Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Raymond Berry, the Hall of Fame receiver of the Baltimore Colts, is celebrating his 80th birthday today. Berry played for the Colts from 1955 to 1967, and he was a key player on the Colts’ NFL Championship teams of 1958 and 1959. In 1960 he averaged 108 yards receiving per game, an NFL record at the time, and still the 11th-highest all-time average for a season. When he retired from playing, he held the NFL records for both career receptions and career receiving yards. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1973.

Berry went on to a long coaching career, including six seasons as the head coach of the New England Patriots. He coached the Patriots to their first Super Bowl appearance, Super Bowl XX, against the Chicago Bears. (The Bears won, 46-10.)

Berry is pictured here on his 1960 Topps football card and his 1964 Wheaties stamp. He appeared on many more cards, as well. (One of them, his 1967 Philadelphia card, actually pictures Bob Boyd.)

According to oldestlivingprofootball.com, Berry is the 494th oldest living pro football player.

Happy birthday, Mr. Berry!

You might recall that a couple of weeks ago I bought a lot of crudely hand-cut Baltimore Colts cards on eBay. Included in the lot was the 1961 Topps Raymond Berry card pictured below. The card to the left of the hacked-up Berry card appears to be Frank Ryan, so I was able to add a piece to my slowly growing 1961 Topps virtual uncut sheet. You can see my progress here.

For a full list of the virtual uncut sheets I have worked on, see the bottom of one of my previous blog articles, “U is for Uncut Sheets.”

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

Last week I added an error card search to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and since then I have been marking the error cards in my database. Here’s a good one: it’s a 1967 Philadelphia Raymond Berry card, but the image on the card is not Raymond Berry. Who is it? Check out the latest entry on my Mistaken Identities page.

My old Beckett catalog also lists a couple of other cards where the wrong player is pictured, but I can’t find other photos of the players to see for myself. One is 1955 Topps All-American #91, Bob Odell, which Beckett says pictures Howard Odell. Another is 1972 Topps #174, Adrian Young, which Beckett says pictures Rick Duncan. If I find other photos of these players, I will add the cards to the Mistaken Identites page.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Raymond Berry, Bob Boyd
• Search eBay for: Raymond Berry, Bob Boyd