Vintage Frankenset Page 7

Back in the desolate days of 2020, I got the idea for a frankenset to give purpose to many of the random old cards that didn't really have a solid "home" in my collection. Plus, filling slots is a good excuse for me to check out neat old card designs I might otherwise miss. The priority of the project eventually slid to the backburner, but I still occasionally fill empty slots and try to keep my streak alive of featuring one completed page on the blog each year.

My Vintage Frankenset has 3 rules for entry:
- Cards must have been released prior to 1981.
- Must fit in a standard top-loader.
- No flagship Topps baseball allowed. (I have a different project for that.)

We're up to page 7, covering card #s 55 through 63.

The page I featured last year was heavy on hockey, and this year again lacks in sport diversity, with two-thirds of the page being baseball cards. It doesn't bother me that much, but in a perfect world, each page would consist of a robust mix. But the page before only had one baseball card, and the next page only has one baseball card, so I'll let it slide that this page has a bunch.

Now let's take a closer look at each card.

1971-72 Topps #55 Pete Maravich

Despite all the baseball, basketball steals the show thanks to this jewel of the frankenset. It's Pistol Pete Maravich's second Topps card, and the first standard-sized card, with his rookie being a pesky tall-boy. Snatching up this and a cache of other nice basketball cards out-of-place from a sub-dollar discount bin might rank as the peak highlight from my days attending the monthly card show back in the twenty-teens.

Legend.

1963 Post #56 Don Mossi

From one legend to another. When it comes to baseball commons, Don always sticks out from the herd.

This is the second Post card in the binder, following Roger Maris back on page 1. Unlike that one, there's no aftermarket artwork on the back of Mossi, just a blank canvas.

 

1951 Bowman #57 Alex Kellner

Another staple from my card show-faring days was gobbling up any old Bowman I'd come across in the ~dollar bins. 1951 Bowman is a beautiful set, though the idea of completing it is a nonstarter for most of us thanks to the rookie cards of Mantle and Mays bringing about financial complications.

The paper loss makes it tricky to follow the narrative, but it mentions Alex Kellner won 20 games in 1949, only to then lose 20 games in 1950. And his 14 loses in 1951 again lead the league, but he stuck around throughout 50s, calling it quits after his elbow crapped out in '59.

1960 Fleer #58 Charlie Gehringer

A couple Cooperstown residents in a row now, starting with Charlie Gehringer.

These vintage old-timer cards are sometimes hard to wrap my head around. Gehringer's 1949 HOF election was only 11 years prior. He lived until '93, so he likely autographed many copies of this card in his later years.

1971 Fleer Laughlin World Series #59 - 1961: Yankees vs. Reds

Cartoon version of Whitey Ford gets the prime center pocket. I'm jealous of you guys who have all or most of these great Laughlin cards. I'll reluctantly settle for having a smattering of them in my vintage frankenset.

I can't always remember World Series winners off the top of my head, but 1961 is easy to recall as a Yankee victory, capping off the 61 in '61 season for Roger Maris. This card back has some extra personality thanks to a focus-grabbing circle (printing flaw) between the first and second line.

1939 Play Ball #60 Schoolboy Rowe

This beauty was a surprise from Mark Hoyle, a great friend to the blog during the early years. It's a bummer he doesn't frequent the blogs much anymore. That reminds me I should probably try getting another "Where Are They Now?" post in the works soon.

Schoolboy Rowe was a 3-time All Star and a World Series champ with the '35 Tigers.

1979-80 O-Pee-Chee #61 Danny Gare

This is one of the most iconic designs in all of hockey cardom, largely in part to the Wayne Gretzky rookie in the set. I don't have The Great One, but I've got This One and a couple more later in the frankenset.

Searching YouTube, I couldn't find any 70s bank commercials featuring Danny Gare, but here's an Easter Seals commercial from '84:

(watch till the end)

1971 Topps #62 Altie Taylor

Altie Taylor brings some serious bad-assery to the page on its lone football card.

"A demon with the football"? Yep, bad-ass. Taylor was Detroit's career rushing yardage leader for a while before his mark was bested by Dexter Bussey, Billy Sims, and then decisively by Barry Sanders.

1940 Play Ball #63 Pete Coscarart

It's crazy that I've only got two Play Ball cards in my entire collection, and they're coincidentally both on page 7 of my vintage frankenset. Unlike the earlier Schoolboy that fell in my lap (Thanks again, Mark, wherever you are), this Pete Coscarart is a card that I specifically targeted and acquired years back. 

Coscarart was the first guy from SDSU to play in the majors. I don't collect guys who went to my college nearly as strongly as I collect guys who went to my high school, but I still wanted to get a playing-days card of the O.G.

And that wraps up page 7.

Another look at the cards together.

Page 8 is already completed, so 2027's post is all-systems-go. But then things get dicey after that. We're talkin' swiss cheese, buddy-boy. So I'll have to get active filling empty slots once 2028 rolls around, God willing, of course. Like, I know I'll never finish the frankenset (330+ cards?), but I guess the goal going forward is to at least keep up with a page every year I'm still around and blogging. So here's to many more completed pages!

Vintage Frankenset Page 6

Back in 2020, I got the idea for a frankenset to give purpose to many of the random old cards that didn't really have a solid "home" in my collection. Plus it's a good excuse for me to check out neat old card designs that I otherwise might miss. The priority of the project eventually slid to the backburner, but I still occasionally fill empty slots and try to keep my streak alive of featuring one completed page on the blog each year. With just 4 weeks left in 2025, figured I better get to my annual post now.

My Vintage Frankenset has 3 rules for entry:
- Cards must have been released prior to 1981.
- Must fit in a standard top-loader.
- No flagship Topps baseball allowed. (I have a different project for that.)

We're up to page 6.

This page probably features a bit too much hockey, but I'm not too finicky about it. (I filled holes on this page with a Canadian seller on Sportlots last year, picking up a few cheap OPC hockey cards.)

Now let's take a closer look at each card.

1978-79 O-Pee-Chee #46 Bob Stewart

Stumbling out of the gate a little with the page's first card. Featuring a crease and a boring photo (and from a set repeated later on the page), gotta say Bob Stewart here is likely to get the boot if I ever find myself with another viable old card #46.

And there's the back.

1938 Wills Air Raid Precautions #47 Anti-Aircraft Searchlight

Next, a pair of non-sport minis to spice things up. Before radar, I guess they just shined giant flashlights in the sky to look for enemy planes.

This is the 3rd tobacco card from Wills in the frankenset, with the cigarette manufacturer also occupying a slot in each of the first couple pages, not to mention that "Wonders of the World" partial set I'm trying to complete. They must've been prolific at churning out cool cards with their packs of smokes back in the day.

1968 Brooke Bond History of the Motor Car #48 -1967 Ferrari P4, 4 Litres

Check out my Ferrari, guys. 😎 Ha, nah I'm not really the automobile aficionado type, but you gotta appreciate a curvy sportscar. I could try to upgrade this top-loader, but I think some yellowed beaters in the mix add to the charm of the frankenset.

Crap, I forgot to take a back photo of this one and might be too lazy to rectify that, sorry.
No, wait-- searching my archives for the term" Ferrari" to refresh my memory of acquiring this card, turns out the back has already been featured here, so I'll reprise that photo. (You can ignore the coincidental bonus Wills content included.)

Note the motor car cards came with tea, not smokes, but yeah, makes sense seeing this from 1968, with tobacco cards mostly being a pre-war thing.

1973-74 Topps #49 Nick Libett

Hockey's back with a very red card. (Hell, it's a very "wings" card, for that matter!)

What would a vintage frankenset be without some stained backs in there? (A sham, that's what!)

1977 Hostess #50 Ron LeFlore

Fine example of a Hostess card getting the honorable center square spot of the page, though nobody's gonna submit this one for grading.

Ron LeFlore is a player from before my time with a unique backstory, but the short version is he first started playing baseball on a prison team in the early 70s and went on to become a MLB All-Star on the strength of that 1976 season.

1977-78 O-Pee-Chee #51 Ron Schock

My knowledge of hockey is weak enough that honestly I would have assumed he's wearing a Sabres jersey here were it not for the informative text suggesting this is an outdated photo. Taking a closer look, my guess would be Penguins and, yep, that's confirmed on the back....

The top name in that font calls to mind the old Radio Shack logo, right?

1976-77 O-Pee-Chee #52 Greg Joly

This is a nice looking card, with the photo fitting the design well.

The back makes me want to make a Jolly Green Giant reference, or Joly green, as the case may be.

1975 Mike Mandel Photographers #53 Richard Link

Here's another example of Nick Vossbrink influencing my collection by blogging about neat, under-the-radar cards. In fact, I think this might be thee card that inspired the creation this Vintage Frankenset. Nick posted about this set of photographer cards in 2017 on the SABR card blog though I don't think I followed the blog at the time and didn't see it until he referenced the post on his own blog in 2020. When I went searching to see if I might score one, there were a few options on eBay at $10 each, and I was pulled toward clicking Dick Link here for the photo. I believe it was the other Nick (dimeboxes) who once did a post looking for cards that featured a photo of a crouched catcher giving a sign-- a common sight in baseball (before PitchCom®) that turns out is very rare to find pictured on a card*. So that's some bonus mojo this card has going for it.

*Seriously-- try to find one! 

And so I ended up with a neat random card to be sorted away with my few other odd cards that don't really go with any of the other cards in my collection. "Hey, maybe I should make like a vintage frankenset...?" And there you have the origin story of this project!

1978-79 O-Pee-Chee #54 Doug Favell

Page 6 goes out the same way it came in, with a '78 OPC hockey card of a guy looking off to the card's right.

Facsimile autographs on cards hasn't really aged that well. Typically feels like the card manufacturer is trying to trick young, naive kids into thinking the players really sat around signing all their cards before they got packed out. Kinda interesting to check out the penmanship, I suppose.

Another look at these 9 cards together...

That's it for page 6. Thanks for reading. I'll catch you back here for (baseball-heavy) page 7 sometime in 2026, God willing.

Vintage Frankenset Page 5

Back in 2020, I got the idea for a frankenset to give purpose to many of the random old cards that didn't really have a solid "home" in my collection. Plus it's a good excuse for me to check out neat old card designs that I otherwise might miss. The priority of the project eventually slid to the backburner, but I still occasionally fill empty slots and try to keep my streak alive of featuring one completed page on the blog each year. I showed off page 1 in 2020, page 2 in 2021, page 3 in 2022, and page 4 in 2023. So here's page 5 for 2024.

My Vintage Frankenset has 3 rules for entry:
- Cards must have been released prior to 1981.
- Must fit in a standard top-loader. (I group them into "pages" but the project consists of toploaders in a box, not actual binder pages, in part to deal with varying sizes.)**
- No flagship Topps baseball allowed. (I have a different project for that.)

**Update! These "pages" are no longer just 9-deep groupings of cards in a box; I found a lightly-used top-loader binder for a decent price and have now paged up the first 60 cards in their top-loaders. Feels like that improves the project while still allowing for different sized cards.

Here's your Page 5 overview. No surprise that the top-loader binder is larger than a standard 3-ring binder, looking more like a portfolio case, with its outer padding and zipper. The black backing of each page means the backs are not visible unless you slip out the cards manually, which is a minor bummer for me as I'm a "card backs" guy, generally speaking, and it might be tricky to keep track of card numbers if I can't see them as easily. But as long as I don't get sloppy about the order, should be fine. Also, while I originally envisioned the frankenset topping out at card #333, the binder holds 360 cards, so I suppose I should expand the project all the way up to a card #360.

Now for a closer look at the cards of page 5.

37 1977-78 Topps #37 Dan Bouchard

Things kick off with a hockey common. This is a recent addition; I was ordering some cards from a Canadian seller on Sportlots, and threw in 3 or 4 cheap vintage OPC cards to fill early holes in the frankenset. That always feels less "organic" than just stumbling upon old cards for this project, or receiving them in trade or whatever, but we only get so much time on this earth! lol (My collecting philosophy feels like it has changed since when I first started this blog in my 30s. Now that I've got more years behind me than ahead of me, I'm making an effort to be less "open-ended"/"long-term" than I used to be with my hobby projects.)

Dan Bouchard here has taught me that there are Louisville Slugger hockey sticks.. I hadn't realized that! I've got a few decent hockey cards in my collection, but I admit I'm a poser and am not a very knowledgeable hockey fan. Like, I thought the Flames were from Calgary, but that logo seems to feature an "A" not a "C", so what do I know?

The pizza cartoon is fun, but I feel like that could go on pretty much anybody's card. With a name like "Guy Bouchard", I was sure Dan's little brother went onto NHL stardom, but he doesn't show up in a hockey-reference.com search, so I guess not. As for Dan, he had a long career in front of the net, currently 41st all-time in career NHL games played at goalie. 

38 1976 HRT/RES Phila. Card Show - 1947 Series #38 Luke Appling

It must've been an epic card show in Philadelphia back in 1976, getting some retro oddballs printed up for the occasion. Fittingly, this was a card show pickup of mine a few years ago. Loved finding vintage oddballs in the sub-dollar bins back then.

These are supposed to be like "1947 Bowman that-never-was" cards meant to complement the real 1948 Bowman set that looks similar to this. Some big names in the 113-card set, like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, not that Luke Appling's a slouch.

39 1953 Bowman Color #39 Paul Richards

Here's a real Bowman card after that homage to the brand. A couple posts back I was talking about completing 1957 Topps and how I really like Topps not trampling much on the photo with that design-- Well, no set does that better than 1953 Bowman Color. Beautiful cards, even stained with a little water damage like this one. It's almost tempting to try going after that set, but nah, I'll be content just having at least this single example in my Vintage Frankenset and admiring the rest when I see them from afar.

Paul Richards would later manage the Orioles for a few years, and had a final hurrah in 1976 as skipper for the White Sox. His best season as far as the standings was guiding Baltimore to a second-place finish in 1960.

40 1977-78 Topps #40 Elvin Hayes

Happy to have basketball represented on this page by Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes. Cool card. Another cheap card show pickup from the past, I believe.

White paper stock! Nice bright, readable back. As a vintage baseball collector, I'm a little jealous that Topps basketball cards (at least for that year) have such better looking backs than the drab, grey stock that Topps used for most of their baseball products at the time.

41 1971 Topps #41 Alex Karras

I have a sentimental soft spot for Alex Karras thanks to watching Webster a fair amount as a young'un. Then I got older and learned he plays Mongo in Blazing Saddles, which blew my mind, and so I had to score a couple cards of his for my collection. This powder-blue beauty makes for a great center square of the page.

Karras played his last down in 1970, so this is his "sunset card" (a.k.a. "final tribute", "career capper", etc) with full career stats.. not that "interception record" is all that interesting. The "did not play" in 1963 turns out to be more interesting than injury; Karras was suspended that year for betting on NFL games. Crazy! He's been posthumously enshrined in Canton.

42 1977 Saturday Night Fever #42

I've never seen Saturday Night Fever, but in my head I think I tend to conflate it with Grease, which I've seen once or twice, both featuring peak John Travolta.. only with disco instead of '50s rock n' roll as the soundtrack. I think Bo sent me this card specifically for the frankenset. It was misplaced for a while, but glad I could find it to secure slot #42, incidentally a rare instance in the frankenset where the card number is displayed on the front.

Features a puzzle back with no context. Looks like a close-up of somebody's lips or something.

43 1924 Cavanders The Homeland Series #43 Looking Across Ullswater

I scored this for a buck in a 2016 COMC order. It's in great shape for a card that's celebrating its 100th birthday this year. I think I was just looking around for cheap tobacco cards that caught my eye. Love the subtle pink and blues. You can almost hear the symphony of frogs and other critters that likely filled the air when the original photo was taken.

Poet William Wordsworth is quoted on the back. Ullswater is a big lake in England.

44 1951 Bowman #44 Roy Smalley

Another off-condition old Bowman card that I must have picked up cheap either at a card show or on COMC. Love the puffy white clouds.

When I think of Roy Smalley, I just remember that his son Roy Jr had a solid MLB career, and the two appear on a Father & Son card in 1985 Topps.

45 1978-79 O-Pee-Chee #45 Steve Jensen

Page 5 ends as it began, with a hockey common. Without peeking on the back, I think that's a North Stars uniform, right? Pretty sure that's Minnesota. But the card tells me now he's with the Kings... though I'm not sure if they were in Los Angeles yet by then.

Steve Jensen's facsimile autograph on the bottom apparently inspired a previous owner of this card to practice some cursive squiggles of their own. The pen marks don't bother me too much, but this slot is definitely upgradable should a slightly more appealing vintage card #45 make its way across my desk. Plus, the card #46 that leads off the next page also happens to be a 1978-79 O-Pee-Chee hockey card... and consecutive cards from the same set in a Frankenset would surely be frowned upon by other Dr. Frankensetters out there, so a shake-up likely awaits.

Here's another look at the completed page 5 to wrap things up. Nice variety, with all four major North American sports represented, plus two very different non-sport cards further spicing it up.

See you back here in 2025 for page 6. That one's already completed, so no problem there. But then we start getting into swiss cheese territory by page 7, with slots #61 through 64 currently vacant.

Anyways.. Thanks for reading!