Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Woody Peoples, a guard for thirteen seasons with the San Francisco 49ers and Philadelphia Eagles, passed away on Tuesday. Peoples made the Pro Bowl twice for the 49ers, in 1972 and 1973, and he was a member of the Eagles’ 1980 NFC Championship team. A tribute to Peoples at lehighvalleylive.com includes a nice photo of him warming up for Super Bowl XV.

Peoples appeared on a few cards during his long career. The card pictured here is his rookie card, a 1970 Topps. He also appeared on a 1973 Topps card, a 1981 Topps card, and a 1972 Sunoco stamp. His 1981 Topps card, his only card with the Eagles, was actually issued the year after he retired.

There are two cards on eBay this week that I seldom see for sale: a 1955 Topps All-American Whizzer White card with Gaynell Tinsley’s bio, and a Gaynell Tinsley card with Whizzer White’s bio. Both were graded 8, or NM/MT, by PSA. It apparently didn’t take Topps long to correct their error in 1955, because these two cards are much scarcer than the corrected versions. The back of each error card is shown here.

Years ago, when I first read about these errors, I assumed that the backs of the cards were swapped in their entirety. Wrong-back cards are fairly common; you can see a few of them on my 1960 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page. It was only recently that I learned that only the bio sections of the White and Tinsley cards are swapped. This is why the descriptions in the price guides say Gaynell Tinsley (Whizzer White bio) and Whizzer White (Gaynell Tinsley bio). Duh.

I have always thought that the corrected Whizzer White card was undervalued, considering that it is his rookie card, and that he served as a U.S. Supreme Court justice for 31 years after his football career. White’s card sells for only about double the price of a common in the 1955 All-American set, and the price guides put it at two or three times the price of a common. His error card sells for much more, but that is because of its scarcity, not his fame.

For more on the 1955 Topps All-American set, see A is for All-Americans.

Don Doll, who played safety from 1949 to 1954 for the Detroit Lions, Washington Redskins, and Los Angeles Rams, passed away on September 22. Doll had 41 career interceptions, and he made the Pro Bowl in four of his six seasons. According to a tribute on the Lions web site, he is the only NFL player to have intercepted at least ten passes in three different seasons. After his playing career, he coached in college and in the NFL for 34 years.

Despite his stellar play, Doll appeared on only two football cards. This was not unusual: defensive players were often under-represented in football card sets of the 1950s and 1960s. (Also see D is for Defensive Players.) The card shown here is Doll’s rookie card, a 1950 Bowman. He also appeared on a 1951 Bowman card with the Lions.

Yesterday I added 1968 Browns Team Issue 7×8 photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The set contains just seven players, the team’s offensive stars at the time. The photos are printed on lightweight cardboard, and the backs are blank. The “7×8” in the set name is to distinguish it from a second 1968 Browns team issue, in which the photos are 8-by-10. The 8-by-10 set, according to Beckett’s site, contains twelve photos, with some overlap with the 7-by-8’s.

There are facsimile autographs on the photos, and as far as I can tell, they are copies of authentic signatures. (This isn’t always the case on vintage cards; see my article on the facsimile signatures on Kahn’s Wieners cards.) At first I thought that the signatures on the Browns photos might be real, not facsimiles, because Ernie Green’s extends into the border. But then I noticed white fisheyes in the “F” and “k” of Frank Ryan’s signature, which I don’t believe would appear in an original.

Most NFL fans have heard by now that George Blanda passed away today. The first notice I read was on the San Francisco Chronicle web site. The news is sad for me: I was a Raiders fan in the late 60s and 70s, so I watched Blanda play on many Sunday afternoons. I remember well his heroics in 1970, especially the game against the Browns, which I watched with my grandmother. She jumped out of her seat when he kicked a 52-yarder in the waning seconds to win the game.

The sports pages and TV shows will undoubtedly cover Blanda’s career in detail over the next few days, so I won’t attempt to do that here. Instead I’ll just show you his cards. He played for 26 years, so he appeared on a lot of them. I have most of them, but I am missing a couple from the end of his career. Pick any thumbnail image to see a larger version.

Today I added 1967 Royal Castle Dolphins cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery–or two-thirds of them, anyway. All of the cards in this regional set are scarce, and ten of them are short prints, so they’re doubly scarce. The short prints are the ones that I don’t have yet. The backs of the cards say that two cards were made available each week of the season, and I can only guess as to why some were short-printed. Perhaps the promotion didn’t get the response the restaurants expected, so they didn’t print as many cards in the later weeks. Or perhaps the promotion was more popular than the restaurants anticipated, so they increased their print runs after five weeks, and the cards printed earlier became short prints.
According to a Miami Herald article, Royal Castle restaurants were modeled after White Castle, and at one time there were at least 185 Royal Castles in the Miami area. By 2008, only one or two were still in operation. A message board thread on roadfood.com includes pictures of the last two Royal Castles and their fare.

The card pictured here is Wahoo McDaniel, who wrestled professionally in the off-season and after his football career. I don’t remember McDaniel as a football player, but I do remember watching him battling Baron von Raschke on Saturday nights. There is a nice photo of him flexing his muscles on the onlineworldofwrestling.com web site.

The key card in the Royal Castle set is a pre-rookie card of Bob Griese. It is a short print, so I don’t have it yet, but there is a picture of one on SGC’s web site. Oddly, it appears that Griese dedicated his signature to “Alan,” but the signature on the card is a facsimile.

Yesterday I added 1955 Rams Team Issue photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The photos are about 4 inches by 6, and they are printed on cardboard. This is unlike the team issue photos I added earlier to the gallery–1955 49ers, 1958 49ers, and 1960 Eagles–which are on paper the thickness of catalog covers.

Beckett says there are 37 photos in the 1955 Rams set, but there are actually 38. The 38th is Bob Kelley, a sports announcer at the time for the Rams and baseball’s Los Angeles Angels. The back of his photo says he moved with the Rams from Cleveland to Los Angeles in 1946.

Besides the Kelley photo, there are 36 player photos and one photo of the coaching staff. The only players on the 1955 Rams roster who are not included in the set are Jack Dwyer and Bob Long. I am nearly sure that this is because the photos were produced during the season, and Dwyer and Long had already left the team by the third game.

Since the whole team is included in the set, many of the photos–eleven, if I counted correctly–picture players who never appeared on cards of their own. I think these guys were excited to get their chance, because they gave us the best action poses in the set. Pictured here are my two favorites, Art Hauser and Ed Hughes.

I realize now that when I picked up my first sets of team issue photos, I bit off more than I expected. I definitely like them, but there are a lot of them! To make room for more, I created a separate team issue photo page in the Gallery.

As you have probably heard, today is the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Monday Night Football. The New York Jets played the Cleveland Browns on Monday, September 21, 1970, and the Browns won 31-21. Below are the 1970 Topps cards of the stars of the night: Matt Snell, who had 108 yards rushing for the Jets, and Homer Jones, who had a 94-yard kickoff return for a touchdown for the Browns. There is a box score for the game on pro-football-reference.com.

According to Wikipedia, Marlboro was the first sponsor of Monday Night Football. The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned cigarette ads on television and radio, didn’t take effect until January 2, 1971. It has been forty years since the ads were taken off the air, but I can still recall their jingles.

The 1970 Topps set happens to be the first one I completed as a kid. I remember selling my duplicates for a penny each–what they cost at the time–and using the proceeds to buy more cards. I also remember that my teacher told me to knock it off, because I was selling them during class. The elusive Greg Cook was the last card I needed to complete the set. I probably traded a Bart Starr or a Joe Namath to get him!

Today I added 1963 IDL Steelers photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These resemble the team issue photos I have been adding recently–1955 49ers, 1960 Eagles, and 1958 49ers–and I wouldn’t really call them cards. They are about 4 inches by 5, and they are printed on thin stock, approximately the thickness of a magazine cover. The backs are blank, or at least they were when they were printed. All of mine but one have “URBANI’S PHARMACY” and its address stamped on the back.

I learned from Wikipedia that IDL stood for Independent Drugstores League, and that the IDL “was a cooperative of independent drugstores that disbanded in the late 1960s.” I also did a web search for “Urbani’s Pharmacy,” and I found an obituary for Mr. Arthur Urbani, who owned the drug store that my photos came from. He sold his store to Rite Aid in 1984.

The images in this set are action shots cropped such that only the players’ faces and upper bodies are showing. The players are clearly exerting themselves, but you can’t see what they are doing, so many of them appear to have odd expressions on their faces. The Buddy Dial photo shown above is one example. Cropping action shots this close is not a good idea.

As is common with team sets, the IDL Steelers photos include a few players who, to my knowledge, never appeared on cards. Those players are Frank Atkinson, John Burrell, Lou Cordileone, and Glenn Glass. As I’ve written before, the thing I enjoy most about team sets is getting to see a few new faces.

Ron Kramer, who played tight end for the Packers and Lions from 1957 to 1967, passed away today. Kramer made the Pro Bowl in 1962 for the Packers, and he is a member of the Packers Hall of Fame. There is a nice article about Kramer’s career on the Pro Football Researchers web site.

My favorite Ron Kramer card is the one pictured here, a 1963 Topps card. The Packers cards in the 1963 set have green-and-gold borders, so the borders match the Packers’ uniforms. This appears to have been a coincidence, since the border colors Topps used for the other teams’ cards don’t match their uniform colors.

Kramer’s rookie card is a 1958 Topps, which I featured in a previous article. He also appeared on a 1961 Lake to Lake Packers card and on two Topps cards with the Lions. You can see all of Ron Kramer’s cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.