A grizzled old man who still had another 15 seasons ahead of him. Remarkable.

Agreed! Gordie Howe was the very personification of the game.

Nonetheless, I don't understand what Topps/O-Pee-Chee was thinking when it came to the 2nd series of the 1964-65 Hockey set. Here's a representative page of the cards from the 1st series:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/6fa1...64de24d45.jpeg

And here's how the majority of the 2nd series cards look:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/85c5...546fea425c.png

:eek:

I don't like the tall boy format and am just glad they opted against a baseball issue. I appreciated them more in the past, but care less for them the more I encounter them.

As you pointed out, there are a lot of bad photos, but they're not just bad due to being head shots. What's with the graininess? They could have used crisper images if they cared enough to do so. Did they tweak those photos, because the hair glare looks absurdly phony. Mahovlich, Bathgate and Goyette all have shiny hair like Astro Boy that proved impenetrable to fleets of jackhammers. Phil Goyette's hair makes me wonder if he had a brother named Don and they sang beautiful harmonies but just never got along. Big M and Goyette's fuzzy photos are unforgivable.

The sizing of these things always bothered me, though it might be charming to some. Being in Canada (you can relate), finding the proper sleeves/pages/top loaders was impossible way back when, at least in our hometown and vicinity. How the heck was I supposed to store them? Given their popularity and higher price as compared to other period cards, I just passed on them altogether as a kid.

I remember seeing T card pages for the first time on a childhood trip to the States and being so impressed! We simply weren't afforded such luxuries in this fairly large Canadian city.

We even hated the Tall Boy format as kids in 1964 for three reasons:

1) The cards didn't fit comfortably in our pockets.
2) They weren't aerodynamic enough to be spun/flung at walls in winner-take-all games.
3) I remember them being ten cents for a pack of five(six?) cards plus gum in London. I think O-Pee-Chee may have been test marketing that ten cent price point in certain markets such as London because two wrappers for the 1964-65 Hockey cards have been found - a five cent one and one with no price.

No card historian has been able to conclusively determine what role Topps played in putting together the "Topps" Hockey and CFL sets from 1957-58 to 1968-69 and into the 1970's. A very curious lack of Hockey and CFL material was found in the Topps archives. The photo selection and text for these sets may have been entirely compiled by O-Pee-Chee in London with perhaps some assistance from the Topps graphics department in New York. The problem of course is that when card enthusiasts started addressing this question in the 21st century, those at O-Pee-Chee and Topps who might have been able to answer the question were gone.

:(