A favorite Feller photo

Bob Feller's failing health has been in the hobby news lately. The oldest living Hall of Famer has been involved in the sportscard and memorabilia hobby for well over 30 years as an autograph guest and speaker at card shows.

In that period he developed an understanding of the hobby with a special appreciation of collectors who were also knowledgeable baseball fans.

In that spirit, Feller was a celebrity contestant in a baseball card flipping contest at the 1985 National Sports Collectors Convention in Anaheim. I recently rediscovered some photos from that event that were taken by then-editor Steve Ellingboe of Sports Collectors Digest.

Back in '85, the card flipping contest was just one of many activities that took place at the National. The show back then wasn't strictly the buy-sell venue that it has since become. There used to be guest speakers, educational presentations, a softball game and other diversions.

The celebrity portion of the card flipping contest may have been unique to the 1985 convention. In the photo here, Feller is shown making a toss, while Chuck Connors waits for his turn. I no longer recall what other celebrities may have been involved. It is my recollection that Feller won the contest.

I just thought you might enjoy this photo of Bob Feller in a different kind of pitching action.

A half-century old collecting memory

An "Odds and Ends" item on the sports page a couple of week ago shot me back more than 50 years ago as it brought into focus a childhood card-collectring memory.

The article was a brief obituary for former Green Bay Packers receiver (and sometimes running back) Lew Carpenter, who had been one of Vince Lombardi's first acquisitions upon taking over as Packers coach in 1959.

A 1959 Topps Lew Carpenter card was one of the first vintage football cards I reaquired when I got back into card collecting in the late 1970s. I probably paid 50 cents for the card at one of the area card shows; or maybe it was a buck, since it was a Packers card being bought in Wisconsin.

My purchase of the card back then, and retention ever since, wasn't based on any special interest in Carpenter as a player, since I don't recall having even seen him play on TV.

Rather, my interest in the card stemmed from the recollection of the first time I saw it. Some bubblegum cards have that effect on me. A look at them today can send me back in time to a vivid childhood memory.

In the case of Lew Carpenter, I was transported back to an early autumn day in 1959. I was walking home after school, but I hadn't gone directly home. I had made a lengthy detour to get to Zwicker's, one of the corner grocery stores that were uniquitous in the days before "supermarkets."

Someone at school had probably brought in some of the new year's football cards that day, and I had to get some for myself, even if it meant trekking to an out of the way neighborhood to spend my nickel. I guess I didn't want to take the chance of having to check all of the stores closer to home in hopes of finding the new cards.

My memory is that the first time I laid eyes on the 1959 Lew Carpenter card I was walking in front of Jim Hoey's house, about a block from the store, when the familiar Packers logo caught my eye. I suppose that first block of the walk home had been traversed as I turned the brightly colored wax pack over and over, admiring the new design.

I don't remember who else might have been in that first football card pack of 1959, but I'll never forget Lew Carpenter's card that made the extra-long walk home worthwhile.

Now, as Paul Harvey used to say, here's the rest of the story. That detour to Zwicker's store added a full mile to my usual half-mile walk home . . . and I was eight years old.

In this day of Amber alerts, helicopter parents and a cell phone in every backpack, some may find it nearly incredible that a third-grader was allowed to walk home alone from school enjoying the simple pleasure of a piece of bubblegum and a handful of shiny new football cards. I survived, and so did my love of bubblegum cards,

Frank Thomas Auburn custom card

It has been an exceptionally long time since my last posting. In the interim I have made my first-ever move to a winter residence. Attempts to secure reliable internet service have been the principal reason I haven't been posting.

At my "home" office in Wisconsin, I had fast, reliable DSL internet access that I now realize I had been taking for granted. Here in central Pennsylvania I struggle to attain and maintain internet connection for both my day job and for my hobby undertakings.

Preparing for, executing, and recbounding from the move also ate up the free time I customarily would be using to work on my custom cards body of work.

I'm happy to return to this forum with a new creation that allows me to put a most satisfying red X on one of the top items on my wish list of cards to create.

Some months back I enumerated a dozen or more custom card projects that were being held in abeyance for lack of a suitable player photo. Several readers have stepped forward with either actual photos, or suggestions that will allow me to make great strides on whitlling down that wish list over the coming months.

The most welcome contribution came from Illinois collector Kraig Kahler, who was able to hook me up with a picture of Frank Thomas in an Auburn football uniform.

Kraig initially wrote that such a picture had been included in a feature in a 1991 issue of Beckett Future Stars magazine, back in the hey days of rookie-card fever and speculation.

The scan he sent from the magazine showed exactly the type of photo I had been looking for over these past many years. It appears to be a university athletic department publicity shot of Thomas in action.

While Kraig didn't want to risk breaking up his magazine collection to send me the issue so that I could make a high-res scan, he went out on eBay and found a copy of the magazine for less that $4 delivered to my door.

When I first laid eyes on the Thomas picture, the image of the 1955 Topps All-American football card of Nebraska star Bob Reynolds leapt to mind. The Cornhusker's card is one of the vertically formatted cards in the 1955 AA set, and features a full-length action pose. That card became the template for the Frank Thomas card I was going to add to my 1955 Updates. As you'll see, that plan eventually fell by the wayside.

My initial design involved dropping a colorized version of the Thomas picture onto the stadium background of the Reynolds card. Yet, when I had done so, the result didn't bowl me over. The image of Thomas was just too small for my liking. After looking at the card for a couple of days, I decided that cropping the photo from full-length to waist-up, and going with a horizontal format was way to go.

In making that switch, I was able to add little more than 40% to the size of the Thomas image. I believe this makes a much nicer card. After all, if I'm going to make a Frank Thomas football card, I want to make a card on which the future Hall of Famer is instantly recognizable.

With the design completed on my computer, my challenges weren't yet totally overcome. The printed I have been using for the past year or so to produce my cards gave up the ghost soon after I got it set up in my new office. After two days of fiddling with it, I determined that the print carriage was no longer functional.

That all-in-one HP OfficeJet printer had been a pain in my neck since its purchase. It had taken several days of work by real computer pros to even get the thing to work in the first place. At one point a hired tech had spent a full eight-hour day on the phone with various levels of HP techies without success. Finally the software-hardware guy at work took over control of my computer remotely and was able to bring the printer up to at least minimal functionality.

That experience had convinced me that I was not going to be buying an HP printer this go-round. After a half-day of on-line shopping, mostly spent reading customer reviews, I decided to go with a Canon PIXMA MP560. Set up was relatively painless, and I've been plased with the first color card images that have been forthcoming. As a bonus, this printer has an optional back feeder that may allow me to begin actually printing on card stock; I'll be experimenting with just how thick a stock it will digest in the coming weeks.

Ultimately, the ability to print my card fronts on cardboard stock could greatly reduce the time it takes for me to bring my efforts from a computer concept to a card in hand.

In any case, I am able to be back in production with my custom cards. That will make the gray days of winter go by much more pleasantly.

Some light shed on mystery Jimmy Waytt card

A veteran West Coast hobbyist and long-time professional baseball photographer has provided some interesting insight into the "1956 Remar Bread" card of Jimmy Wyatt that we wrote about a while back.

Doug McWilliams, a long-time Oakland Oaks collector and fan, wrote. "I saw your musings about Jimmy Wyatt and the 1956 Oaks card. I would say it is strictly a vanity card.The image used is not Mr.Wyatt. It is Dick Wakefield and it matches exactly his 1950 Remar/Sunbeam card --on the front.

"I own the original 4x5 negative used for that card," McWilliams wrote, " and have several glossy prints of same. My original has much more surrounding image on the negative than the real card does. The 'JimmyWyatt' card matches exactly the cropping of the 1950 Wakefield. I'd guess he used maybe the original printer's image (negatives, plates, etc.), but I doubt it.

"Maybe he worked in the same print shop that did the 1950 Remars, and came upon them in 1956, and printed them for fun, which might explain the coloring, toning of age, with the paper. Or, maybe he came up with some 'old' paper recently, and did them. Ihave unused paper that's 50-60 years old around here. The speculation is endless."

McWilliams continued, "If you look up minor league ball players, there is a James Wyatt listed,he would have been 20 in 1956 (not 22), he was the same weight, but not the same height. And -- he never got past 2 years in 'D' ball. I'd guess the card is for another Jimmy Wyatt.

Doug McWilliams was a major league photographer from 1969 through 1995, 24 years of that for Topps. He also shot for himself, and did B&W and color postcards for the players' personal use. His pre-1981 player postcards are listed in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

Trying to top Topps' 74 Namath

As I said in my Oct. 27 posting when I introduced by 1977 Topps-style football card of Joe Namath in a Los Angeles Rams unifiorm, an apparent contract dispute between Topps and Broadway Joe prevented Namath's appearance on a Topps card after 1973.

Few collectors have ever seen the proof card Topps prepared for its 1974 football set before Namath pulled the plug. As far as I know, there are at least two examples of the blank-back proof 1974 Topps Joe Namath card. Larry Fritsch showed me the one he had more than 25 years ago. In 2004, Heritage Auctions sold an example for $2,340. I'd be surprised if more than two or three other examples of the Namath proof card exist.

In one way, that's not a bad thing, because what Topps was contemplating issuing in 1974 was one ugly-ass card.
I never planned to do any other Topps-style Joe Namath cards for those missing years, but when I gave the '74 proof another look, I thought it might be fun to see if I could improve on the Topps prototype.

For my 1974-style card I decided to adhere to the spirit of Topps' license in that period. That is, since Topps didn't have a license with the NFL, they couldn't depict uniform or helmet logos. Most of the 528 cards in the 1974 set have players in portrait or posed-action photos, usually bare-headed. (The cards are a great resource for researching football player hair styles in the mid-1970s.)

The few game-action photos in the set have been airbrushed to eliminate helmet and jersery logos.

My search for a helmet-less pose of Namath offered few decent choices that dated to that era, but I was fortunate enough to find an eminently suitable picture, as shown here.

As mentioned, the 1974 Topps proof card of Namath is blank-backed. I created a back that I have put on both my reprint of the proof and on my custom card.

I'll let you be the judge of whether I was able to improve on the Topps product, at least in this one instance.

Tribute cards to a personal favorite

Sometimes it's hard to say why a collector chooses a player as a personal favorite. That was the case with me and Johnny Sample. I don't know whether it began when I first saw his 1960 Topps rookie card, which remains to my mind one of the most visually appealing football cards of its time, or whether it was my natural teenage contrarian tendancy to embrace what others loathed. And many was the Packers fan in the 1960s that cursed Sample as an uppity something-or-other as he laid out another Green and Gold receiver.

I remember reading his book, Confessions of a Dirty Football Player, published in 1970, after his reitrement. That candid assessment of professional football as he lived it was to the NFL establishment what Jim Bouton's Ball Four was to Major League Baseball. I'm going to order a copy from Amazon and re-read it. I suggest you do the same, or at least google him and read some of the articles available on the internet.

In gathering information for my 1955-style Johnny Sample card, I had to go all the way back to the basics, since I didn't even know what college he had played for.

Turns out Sample was perhaps the finest all-around athlete ever to play for Maryland State. That school, one of what is now known as an Historically Black College/University, last fielded a football team in 1979 and is now known as University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

From 1954-58 Sample starred on the gridiron as a running back, defensive back, punt and kick returner and punter/place kicker. He was named a first-team Black College All-American in 1955 and 1957. His teams had a 28-1-1- record and he earned the distinction of being the first player from an HBCU team selected to play in the College All-Star Game.

Sample also played basketball as a freshman, was a member of the track team and was said to be an accomplished gymnast. On the baseball diamond, he was a slugging, base-stealing all-star second baseman, named the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association Player of the Year in 1958 and earning a contract offer from the Philadelphia Phillies.

Sample chose to sign with the Baltimore Colts after they made him a seventh round pick (#79 overall) in the 1958 NFL draft. In 11 pro seasons, Sample gained the reputation as a hard-nosed -- some would say dirty -- defensive back. If he didn't exactly invent the art of trash-talking and the bump and run, he raised those intimidation techniques to a fine art. He also backed up his bravado with studious preparation for games, keeping elaborate notes on pass receivers' tendencies.

Sample's bellicose nature and unwillingness to to stifle himself concerning the black man's place in pro football and in the USA at large made him unpopular with coaches, league officials and most of the mainstream media. His on-field play, however, meant there was always some team willing to give him a job.

In his career, Sample was on the winning side of two of the NFL's most famous games. In the 1958 NFL Championship Game, often called the "Greatest Game Ever Played," Sample intercepted two passes in the fourth quarter, including a 42-yard touchdown, the help the Colts defeat the Giants 23-17 in overtime in the game that many say began the NFL's rise to domination in American sports.

At the other end of his career, Sample was co-captain of the 1968 N.Y. Jets. His interception of an Earl Morrall pass on the Colts' two-yard line helped the Jets cement Joe Namath's guarantee of a Super Bowl III win over the Colts, establishing the AFL's parity with the NFL and assuring the eventual merger of the two leagues.

Sample retired from football after the 1968 season. He owned a ticket agency and the Sample's End Zone sporting goods store. in Philadelphia, where he also hosted a talk radio program for a time. Most impressive to me, however, was that after more than a decade of being pounded in the NFL, Sample took up tennis. As a player he earned a No. 1 ranking in the over-45 age grioup of the American Tennis Association. He also became a professional linesman, officiating at top tennis evgents all over the world. Off the court he sponsored grass-roots tennis programs for kids and sponsoring tournaments.

Sample remained politically active, as well. In 1986 he organized 73 buses from Philadelphia and northern New Jersey to ride to Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March.

Sample died from complications of heart disease in 2005, at the age of 68.

For whatever reason(s), Sample was a favorite of mine, which was too bad because as a kid there was virtually nothing in the way of his football cards to collect. In terms of mainstream cards, he appears only in the 1960 Topps set and, as a Redskin, in the 1966 Philadelphia Gum set (after he had joined the N.Y. Jets). I see on eBay that he also has at least one Kahn's Weiners card and probably appears on a few other regionals over his 11-year pro career.

I don't know how seriously I'm going to approach re-creating a football card legacy for Sample, but I've got some great photos of him from his early years with the Colts, a really super Redskins pose, and a late-career photo in a Jets uniform. With so many other card projects on the docket, it will be hard to devote too much time to just one player, but it's going to be a long winter, so who knows what will happen.
I'll keep you posted.

1955 Burger Beer checklist expands

As promised last time, we're going to take a new look at the issue that has been listed in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards as 1955 Burger Beer Cincinatti Reds premium pictures.

The impetus for this is the recent receipt of scans that were previously lacking, and a near doubling of the checklist for this set.

In the course of my cataloging work over the years I have worked with several dedicated Reds' specialists on building and updating checklists for the Burger Beer premium pictures. Names that come to mind as especially helpful in that work are Len Samworth, Moe Ryan, Bob Montgomery and Mark Reed. The latter was instrumental in allowing us to finally picture and to greatly expand the checklist for 1955 Burger Beer premium pictures.

Burger Beer was one of the Reds' staunch sponsors and (presumably) stadium concessionaires in the 1950s and 1960s. In that period they produced several distinctive styles of Reds' player pictures, though the manner of distribution is unknown . . . at least to me. The pictures may have been given as point-of-purchase handouts, or possibly used to satisfy fan requests for a favorite player's picture.

The Burger Beer premiums are all similar in format. They vary a bit in size, but all have portraits or posed action black-and-white photos on front, surrounded by fairly wide white borders. In the bottom border are some combination of player name (sometimes first and last, sometimes only last name), position, team name and team logo. Backs are generally blank, except for a few issues that have a short advertising message at the bottom.

Dating of the Burger Beer pictures is problematic and in the SCBC, they have been assigned to their various "sets" rather arbitrarily, generally based on shared photo characteristics and the uniform worn by the player, even when the players depicted might not have been on the Reds' roster in a given year. To me, these anomalies suggest that more than one style of picture may have been produced in any given season. Some players, in fact, are shown in the same pictures in different years, sometimes with minor cropping variations.

The issue that we have cataloged as 1955 is one of those "Burger Beer" sets that may or may not actually have any connection to the brewery, since the pictures lack the ad message found on the issues of 1956-1957 and 1958-1959. Based on their similarlity of format to the known Burger Beer issues, however, collectors have accepted them as part of that family.

The 1955 premiums are the most visually appealing of the bunch. Besides large, sharp player action poses or portraits, the fronts feature the iconic Mr. Red anthropomorphized baseball logo in each corner of the wide bottom border. Centered on front at bottom, in either two or three lines of type, are the player name, position and, on most but not all pictures, team name.

It is possible this style of picture was begun in 1954 and continued into 1955, based on the fact that two of the known pictures in this format are of players who were traded away from Cincinnati in the 1954 postseason.

Previous editions of the catalog included no photo, and only 13 players on the checklist. We're happy to be able to greatly expand that checklist and to finally share with you images of this set.

(1) Bobby Adams

(2) Dr. Wayne Anderson (trainer)

(3) Fred Baczewski

(4) Ed Bailey

(5) Gus Bell

(6) Rocky Bridges

(7) Jackie Collum

(8) Art Fowler

(9) Jim Greengrass

(10) Charlie Harmon

(11) Ray Jablonski

(12) Johnny Klippstein

(13) Ted Kluszewski

(14) Roy McMillan

(15) Rudy Minarcin

(16) Joe Nuxhall

(17) Harry Perkowski (traded to Cubs, Oct. 1, 1954)

(18) Wally Post

(19) Frank Smith (traded to Cubs, Dec. 8, 1954)

(20) Gerry Staley

(21) Birdie Tebbetts

(22) Johnny Temple

As always, your reports of additions or corrections to this checklist are encouraged, if you can provide documentation in the form of a scan or photocopy.