Q&A

For the final post of 2010, let's make sure we get a police escort to help usher out the year...

Q:

"What exactly are Police Cards? I see them listed but never saw one. Were they given out by local police departments?"

A:

As a Steelers collector, I happen to have some Police cards. Here's one from 1985:

As you can see, these cards were sponsored by both the Giant Eagle supermarket chain and the Kiwanis club. It's a fairly basic team issue, with the Steelers' name above the photo and some vital info below. The backs look like this:

There's an explanation of a football term, but other year's cards featured positive things a player has done, such as finishing a college degree or winning an award. In bold font, a message for the owner of the card appears below that. This card says to avoid getting mixed up with drugs and alcohol, but others suggested staying in school, keeping safe and staying out of trouble.

Police cards were a joint effort among teams, businesses, community organizations and the police departments. Most of these cards were made and issued in the 1980s. A lot of them were football cards, but several baseball teams took part in the outreach as well. They were generally given to officers, who them distributed them to kids they encountered. In a way, they were meant to encourage kids to approach officers, rather than scatter whenever one showed up. Since they're found fairly easily as team sets, it appears many were siphoned off to dealers -- card dealers, not the unsavory dealers the police generally looked for -- instead.


Sadly, the Police card sets have seemed to stop since sometime in the early 1990s. They could still serve a purpose.

Three New Sets Added to My Website

I've been really bad.

My first duty here has been to build a reference site devoted to vintage baseball cards. And my website, which I've slowly been working on since 2000, has done that for the most part. From my first pages covering 1950s Topps and Bowman sets, I went back, hitting the 1930s gum sets and getting the major T-series sets in there as well. Then, I've filled in whenever I've had the time, info and an image.

However, there's always been some really obvious shortcomings with the site. The biggest one...is the lack of stuff from the 19th Century. While I realize that there aren't always going to be people looking for it, I know it's missing. I have added exactly three set descriptions to the site for sets from before 1900 in the past 10 years.

1895 Mayo Cut Plug (N300) was the first. It was added sometime in 2001. Then came N162 Goodwin Champions later that year. Finally, I added Buchner Gold Coin later on when I was given some terrific info about the set. But that's been all.

However, there's been no A&G sets, not even after I made a mental note to make them -- back in 2006 -- so I can capitalize on Topps bringing back the name. I need to do the same thing with Gypsy Queen, for the same reason. Finally, the "Big Daddy" of the N cards...Old Judge...is missing as well.

And what have I been doing all this time? Staying in the 1970s...keeping it in the Topps monopoly era...reminiscing about not being able to find a single 1986 Donruss card where I grew up. This is a vintage cards blog, and I've really lost sight of some of the truly great stuff out there that the vintage world offers collectors.

Well, that changes today. I've now placed three new set descriptions on my website:

N28 Allen & Ginter

This set was the first of two 50-card sets that featured athletes from several different sports. 10 of them were baseball players (6 of those went to Cooperstown), which has made this a very popular set over the years. Of course, the artwork doesn't detract from that fact a bit.

N29 Allen & Ginter

This was the second 50-card set, and this one covered a wider variety of sports. Yes, the big names of the N28 set are gone ("Wild Bill" Cody, Annie Oakley, John L. Sullivan), and the baseball players aren't quite the same level -- six players, but only one Hall of Famer -- but there's quite a variety here. There are runners, walkers, cyclists, hammer throwers, swimmers, pole vaulters, high jumpers, even a tricyclist.

As a premium, Allen & Ginter went and turned those cards into these:

N43 Allen & Ginter

Some of the collectors of modern A&G cards will recognize this design as the same one used for "box toppers" which may seem cool but also might get them to understand that Topps really didn't have any new ideas with the way they set up the gimmicks, either.

I'm not really big on resolutions for New Years, but I really need to make sure I explore the pre-Topps era some more. I need to start pulling out my oldest cards and showing them off. I need to start adding more set descriptions to my website. I also need to finish writing that damned book I've started too many times.

Yes, that's right. I'm writing a book about vintage cards. And I'll have it in a format where you can load it to a Kindle or an iPad and take it to a show with you. Or download it to your computer and have a reference file. As I get closer to getting it done, I'll share more about it.

In any case, whatever new sets get added to the site, I'll share them here, as I always do. I'm just not looking forward to writing out that checklist for Old Judge, though.

Hopefully, this blog should be fired up for 2011.

A Slight Detour From "Vintage"

I'm going to take a slight turn away from my normal vintage (which I generally define here as "pre-1981") and instead going back to my childhood hobby memories.

In short, I'll toss this out:

It's an unopened pack of 1986 Donruss cards. It was quite a sight at the time, especially as the supply dried up and prices got higher. I read about the cards every time I picked up an issue of Krause Publications' Baseball Cards magazine (then coming out every two months) and saw how the cards of Jose Canseco, Fred McGriff and Andres Gallaraga were setting the hobby on fire.

However, I never saw one of those packs -- at all -- in 1986.

I'm just trying to come to grips with the fact that 1986 is now nearly a quarter century ago. Man, 25 years. Where the hell did that time go?

During the Spring of '86, I was still 13 years old and finishing up the 8th grade. I lived in a tiny town in Northern New York and was making money during the winter by shoveling snow from the driveways of neighbors. Anybody who's ever been there during the winter months will understand that there is a tremendous potential for making money that way, since it seems there is a continuous white blanket over the entire area every year from November to April. Some years, it's necessary to incorporate a heavy jacket into Halloween costumes because it might snow that night. Anyway, the winter of '85-'86 was one of the heavier ones snow-wise while I grew up.

The result of all that snow clearing was the fact that I had quite a bit of spending money (a relative term, since $20 was usually more than I ever held at one time) when the new cards appeared on the shelf of the little mom-and-pop shops. So, once the cards began to arrive, I quickly discovered that Topps was once again king when it came to availability. This happened every year. As a savvy card-buyer who had been at this game for eight years at that point, I knew that I could just go around and check out the other usual places. The Fleer and Donruss cards were bound to show up eventually.

I need to point out that I lived in a town that was a mile and a half across, with a slightly smaller town across the river. There were four or five family-owned stores there, with a few drugstores, two supermarkets and one department store. Aside from a few gas stations that also sold candy, there weren't all that many places to get cards with little more than my two legs and a bicycle. And even then, at my age, I still wasn't going to be allowed to pedal 15 miles to Watertown or 10 in the other direction to Lowville (rhymes with "Cowville"). That said, I was able to find some Fleer cards at one of the drugstores -- in a rack-pack with the "Future Hall of Famers" cards, no less -- but nobody carried any Donruss cards. I asked if they could be ordered, but none ever arrived that year. There were some Sportflics packs that popped up late in the summer, but nobody wanted to pay $1.25 for three cards, even if they did have a 3-D feature.

It wasn't just me, though. None of my friends had any Donruss cards in 1986, not even the ones who would take trips in the car to those bigger towns. All the while, there was that damned Jose Canseco card in my magazines, taunting me by its unavailability.

For the record, in 1987 the local stores made up for their oversight by having Donruss cards everywhere. After the pain of '86, I just refused to buy Donruss cards out of principle. That turned out to be a pretty good thing, especially in 1988.

Last month, I was looking at Steve Hart's Baseball Card Exchange website. While looking through the unopened material he was offering, I stopped at 1986 Donruss wax. He was selling boxes for $22 each. Seeing the chance at finally doing something that geography and luck prevented all those years ago, I bought two. And you can bet I ripped those suckers as soon as they found their way to my doorstep, even as my wife shook her head at my childish pursuit.

The first box yielded 499 cards from the 660-card set. Figuring I had a good chance to get close on getting the set competed, I opened the second box and realized that I was seeing many of the same players I pulled from the first box. Of the 540 cards in the second box, less than 50 were needed. However, the second box yielded THREE Canseco rookies to go with the one that I pulled from the first box.

Had this been 1988, I could have immediately turned those three Canseco cards around and taken a huge chunk out of my wantlists. However, in 2010, Jose Canseco isn't quite the hobby icon he was after posting his 40/40 MVP season.

But, hey...if you're working on an '86 Donruss set, drop me a line. I need about 120 cards and have plenty of duplicates.

Holiday Wishes

With Christmas Day coming tomorrow, I realize many of this blog's regular readers are busy with other things than stopping by to read what I've written. Actually, that's the way it should be. With family activities, traveling and holiday revelry, anybody who's stopping here in the midst of that to read what I have to say about cardboard pictures that were designed decades ago probably needs to take some time to get away from the computer. A paradox, I know.

Despite that, I'm glad you stopped by anyway. As for me, I'll be working today and tomorrow. Fortunately, my job starts after dark and I'll be getting time and a half for both days.That way, I can still visit with family and friends in addition to getting paid better for a couple of days. That sounds like a win/win to me.

However, since this is a time for giving gifts and you're stopping here anyway, let me pull out one of the oddball cards from my collection to show off today:

This card is from 1958. It was originally included as an insert in wax packages of regular Topps cards that year, along with a contest card related to the All-Star game. The cards were a way of adding something to packs after the checklists (issued as separate cards in 1956-'57) were incorporated into the regular set.

As the card says, all 16 teams were available as 5-inch felt logos, including the new cities for both the Giants and Dodgers, who had moved before the '58 season began. In order to get the logos, there was a process described on the back:

As you can see, this was a way for Topps to boost sales of its two main brands of bubblegum. There's even an explanation that Bazooka Joe comics and wax wrappers weren't part of the deal. There was also an explanation about adding a separate, stamped envelope to get it back, as well as an admonition not to send money.

As for the Topps address, I like the way it shows the way large cities used addresses before the ZIP code was introduced in the 1960s. Larger cities were divided into zones, and Topps' mailbox was in "zone" 32 for Brooklyn, which -- if I've read the history correctly -- would have become 11232 after the implementation of the ZIP code.

I picked this card up from a store in St. Augustine, Florida before it closed down for good. The owner wasn't sure what it was and let me pick it up for one dollar. A nice deal indeed.

1955 Topps in the Mail!

I recently picked this card up as part of a trade:

It may not look like much, but it it is. A Hall of Famer, a lifelong Tiger, a fan favorite and the card that finally reduced a wantlist number to a single digit.

Back in September, I shared some cards from my 1955 Topps set-in-progress here. This Kaline card now drops the wantlist to 9 cards left. One digit...that's a big deal. Of course, all the cards left are Hall of Famers and some will be long-term prospects at my normal price range (Koufax, Clemente, probably Mays and Robinson as well). That said, every additional hole that gets filled in my binder is a big deal.

"Mini" Football

In only its second year after regaining its rights to print NFL cards, Topps released a football set in 1969 that featured a player photo against a brightly-colored background:

(Remember this photo...you'll be seeing it again)

The cards featured great full-bleed borders, but for some reason they gave Topps some trouble. When they came out with their second and final series, the cards were given white borders and some of the background colors were toned down:

By the way, it's funny to see Ken Kortas as a Steeler in the second series, since he played in Chicago during the 1969 season. By the time this card was distributed through wax packs, uniform #75 was being worn by a rookie named Joe Greene, who kept that number through his retirement after the 1981 season.

The 1969 Topps football cards came in packs that looked like this:

The pack mentions a "mini-card album." One of those is also a part of my Steelers collection:

Notice the team logo has no color in it and appears to have been drawn by a high school student. At the same time, the "game action" photo appears to have been airbrushed to remove the receiver's logo, yet the blurriness really doesn't obscure the Giant defender's helmet enough to mask his team's identity. That's Kyle Rote, in what appears to be an old picture. Each team had a different photo, but few actually showed the team featured in the booklet.

The back looks like this:

Again, the logo has no color and appears to be a slightly larger version of the one used on the front. There were 26 books, one for each team then playing in the NFL.

Inside, there were spots where small cards could be affixed:

The cards were also placed into wax packs along with the booklets, as a perforated sheet of four cards:

(Yep, the same Roy Jefferson photo shown above)

No, I didn't rip the Roy Jefferson card away, I just happen to have the card as a panel as well as singly. There were 66 panels (264 cards in all, with some players appearing in variations), and 19 players in the set who didn't also appear in the regular 1969 Topps set.

Q&A

Richard writes:

Q:

"I am wondering what the difference in the red and black 1952 Topps would be. Is it that the area around the name and number on the back is black and on the others red?"

 A:

 First of all, thanks for giving me an excuse to pull out my 1952 Topps binder. Granted, there usually doesn't need to be a pressing need to get them out, but I digress...

The first series of 1952 Topps cards consisted of 80 subjects. Their backs were printed entirely with black ink:

During the print run, Topps tweaked the design. Part of the reason was out of necessity, since cards #48 and #49 had their biographies reversed. At the same time, it was determined that a splash of red ink would make the cards really stand out. So, this was the result:

That definitely made the cards easier to read. Topps kept the red ink for the backs through the rest of their six series in 1952. Only cards #1-80 can be found with either black or red backs. The exception: the errors on #48 and 49 are only found with black backs.

The backs weren't the only place to get a reworking, though. Looking at the above two cards side-by-side shows another slight improvement:

(Both of these men were U.S. Army lieutenants during World War Two)

The Elmer Valo card was a black back, while Spahn features the updated back with red ink. A close look at the skin tone shows that Valo's picture is more subdued, while Spahn's is brighter. Whether that was a conscious design change or merely a result of the printing changes, it certainly makes the classic 1952 Topps design more appealing.