1968 American Oil ('Mr.') Tom Matte

In my never-ending quest for Baltimore Colts items I somehow came across this oddball item (or half an item) and recently added it to the Colts binder. It's from 1968 and is an American Oil (aka Amoco) Mr. & Mrs. NFL game piece. The idea was to buy gas, get a game piece, match the two halves and win a car or a cash prize. I'm just a bit put out by the fact that the Matte pair only netted you 4 bits. 

BTW...Amoco was behind one of the strangest NFL promos ever...the 1966 NFL Stamps contest. same basic idea...gas station visits netted you a stamp that went on a game card. I blogged about that one in 2016. 

Captain Obvious is here to tell you that the other half of this was a photo of Mrs. Matte (or more likely the whole Matte clan). I've been on the lookout for one of those but so far haven't had any luck. 

It measures 2 1/8" by a 3 1/2" more or less. Here it is with a standard card for perspective.

I found this page with a detailed look at the set. Some of the 'Mrs.' photos are a hoot. Well worth a peek. If you stumble upon a Jim Grabowski or Mrs. Joe Morrison game piece Amoco owes you a 1969 Ford. Ask for a Mustang.

1970 Kelloggs Baltimore Colts

I've got plenty of Kelloggs baseball cards. Probably have every Orioles player that Kelloggs issued but these are my first Kelloggs football cards. I'm not even sure I was fully aware of the fact that Kelloggs made football cards available at all.I know I never picked up any in a cereal box.

The '70 baseball versions were the first 3-D cards for Kelloggs and the football versions are very similar. The set consisted of 60 cards. They were found in cereal boxes AND available through a mail-in offer. John Mackey, John Unitas, Bubba Smith and Tom Matte are the Colts in the set. I picked them up in one transaction recently and they are in generally good shape. They are all curled as you would expect, Kelloggs cards of that vintage all seem to do that. Only the the Unitas card has the usual Kelloggs cracking although they are not as noticeable in hand as they are in the scan. The Matte and Smith cards each have a tiny crack on the upper left only. The corners are sharp.

The cards have a nice write-up on the reverse and a very limited stat summary. They also add a listing of the player's 'Pro honors' i.e. All Pro, All NFL, etc. That's a nice touch. There are no team logos and the copyright credits the NFLPA.  I'm not sure about the Matte card but Unitas and Mackey are shown against a background that is Los Angeles' Memorial Coliseum.

Here are the rest of the Colts:

The Matte card may be my favorite of this set since it's not a picture I've seen before.

This Bubba Smith shot proves that Kelloggs got their pictures from Topps.

Kelloggs' football cards returned in 1971 as another 60 card set. Only Johnny Unitas is a carryover player from the '70 set. In fact only five players total from the 1970 sets were repeated in 1971. And the '71 cards are scarcer due to the fact that they were not available through the mail, only in cereal boxes. I had bought a '71 Mike Curtis card from an online dealer but the dealer refunded my money because they discovered the card was too severely cracked.

So the hunt for the '71 Kelloggs Colts continues.

1970 Topps Super Colts

Joe over at the Schlabotnik Report picked up a nice stash of the 1970 Topps Super football cards recently and blogged about them a couple of weeks back so I'll spare you a repeat of the details but these are really pretty neat items. I have always been aware of the baseball versions of these but the football ones were unknown to me until a few years back. I hadn't pursued them until I decided to collect the Baltimore Colts cards from their tenure in Baltimore.

I will not attempt to collect every single insert and oddball card or set out there. That's just silly (there is a Topps test issue Unitas tattoo that cost more than my car). But the affordable and interesting ones are going to be in my sights.

My copy of the Unitas is a bit rough but I wanted to buy cheap and that's what I did. It's still nice enough to add to my binder. As Joe pointed out the reverse side of the card is identical to the regular Topps 1970 backs except for the card number.

Tom Matte came to me at the last card show I attended and he was essentially a throw-in on a stack of Colts cards I had selected. Again he is 'much loved' but I can't complain about the price.

Matte and Johnny U. are the only Colts in the set. The Supers, btw, are sometimes confused with another 1970 Topps special set, the Super Glossy inserts. I have the Unitas and posted that one a couple of years ago.