March 9th, 2012 | Published in New in the Gallery
This week I added the twelve football cards from the 1952 Wheaties multi-sport set to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. For details on the cards, see my 1952 Wheaties page. For a survey of other football cards that were distributed with food products, see one of my previous blog articles, W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues.
March 30th, 2010 | Published in Interesting eBay Auctions
This uncut sheet of 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns cards was on eBay last week. 1946 was the Browns’ first year; they were part of the new eight-team All-American Football Conference. The Browns were the AAFC champions all four years of the league’s existence, 1946-1949, and they joined the NFL when the AAFC folded in 1950. As far as I know, these Sears cards were the only cards printed of an AAFC team.
Conspicuously absent from this set are Marion Motley and Bill Willis, African American stars who later made the Pro Football Hall of Fame. According to Willis’s Wikipedia page, the two did not play in the Browns’ 1946 game against the Miami Seahawks, because they were forbidden by law to play against white players in Miami.
This small Sears set contains pre-rookie cards of three other Hall of Fame players: Otto Graham, Dante Lavelli, and Frank Gatski. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) The black-and-white head shots are nice, but otherwise the cards are unremarkable: all eight have the same ad on the front and the team’s 1946 schedule on the back.
The set is rare–these particular cards are the first I have seen–so it is hard to assign a value to the cards. The highest bid in this auction was $2000, and it did not meet the seller’s reserve. Perhaps the seller will list it again with a better description and a scan that shows the corners of the sheet.
For more interesting auctions, see my other Interesting eBay Auctions articles.
January 6th, 2010 | Published in Interesting eBay Auctions, Interesting Message Board Threads, Oddball
Today a collector on the Collectors Universe message boards posted pictures of 5 uncut panels of 1952 Wheaties Champions cards. From the looks of it, his panels are in great shape. The Wheaties Champions set is a multi-sport set, and it includes women as well as men. There are 10 cards on each panel, so the collector has 50 of the 60 cards in the set.
There are thirty athletes in the set, with each athlete appearing on both a portrait card and an “in action” card. Six of the athletes are football players: Doak Walker, Otto Graham, John Lujack, Tom Fears, Glenn Davis, and Bob Waterfield. I haven’t yet added the football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but since there are only a few of them, I’ll try to do that sometime soon. There is currently a full set listed on eBay, but I’ll probably pick up individual cards as they become available. Surprisingly, though they were hand-cut from the boxes, most of the cards I see are in pretty good condition. I infer from this that people saved the full boxes, and the cards I’m seeing were cut from boxes relatively recently.
