendale Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 312 stamps in the set, 12 each for the 26 NFL teams of the time. The stamps are slightly smaller than 2×3 inches.

The stamps were printed on panels of 12, and they were designed to be stuck in a special album. The album contains a page for each NFL team, and each team page contains a bio for each player and a place for his stamp. The full stamp panels were approximately the same height and width as the album, so I assume that the stamps and album came packaged together. The album was published by Glendale Publishers, Inc., of New York City.

Oddly, the title of the stamp album is “Official 1970 Pro Football Stars,” though Glendale apparently published it in 1969. The copyright date inside the album is from 1969, and the players’ bios include their performances in 1968, but not 1969. (Click on the image below to see a larger image.)

There are three Hall of Famers in the 1969 Glendale set whose stamps predate their rookie cards: O.J. Simpson, whose rookie card is a 1970 Topps; Jan Stenerud, whose rookie card is also a 1970 Topps; and Gene Upshaw, whose rookie card is a 1972 Topps. I have added the three stamps to my pre-rookie card page.

• See the full set of 1969 Glendale Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
• Find individual Glendale stamps, full panels, and stamp albums on eBay.

Dan Tester (thanks, Dan!) sent me a link yesterday to a picture of a four-card panel of 1953 Bowman football cards. That small panel was enough to show that 1953 Bowmans were printed in numerical order on the uncut sheets, as the earlier Bowman cards were. That bit of knowledge prompted me to go ahead and assemble virtual uncut sheets for the 1953 Bowman set.

One thing I don’t understand is why the price guides show short prints in the 1953 Bowman set. It looks to me as if the 96-card set broke evenly over three sheets of 32. If Bowman had printed fewer copies of one sheet than the others, that would have resulted in short prints, but the price guides’ short prints don’t match up with a single sheet. Maybe some reader can explain it to me.

Anyway, check out the new sheets!

This week I added 1962 Kahn’s Wieners football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 38 cards in this set: sixteen Browns, fourteen Steelers, and a sprinkling of players from six other teams. Kahn’s Meats was (and still is) based in Cincinnati, and the early Kahn’s sets were heavily weighted toward players from nearby Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

The 1962 Kahn’s set includes a pre-rookie card of Gene Hickerson, pictured here. Hickerson’s generally recognized rookie card (because it was issued by a major card company) is in the 1966 Philadelphia set. (For a discussion about rookie cards and pre-rookie cards, see an earlier article, R is for Rookie Cards.)

According to beckett.com, Kahn’s also issued an album to hold their 1962 cards, but I have not seen one yet.

Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided images for several of the Kahn’s sets.

Tom Addison, who starred at linebacker for the Boston Patriots for their first eight seasons, passed away on June 14. Addison played in the AFL All-Star game each year from 1961 to 1964. He also played in the 1963 AFL Championship game, which the Patriots lost to the Chargers. There is a nice tribute to Addison and a summary of his career on the Patriots web site.

Addison appeared on a Fleer or Topps football card each year from 1962 to 1967. His rookie card, a 1962 Fleer, is pictured here. Oddly, he also appeared on a 1961 Fleer Wallet Picture, but he did not have a card in the regular 1961 Fleer set.

• See all of Tom Addison’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
• See Addison’s career stats at pro-football-reference.com.

Lee Riley, who played defensive back from 1955 to 1962 for the Detroit Lions, Philadelphia Eagles, New York Giants, and New York Titans, passed away on June 9. Riley’s best season was 1962, when he intercepted 11 passes for the Titans, leading the AFL. Riley was the son of Leon Riley, who played briefly for baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies, and the brother of Pat Riley, longtime NBA coach and current president of the Miami Heat. He is mentioned in Pat Riley’s profile on the NBA web site.

The card pictured here is Riley’s rookie card, a 1955 Bowman. (1955 Bowmans are the only vintage football cards I can think of that indicate which players were rookies.) He also appeared on a 1963 Fleer card, issued after his last season.

You can see Lee Riley’s career stats at pro-football-reference.com.

It seemed like a good week to add another set of wiener cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. So I added 1963 Kahn’s Wieners, a set of 92 black-and-white cards distributed in the Cincinnati region by Kahn’s Meats. (Kahn’s is still in operation; it is now a Sara Lee company.)

All fourteen of the 1963 NFL teams are represented in the set, but the distribution of the cards among the teams is very uneven. I thought that the distribution might be related to how the teams finished in 1962, so I looked up the 1962 NFL standings. I found that, except for the Redskins, there is a strong correlation between the teams’ 1962 records and the number of players representing them in the 1963 Kahn’s set. Why so many Redskins? I dunno, maybe they were expected to do better in 1963. (They didn’t; they finished 3-11.)

Like earlier Kahn’s cards, the 1963 cards have facsimile signatures printed on them. However, as I pointed out in a previous article, at least some of the facsimile signatures are not in the players’ handwriting. The signature on the John Unitas card pictured here, for example, does not look like any of his autographs that appear in a Google image search. Most obvious is that on all of the items I found with his actual autograph, he signed his first name “Johnny,” not “John.”

Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided the images for this set.

(Feel free to Twitter this article.)

Most of you are familiar with my virtual uncut sheets of vintage football cards. There are a lot of sets I haven’t been able to do yet, though, because I have not seen pictures of real sheets. So I would like your help: if you see an uncut sheet for a pre-1970 set that I have not done yet, please send me an email and let me know where you saw it. The sheets I have completed are listed on the Vintage Football Card Gallery home page.

I would also like to see any pre-1970 cards that are miscut so badly–on either the front or the back–that they show part of the next card. The card pictured here is an example that I found in an eBay auction: it’s a miscut 1957 Topps Sid Watson card that shows Kyle Rote’s toe. If I see enough cards like this, I might be able to piece together what the uncut sheet looked like–especially if there is a pattern to the card numbers.

This weekend I added 1975 McDonald’s Quarterbacks cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. This is a bitty set: just four cards of AFC quarterbacks. Three of the four quarterbacks–Ken Stabler, Terry Bradshaw, and Joe Ferguson–had led their teams to the playoffs the season before. The fourth, Al Woodall of the Jets, was an odd choice. Perhaps he was included because New York was a big market, or perhaps because Marden-Kane, Inc., and Rosenfeld, Sirowitz & Lawson, Inc., the advertising agencies who produced the cards, were based in New York.

On the back of each card is a coupon for 25 cents off a McDonald’s Big Meal. Each coupon was good for a different week early in the 1975 NFL season.