May 30th, 2013 |
Published in
Milestone Birthdays
Hall of Fame running back Gale Sayers is celebrating his 70th birthday today. Sayers played from 1965 to 1971 for the Chicago Bears, and he was named first team All-NFL in five of his seven seasons. He led the league in rushing in 1966 and 1969, in yards from scrimmage in 1966, and in all-purpose yards in 1965, 1966, and 1967. In 1965 he also led the NFL in scoring, with 132 points.
Sayers is pictured here on his 1971 Bazooka football card. He appeared on many more cards, stamps, and stickers, as well.
Happy birthday, Mr. Sayers!
April 19th, 2011 |
Published in
New in the Gallery, Oddball
Yesterday I added 1971 Bazooka football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 36 cards in the set, with at least one player from each of the 26 NFL teams. The cards were printed, three per box, on the bottoms of 25-cent boxes of Bazooka bubble gum. There are nice pictures of two empty boxes in the Redskins Football Card Museum.
I wouldn’t categorize the set as either a regular issue or a food issue, so I’m filing them under Oddball. A big thanks to Mike Ford for providing the images.
December 21st, 2010 |
Published in
General Collecting Info, New in the Gallery
The 1966 Philadelphia football card set contains 198 cards, and it was almost certainly printed on a single, standard 264-card sheet. This means that 66 cards were repeated on the sheet, and so there are 66 double prints in the set. The price guides have not identified the double prints, however.
By comparing an uncut half-sheet with PSA’s population report, I believe I was able to identify the double prints in the set. I added an explanation to my 1966 Philadelphia virtual uncut sheet page and marked the cards I think are double prints in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.
I haven’t seen the second half-sheet, so I could be wrong. Those who collect the set know, though, that some cards are much easier to find than others, and the cards I have chosen as double prints match up pretty well with cards that are easy to find.
The Gale Sayers rookie card, shown here, is one of the double prints. PSA has graded nearly twice as many examples of this card than of Dick Butkus’s rookie card, which is also in this set.
August 26th, 2010 |
Published in
Interesting eBay Auctions, New in the Gallery, Oddball
Yesterday I added 1972 NFLPA Iron Ons to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These are patches that you could (and still can!) iron onto your clothes to impress your friends. Beckett calls them “Fabric Cards,” but they aren’t cards at all: they’re cloth, not cardboard, and they’re floppy.
There are 35 patches in the set, with 22 of the 26 NFL teams represented. Oddly, there are no Bengals, Oilers, Eagles, or Rams in the set, but there are four Chargers, and the Chargers were a losing team at the time. Perhaps Deacon Jones was supposed to represent the Rams in the set, but he was traded to the Chargers before the 1972 season.
Most of the NFLPA patches have a blue background, but there are six with a pink background, one with white, one with yellow, and one with green. I don’t think the colors are significant, but the distribution is odd, so perhaps I am missing something. There are no logos or trademarks on the patches, but John Brockington and Jim Plunkett appear in their College All-Star jerseys, complete with stars on the shoulders. Brockington and Plunkett also appear in their All-Star jerseys on their 1972 Topps cards, but Topps airbrushed the stars off of them.
According to Beckett, the NFLPA patches were sold from vending machines. When researching them, I found a couple of related items on eBay: a promo package and a vending machine display, pictured below. Interestingly, the list of players on the vending machine display does not match the list of players in the set: some players in the set are not on the display, and some players on the display are not in the set. Pity the poor young Bob Lilly fan, who kept chucking quarters into the machine, trying to get a patch of his hero!
