The Lost Box of Total Awesomeness - Almost forgot about these

Venezuelan Topps cards from the '60s is pretty awesome but I have much more awesomeness in store. Here's some oddball stuff from the '60s to lay the foundation and prepare you for the ultimate awesomeness that is ahead. Oddballs ahoy!

1968 Topps Game Al Kaline

Topps oddballs from the '60s are great ways to find cheap cards of stars. Some of them look great, others not so much. This set from 1968 is cool in many ways. They are unique, they look pretty good, they are not scarce and they can be found fairly cheaply. Even the Mantle is affordable. Plus you can play a baseball game with them if you are so inclined.

This card might be one of the first cards in my collection. My mom traveled for work a ton when I was a kid. On a trip to Boston, she found a couple of sheets of Al Kaline cards at an antique store and brought them home for me. I was pretty stunned by all these old cards from the' 60s and '70s and even moreso when I found out Al was a Hall of Famer. As a nerdy little child, I was also bemused that his name was a chemical term. One of the cards in the lot was a game card like this. I have two of them, so I don't know if this one the original one or one I picked up later, but it's a cool reminder of the cards that first got me fascinated by old Topps cards.

1963 Jell-o Roy Sievers

1963 Post Robin Roberts

Here's a couple of food oddballs. Post Cereal and Jell-o cards are another great way to get stars from the early '60s for cheap. The jagged edges from the scissors of spazzy kids all hopped up on sugary cereal and Jell-o scare away the gem mint PSA crowd and they are just ugly enough to be ignored by the mainstream. I love cards that you have to cut off boxes. These from the '60s, Hostess cards from the '70s, box bottom cards from the '80s... The soul of card collecting died a little bit when there were no cards to cut off of other things in the '90s and today. These two cards look almost exactly alike, so how can I tell which is the Jell-o and which is the Post card? Here's a scan of the two together:

As you can see, the Sievers card is just a tiny bit smaller than the Roberts. Post cards came on large boxes where four or five cards could spread out. Jello boxes are tiny and they had to squash the card to fit on that little box. The other giveaway is the red line in the stats. On the Jell-o box it ends abruptly, while on the Post box it extends almost to the border. Just looking at these cards makes me want to pull out some scissors and cut some cardboard really bad.

1960 Fleer Warren Giles

1960 Fleer Harry Heilmann

These are two more cards I've had forever. I don't remember where I got them, I just remember them always being around. Heilmann is a Hall of Fame outfielder for the Tigers from the Ty Cobb era. He was a great hitter, but no one seems to remember him at all today. He also has the honor of being the first player to hit a home run in every major league stadium during his career (granted, there were only 16 stadiums at the time). Heilmann is cool to anyone familiar with baseball history, but Warren Giles is not a card anyone would be really interested in. Who wants a card of the National League president? When I was a kid I was torn between the coolness of having an old card and the lameness of it having an old fat guy in a suit on it. It doesn't help that the 1960 Fleer set is among the ugliest of all time. The border "corners" are just stupid. The pictures look like they are all black & white photos that were tinted after the fact, so the colors on them can be quite bizarre. Also several of the old timers have photos on their cards that were taken in the '50s and not during their playing days. As a result there are several geezers on trading cards that look like they should be playing bridge instead of baseball. Still, they are old dang cards and some good history for one of the hobby's great manufacturers.

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