Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Happy Flag Day! In honor of the day, I found a few football cards that have American flags waving in the background. First, three cards in the 1950 Bowman set: Tank Younger, Bill Wightkin, and Fred Naumetz. My guess is that someone drew the flags by hand on all of these while adding color to the original black and white images. The image on Tank Younger’s 1950 Bowman card, for example, is the same as the one on his 1950-1952 Exhibit card, but there is no flag on the Exhibit card.

Next are Y.A. Tittle’s 1958 Topps and 1960 Topps cards. The images on these two cards appear to have come from the same photo shoot.

Here’s the last one I found, Paul Hornung’s 1965 Philadelphia card. I was surprised that I didn’t find any newer than this. Can you think of others?

This week I added 1959 Bazooka football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These cards were hand-cut from the bottoms of boxes of Bazooka bubble gum. Y.A. Tittle, of course, is pictured in his helmet. (As I wrote in an earlier article, Tittle is wearing his helmet on nearly all of his cards.)

See the Gallery for more information on the 1959 Bazooka set.

Ever wonder why all of the Baltimore Colts in the 1950 Bowman set are wearing green? Did Bowman take liberties with the team’s colors, as Topps did with the Houston Oilers in 1961? (See Houston Oilers: Pretty in Pink.) Did the team change colors from green to blue sometime after 1950?

No, the 1950 Colts were actually a different franchise than today’s Colts. The original Colts were members of the AAFC, and they were one of three teams to join the NFL when the AAFC folded after the 1949 season. This Colts team lasted just one year in the NFL before disbanding, and in 1951 the Colts players were made available to the remaining teams via the draft.

In 1953, the NFL awarded a Baltimore group a new franchise and gave it the remnants of the original Dallas Texans, a franchise that had lasted just one year in Dallas. The new Colts wore blue, and they’ve worn blue ever since. A nice article by Bob Carroll on the profootballresearchers.com web site traces the lineage of the two Colts franchises and the other AAFC teams.

Pictured here are cards of two of the Colts cards in the 1950 Bowman set, Y.A. Tittle and Chet Mutryn. You can see the entire 1950 Bowman Baltimore Colts team set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Here’s a bit of trivia: Besides Y.A. Tittle, what Hall of Fame quarterback played for the Colts in 1950?

Answer: George Blanda. The Bears traded Blanda and four other players to the Colts on September 5. Blanda played in one game for the Colts, and the Bears bought him back on September 20.

One of my readers, Steve, recently called my attention to the card shown here, a 1949 Silber’s Bakery Colts Y.A. Tittle card. Huggins & Scott has the card up for sale in their current auction, and they kindly let me copy the image.

I hadn’t seen this Tittle card before, and I hadn’t heard of the Silber’s Bakery issue. Reader Steve also sent me a link to a book, called Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, that contains a description of the Silber’s Bakery set and pictures of two more of the cards. (One of the cards pictured in the book is Rex Grossman, grandfather of Redskins quarterback Rex Grossman III. The elder Grossman played for the Colts and Lions from 1948 to 1950.) There are also pictures of a few Silber’s cards on the SGC web site, along with a full list of the cards in the set.

Tittle’s Silber’s Bakery card is a pre-rookie card; his rookie card is a 1950 Bowman. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) It is also one of the few cards on which Tittle appears bareheaded. As I wrote in an earlier article, Tittle apparently preferred to wear his helmet for photos. The image on his Silber’s card is the nearly the same as the one on his 1951 Bowman card, shown here. I imagine that whoever colored his jersey 49ers red enhanced the trees in the background, as well.

In 1949, when the Silber’s Bakery cards were issued, the Colts were still in the All-America Football Conference, or AAFC. The Silber’s set is now the second set of AAFC cards I have learned about, the other being the 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns set I wrote about a few weeks ago.

In 1950, the AAFC folded, and three teams from the AAFC–the Colts, Browns, and 49ers–joined the NFL. This Colts team disbanded after the 1950 season, and Tittle joined the 49ers. Three years later, the Dallas Texans moved to Baltimore and changed their nickname to the Colts. The second Colts franchise stayed in Baltimore until 1984, when they moved to Indianapolis.

Judging by his football cards, Y.A. Tittle seldom took off his helmet. From 1953 to 1964, the only Tittle card I know of that shows him bareheaded is his 1961 Topps card. Here he is in his many helmets:

I think it must have been Tittle’s preference to wear his helmet for photos, since I can’t think of any other player who appeared helmeted on so many cards. As I’ve written before, I usually don’t like images of players wearing their helmets, because the helmets cover too much of the players’ faces. But Y.A.’s many appearances in his helmet made him look natural in it, like Doonesbury’s B.D.

Yesterday I added 1955 49ers Team Issue photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The photos are bigger than cards, at just under 5×7, and I had to order extra-large toploaders for storing them. They came in the original envelope, pictured below. The photos, amazingly, are in much better condition than the envelope.

The photos are sharp black-and-whites, and each includes a facsimile of the player’s signature. On the back of each photo is a glowing biography of the player on the front. (Hardy Brown‘s bio calls him “the most feared linebacker in the game because of his fantastic ‘shoulder tackle’ which uncoils like a pile driver and causes many fumbles”!) Most of the images of the well-known players are familiar, since they also appear in color on 1950s Bowman and Topps cards. Being a team issue, though, the set also includes numerous players who never appeared on cards. In the 50s and 60s, the major card companies printed cards of only 10-12 players from each team, and most linemen and defensive players were left out. I love team sets for this reason: I get to see players I’ve never seen before.

There are 38 photos in the set, and it includes photos of the 49ers’ coaches and their TV and radio announcers. I imagine that in the 50’s, the announcers for each team were as familiar to fans as the players, so it was natural to include them in a team set.

The set includes six Pro Football Hall of Fame players, including the four members of the 49ers’ “Million Dollar Backfield”: Y.A. Tittle, Hugh McElhenny, Joe Perry, and John Henry Johnson.

I pick up bits of trivia here and there, and I thought I’d pass them on via a quiz. The questions will be about the players, not the football cards, so you don’t have to be a card collector to answer them. (You can probably find some of the answers on cards, though.)

So here we go, Question #1: What do the five players pictured here have in common? Scroll down slowly; the answer is after the strategically placed sponsored links.

For more information on a card, click on it or hold your cursor over it.

Sponsored Links

Answer: They share the record for the most touchdown passes in a game, with 7. Nope, no Dan Marino, Brett Favre, Tom Brady, or Peyton Manning! Source: NFL Passing Records page of nfl.com.

• Sid Luckman, Chi. Bears vs. N.Y. Giants, Nov. 14, 1943
• Adrian Burk, Philadelphia vs. Washington, Oct. 17, 1954
• George Blanda, Houston vs. N.Y. Titans, Nov. 19, 1961
• Y.A. Tittle, N.Y. Giants vs. Washington, Oct. 28, 1962
• Joe Kapp, Minnesota vs. Baltimore, Sept. 28, 1969

• Next question

Today I added 1964 Wheaties Stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. When I bought my first group of these stamps, I assumed that they would be the thickness of a card, like the 1969 Topps 4-in-1 inserts. I found, though, that they’re like postage stamps, only much bigger: 2 3/4 by 2 1/2 inches. Because they’re so big and on such thin paper, they are fragile, and bending one can leave an indentation, even if it doesn’t leave a crease.

There are 74 stamps in the set: 70 player photos and 4 team emblems. The player photos are sharp and bright. Most of the photos are waist-up or head-and-shoulders shots, and Y.A. Tittle is the only player whose face is obscured by his helmet. (Tittle must have preferred posing in his helmet. Most of his cards picture him wearing it.) My two favorite stamps, Jerry Kramer and John Henry Johnson, are shown here.

The stamps go with a magazine-sized booklet called the Wheaties NFL Pro Bowl Football Player Stamp Album and Fact Book–or WNPBFPSAFB for short. You could buy the album for 50 cents via a mail-in offer from General Mills. The stamps were originally part of the album, most of them on pages just inside the back and front covers. There were 6 pages of stamps, with 12 stamps on each page. That makes 72 stamps, and there were 2 more on a small panel adhered to the inside of the front cover. In my album, the tab from the small panel is still there, and there are remnants of the stamp pages along the album’s spine.

The 6 full pages were printed on a single master sheet, as you can see on the Topps Vault web site. (Evidently Topps supplied the stamps and album for General Mills.) The master sheet is missing two stamps, Norm Snead and Jack Pardee, the two that came on the small panel stuck to the inside of the album’s front cover. This small panel seems odd, when Topps could have fit Snead and Pardee on the master sheet by displacing two of the team emblem stamps. Perhaps it was just poor planning: “Oh, crap, we forgot Snead and Pardee. Quick, make a little two-stamp panel!”

The non-stamp pages of the album include a short writeup for each player, and a place to stick his stamp. The players are grouped by conference, first the Eastern Conference players, then the Western Conference players. (The Pro Bowl back then matched the East against the West.) Within each conference, the players appear in alphabetical order–almost. I wonder how many kids noticed that Mitchell came before Michaels, and Promuto came before Pottios? Also, the album shows Jim Ringo in transition from the Packers to the Eagles: his writeup says Eagles, but he’s still on the Western Conference side of the album. (According to Packers legend, after the 1963 season, Ringo appeared with his agent in Vince Lombardi’s office, asking for a raise. Lombardi left the room, returned in five minutes, and told Ringo he’d been traded to the Eagles.)

All of the players on the stamps played in the 1963 Pro Bowl. According to pro-football-reference.com, there were 71 players in the Pro Bowl that year, so one Pro Bowler didn’t get a stamp. Who went stampless? It was Frank Gifford, but I don’t know why he was excluded.

Oddly, though there are 70 player stamps, the album has writeups for only 68 of the players. Joe Schmidt and Y.A. Tittle appear on stamps, but they were omitted from the album. It’s not like there wasn’t room: the creators of the album included several pages of Pro Bowl history, facts, and records, and they could easily have squeezed in another couple of players. Unless I am missing a page, though, there is no place for Schmidt and Tittle.

It’s also odd that there are only four team emblem stamps. The Vikings, 49ers, Cardinals, and Giants are the only teams with stamps, a pity because the team emblems are colorful and fun. There is no place in the album to stick the four team stamps, either.

• See all of the 1964 Wheaties Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery
• Find 1964 Wheaties Stamps on eBay

A few months ago I created a page called Mistaken Identities: Vintage Football Cards Picturing the Wrong Player. The page shows numerous cards that show the wrong player in the main photo. I learned from my Beckett catalog, though, that there are also a bunch of 1962 Topps cards that picture the wrong player in the black-and-white inset photo. What’s more, it appears that Topps faked a couple of these photos intentionally, altering the impostor’s jersey number to match the player on the card.

Here is one of the altered jersey numbers: the inset photo on Zeke Bratkowski’s 1962 Topps card actually shows John Unitas, with his number changed from 19 to 12. Topps apparently couldn’t find a good game photo of Bratkowski, though he had been in the league for eight years. It’s too bad, because Bratkowski took great action shots. On his his 1962 Post Cereal card, he’s throwing while going down, and on his 1958 Topps card, he’s leaping over palm trees!

The second altered jersey is on Fran Tarkenton’s rookie card. Beckett says that it’s Sonny Jurgensen in the inset photo, with his number changed from 9 to 10. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but did Topps leave the Eagle wings on Jurgensen’s helmet?

The third impostor is on Roman Gabriel’s rookie card. On this card, the player in the inset photo is clearly Y.A. Tittle. It is understandable that Topps didn’t have an NFL game shot of Gabriel, since 1962 was his first year in the league. This time they didn’t try to fool us: they just picked out a nice quarterback photo and called it good.

Last, we have a couple of Redskins. That’s Don Bosseler pictured in the inset photo of Dick James’s card. Bosseler didn’t appear in the 1962 Topps set on a card of his own, so it’s nice that they gave him a cameo. (He did, however, appear on a 1962 Post Cereal card.)