Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

As I wrote in an earlier post, it will take me several steps to add the 1972 Sunoco Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Last night I skipped ahead and finished step #4: Add player information (college, etc.) to player database. Now when you do a search by college, the Sunoco Stamps are included in the search. (To search by college, see the Search by College page or the Advanced Search page.)

Now everything’s done except the scanning. I finished the Atlanta Falcons and Baltimore Colts, so I have just 24 teams to go. Whew.

In a comment on my last article about the stamps, Rob Lewis, the eBay seller who sold me the set, offered to send a copy of the order form for the update stamps to anyone who sends him an SASE. He also added some remarks about the update set. To see his comment, go to the article and scroll toward the bottom. Rob said the stamp album–which I still haven’t opened–contains 144 stamps, too. So I guess those 144 would be double-printed and a little easier to find? When I finish scanning–sometime next year–maybe I’ll summarize the different ways you could obtain the stamps, show which ones were replaced by updates, etc.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I bought a set of 1972 Sunoco stamps on eBay. Well, I received them, and I’m very pleased. The stamps are just as described, and the seller packed them well: stars in sleeves and top loaders, and commons in team bags. The auction included a deluxe stamp album, and the seller also threw in a checklist and two stamps from the update set. (They’re the Norm Thompson and Dave Costa stamps pictured here.) It was great fun opening the package: I kept pulling out more and more stuff! The seller, rl1114, has lots of other items for sale, too, so check him out.

It will probably take me months to scan the stamps for the Vintage Football Card Gallery, so I’ll write blog entries for intermediate steps. So far I entered all of the players’ names, added personal information (college, position, hometown, etc.) for some of the players, and scanned the five pre-rookie stamps in the set so I could add them to my pre-rookie card page. Two of the pre-rookies are pictured here: Dan Dierdorf and Art Shell.

The stamp album is still in its original shrink wrap, but I’m curious, so I’ll probably have to unwrap it. Maybe that will be my next article on the set.

I mentioned in O is for Oddball that someday I would buy a set of 1972 Sunoco stamps. “Someday” came sooner than I thought: I picked up a set last night. I bought them mainly to add to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and now I have a lot of work to do. Here’s the process:

1. Scan all 624 stamps and number the scans.
2. Create thumbnail pictures from the scans.
3. Enter all 624 stamps in my card database: stamp number, player, team, errors, etc.
4. Check for players I don’t have in my player database, look them up online, and add them: name, position, college, hometown, etc.
5. Back up the gallery site, in case I botch something.
6. Upload all the new stuff to the gallery site.
7. Update the various pages that refer to the set, such as the home page, O is for Oddball page, and pre-rookies page.
8. Test it all.
9. Write a blog post to announce the addition and say something about the stamps.

I’ve automated some of the process, so there’s not much thinking involved anymore. The scanning and data entry still take plenty of time, though. It’s a good thing I love the hobby!

To a card collector, “oddballs” are collectible items that have some characteristics of cards–small size, two dimensions, pictures of players, team logos, and so on–but are not traditional trading cards. Some examples are coins, bottle caps, cap liners, discs, stamps, stickers, patches, pins, and playing cards. Many of them came on or in packages of food. Some were regional and featured a particular team.

I distinguish oddball items from inserts (see I is for Inserts), though some inserts also fit the description above. Why? Well, since inserts came in packs of cards, most of them are familiar to collectors, and there are enough of them to group them into a category of their own. Oddball items are the unfamiliar, the hard to categorize, the things that go under “miscellaneous.” They have brand names you might never have heard of, like Glendale and Drenks and Salada.

Any number of items can be considered oddball, and I’ll list just a few here. I don’t collect many of them–you have to draw a line somewhere–so I’ll mostly provide links to other places. The only oddballs I have in my collection are playing cards and stamps, which aren’t too far removed from trading cards.

Stamps

I am familiar four sets of vintage football stamps that were not inserts, and there are probably more. You can see 1964 Wheaties Stamps, 1969 Glendale Stamps, and 1972 Sunoco Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and there is also a set of 1972 NFLPA Wonderful World Stamps, which I don’t yet have. Each of the sets had an accompanying album into which you could stick the stamps. A 1964 Wheaties stamp of Raymond Berry is pictured here.

Discs

1976 was the year of the disc. Five sets of football discs were printed that year: Coke Bears Discs, Crane (potato chip) Discs, Buckman Discs, Saga Discs, and Pepsi Discs.

1976 is newer than I typically deal with, and I have never had much interest in the discs, so I don’t know a lot about them. I assume that the same company printed all of them, since I don’t know of any others printed before or since 1976. A friend sent me a couple of Crane Discs once; they’re about the size of a beer coaster. Pictured here is one of them, Charley Taylor.

The PSA registry shows all of the players in the disc sets, and you can see lots of examples on eBay.

• 1976 Buckmans Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Coke Bears Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Crane Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Pepsi Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Saga Discs: composition, examples

Playing Cards

I initially included playing cards under Oddball items, but there are enough of them that I thought they deserved their own category. See P is also for Playing Cards for a list of vintage playing cards that picture NFL and college football players.

Other Oddballs

As I said at the top, I don’t own many oddball items, and my knowledge of them is limited. Here are a few more, along with links to the set compositions and some examples. As I learn more about them, I’ll give these oddballs sections of their own. If I am missing your favorite, let me know and I’ll add it here.

• Previous: N is for National Chicle
• Next: P is for Philadelphia
• All of the ABCs