December 27th, 2008 |
Published in
error cards, Football Card Trivia | 2 Comments
Well, it appears that the poor Lions will go winless in 2008. Because the team has been so bad recently, whenever I look through 1950s football cards, I marvel at all of the great Lions players from that era. The great players made for great teams: in a span of six seasons, the Lions played in four league championship games, and they won three of them–all against the Browns. The last time the Lions won a championship–51 years ago, in 1957!–there were six future hall-of-famers on the team, and they beat the Browns 59-14 in the championship game.
Five of the future Hall-of-Famers–Bobby Layne, John Henry Johnson, Lou Creekmur, Jack Christiansen, and Yale Lary–appeared on cards in the 1957 Topps set. This page in the Vintage Football Card Gallery shows those cards. The sixth hall-of-famer, Joe Schmidt, whose rookie card is in the 1956 Topps set, did not appear on a card in 1957.
Pictured at the top is John Henry Johnson’s 1957 Topps card, which incorrectly says he played for the Browns. Topps even took the trouble of recoloring the picture to put Johnson in Browns colors. Below the 1957 card is Johnson’s rookie card, a 1955 Bowman, which shows the same picture of Johnson, except in 49ers colors.
December 25th, 2008 |
Published in
Silly Stuff
Fellow collectors, customers, and people who stumbled here by accident: Have a safe and happy holiday season, and stop back here often during 2009!
(Oh, the card? That’s old Saint Nix!)
December 23rd, 2008 |
Published in
Sites I Like | 1 Comment
The Fleer Sticker Project features pictures and descriptions of the baseball and football stickers Fleer has printed since 1960. Some of the stickers varied only slightly from year to year, and the site describes how to distinguish between the different years. Also included are lots of pictures of old sports programs, magazines, catalogs, cards, bottle caps, pop cans, and so on. You pretty much just have to go browse around.
December 9th, 2008 |
Published in
Football Card Trivia, New in the Gallery
Yesterday I added 1968 Topps Stand Up cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These were insert cards in 1968 Topps packs, and there are 22 cards in the full set. Each card is perforated around the player’s head and shoulders such that you can punch the player out from the back and stand the card up. Of course, cards that have been punched out are now worth far less that those that remain intact, so it’s best if the cards’ original owners didn’t have any fun with them.
Topps choose a curious group of players for this set. The set contains at most one player per team, and Topps chose Jim Grabowski to represent the Packers over Bart Starr and Ray Nitschke. They also chose Willie Richardson over John Unitas, Jack Concannon over Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus, and Curtis McClinton over Len Dawson. (Topps did feature puzzles of Bart Starr and Len Dawson on the backs of the some of the regular 1968 cards, though.)
There is only one defensive player in the set, Alex Karras. And oddly, Homer Jones appeared in this set but not in the regular set of 1968 Topps cards.
December 5th, 2008 |
Published in
Player Bios
Occasionally I pick a random player and do an internet search on him. My pick today was Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, the Colts and Steelers defensive tackle whose famous line was “I just wrap my arms around the whole backfield and peel ’em one by one until I get to the ball carrier. Him I keep.”
My search turned up this wrestling article. It seems Big Daddy did a little wrestling in the off-season. A bit of trivia from the article: Big Daddy got his nickname because if he couldn’t remember someone’s name, he called him Little Daddy.
Pictured is Big Daddy’s 1960 Topps card. You can see all of his cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
Give it a try! Pick an old player from your favorite team and do a search. Let me know if you find anything interesting.
November 29th, 2008 |
Published in
Sites I Like
November 15th, 2008 |
Published in
My Collection
I collected cards as a kid for about five years, then they went into a shoebox in the closet, as a lot of cards do. It wasn’t until 1989 that I picked up the hobby again. A friend of mine who sold sports cards in his store gave me a pack of 1989 ProSet cards. They were very cool, I thought, and I was hooked again. I bought a few packs of the ProSet cards, and I started going to card shops and card shows.
At the time, Don Majkowski was doing well with the Packers, so I started speculating on his cards. I must have bought a couple hundred at a dollar each. Unfortunately, I was one Packers quarterback too early: in a short time Majkowski got hurt, and Brett Favre took over. Having been burned by Majkowski, I didn’t buy any Favre cards–and I still couldn’t tell you what the best Brett Favre card is.
But ProSet and Majkowski had gotten me back into the hobby, and in the course of hunting for Majkowski cards, I also worked on the sets I had started 20 years earlier. My shoebox had survived the years in a closet in my parents’ TV room, so I had a good start on some mid-grade sets. I completed the sets, started other vintage sets, upgraded the beat-up cards, on and on. It’s now been nearly another 20 years, and I’m still upgrading. And I still have a couple hundred Don Majkowski rookie cards in a shoebox in the back of a closet.
November 11th, 2008 |
Published in
New in the Gallery | 8 Comments
As the About page says, the Vintage Football Card Gallery is a reference site. The cards in the gallery are not for sale, but I do have lots of cards for sale on my Nearmint’s Vintage Football Cards site.
You can search the gallery for your favorite set, team, player, or college. To do complex searches, such as “Show all the rookie cards of Hall of Fame players named Bob,” try the Advanced Search page.
On the Site Map you will find links to other miscellaneous pages. Among them:
- A page that shows a bunch of cards that picture the wrong player
- A page showing lots of vintage football card wrappers
- Interactive team cards: 1959 Topps New York Giants, 1961 Topps Green Bay Packers, 1963 Topps Dallas Cowboys, 1964 Topps Oakland Raiders, and 1967 Philadelphia Cleveland Browns
- Puzzles of Bart Starr, Len Dawson, and Fran Tarkenton, assembled from the backs of 1968 and 1969 Topps football cards
- Examples of pre-rookie cards, minor issues that were printed before players’ commonly accepted rookie cards
- “Virtual” uncut sheets of cards: 1948 Bowman, 1958 Topps, 1959 Topps, 1960 Fleer, 1960 Topps, 1961 Fleer, 1962 Topps, 1963 Fleer, 1966 Philadelphia, 1968 Topps, 1969 Topps, and 1970 Topps Super.
I add to the gallery whenever I have time, so check back occasionally for new cards. Enjoy your visit!
Tags:
1959 Topps,
1960 Fleer,
1960 Topps,
1961 Fleer,
1961 Topps,
1963 Fleer,
1963 Topps,
1966 Philadelphia,
1967 Philadelphia,
1968 Topps,
1969 Topps,
1970 Topps Super,
uncut sheet
November 8th, 2008 |
Published in
My Collection | 2 Comments
Well, it wasn’t really my first card, but it was the one I was after. Pete Banaszak was from my hometown, Crivitz, Wisconsin, and he played for the Raiders when I started getting interested in football. I wasn’t even sure he had a card, but I spent a lot of dimes looking for it.
There was a Red Owl grocery store down the block from our house, and that’s where I spent most of my dimes. I remember being annoyed at the sales tax, which was new at the time. Getting only four dime packs for my five dimes seemed to me like a complete rip-off.
When I finally found Pete, I pinned him to my bulletin board, and he remained there for years, maybe even through high school. He played for the Raiders for 13 years, a long time for a running back, finally retiring when I was in college.
