1926 Spalding football cards
 

We began discussing this set on the Hunt/Casterline Pro Football Hall of Fame Card Collection thread - especially about the scarcity of the Benny Friedman card. Maybe this has been covered before, but the scarcity of the Friedman card is a mystery to me, especially since an uncut sheet showed up several years back and you can see that there is no reason for Friedman to be a short print. Benny is 8 rows from the top, six in from the left. I had no trouble collecting the other football cards, but Benny is the white whale - Why?

https://c7.staticflickr.com/9/8164/2...45d3aa60_o.jpg

Was he the 1st Jewish HOFer?


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Sid Luckman and Ron Mix were in before him.

Here is my opinion about what happened based on the info I've been able to collect.

All indications are that the promotion of this set was a bust. Sports Company of America talks about distributing "millions" of these cards but given the population of existing cards, they did not successfully do this. The cost of a card (and associated candy and sports scrip) was ten cents, and that was pretty expensive for the 1920s. I doubt that millions were sold ... probably thousands instead.

Correspondence with the athletes says that any of them that sign up to be involved would receive 500 copies of their own card for personal distribution. My bet is that most of the existing cards out there today came from these freebies given to the athletes. Also from a couple of finds of uncut sheets that have popped up throughout the years.

If the above is true, the rarity of each individual card is likely tied to whether the athlete distributed the 500 copies s/he received or not. Perhaps Friedman misplaced his or just wasn't interested in distributing them. If so, the only remaining cards are those that did sell through the coin operated machine or were on a discovered uncut sheet.

jeff

That uncut sheet is DA BOMB (sorry, showing my age)! Wish I owned it.

You might have had no trouble getting the rest of the Spalding set, Mike, but it was the toughest set to complete in my run of 1888-1988 nationally distributed football cards. The last four cards I needed were:

Grange
Nevers
Oberlander
Stuhldreher

and I only complete the set thanks to your willingness to help (and that guitar you wanted!).

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/IB...S=w453-h720-no

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_y...Z=w249-h366-no

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/tt...5=w486-h686-no

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/mg...4=w334-h462-no

I'm working on the Master Set now of all player/back combinations but don't expect to ever complete that effort.

jeff