Vintage oddballs from my Arizona trip

I still have a little more vintage Browns purchases to show from my recent Arizona trip in addition to what I've shown in my last two posts.

I like oddballs, and sometimes go a bit crazy when I find them. I will even look through baseball oddballs to find and send some to other bloggers. One store that I went to in Phoenix had tons of oddballs. I loved it. (To any interested, the store is 20th Century Sports Cards and Collectibles at 3210 W. Bell Rd., Suite 102/103.)

Looking through the display cases, I saw a display of 1964 Wheaties football stickers. Upon asking and looking through the stickers, I picked up a complete team set of the Browns, and accidentally added one extra sticker.

Top (l-r): Jim Brown; Bill Glass; Galen Fiss
Middle (l-r): John Morrow; Bernie Parrish; Dick Schafrath
Bottom: Erich Barnes

Unfortunately, if you look closely at the number on the Barnes sticker you will see a border on it. Knowing that Barnes played for the Browns, and since the jersey did look brownish, I figured that he was part of the team set. As it turns out, he didn't start with the Browns until 1965, and from looking at other photos and his playing history, I figure that it is an old photo of him wearing a Bears uniform. (See the orange accent on the border of the jersey number.) Oh, well. (Tony Burbs, I'll be putting it aside for you.)

Another item found was this fold-out poster of Gene Hickerson:

1970 Topps - Posters #15

A thing of beauty!

As is another poster that I needed:

1971 Topps - Posters #16

You might be able to see from the top and the sides, that this poster has a bit of a centering issue, but it sure looks good to me.

Finally, in 1972, Sunoco issued a set of stamps, with an update set to follow. I have all the Browns in the regular set, and need two in the update set. What I didn't have, however, was one of the albums that the stamps could be stored in.

In the store, they had two different albums for the 1972 set. The larger one was 128 pages, and had a lot of nice color pictures, and team write-ups; the smaller was 56 pages, and just had pages to put the stamps in by team.

I picked up one the larger, deluxe albums.

The back of the album had 144 stickers still attached. They were the same stickers in each of the albums.

I'll conclude today with some thoughts on current Browns news.

I can't say that I was surprised that the Browns released Donte Whitner, as it fits into how they are releasing veteran players and goin younger. Personally, I would have liked to have kept him as a veteran leader, but I understand why they did it. I don't, however, know why they wouldn't have done him the favor of releasing him earlier so that he'd have a better chance to find a good home, or a better salary in free agency before teams started filling their needs.

The other player released was Ifo Ekpre-Olomu as he was fighting back from missing all of last year with a knee injury. The drafted him knowing that he wasn't going to play last year, hoping that he would be ready for this year. I wish that they would have kept him at least through off-season workouts to see if he could come back, but I'm sure they know more about his knee than I do from just reading the internet. I hope he manages to get healthy and make it into a NFL game.

With those two players released, the Browns secondary has more holes. I wonder if they will choose Jalen Ramsey with pick number two if he's available.