We have a treat today, a guest post from Keith Olbermann looking at some mysterious doings within the 1962-63 Topps Hockey set:
The
1962-63 Topps Hockey Mystery: Doug Marcel Frank Harvey Paille Paice
I’m
pretty sure there are three unissued error cards that Topps printed, then
withdrew, from its 1962-63 hockey set. Whether any of them ever got out in
packs, I can’t say. But based on the Topps production methods so meticulously
obsessed over by your proprietor here, I’m pretty sure they could have.
#3
Bruce Gamble (photo of Doug Mohns), #6 Doug Mohns (photo of Bruce Gamble), and
especially #61 Marcel Paille (with goalie Paille’s name on the front, Paille’s
biography on the back, with a photo of not Paille but rather Rangers’ trainer
Frank Paice) have been categorized – dismissed, even – as proofs that were
corrected before the set was printed.
(ed. note - Here's the Gamble and Mohns cards, as issued):
I
don’t think so. And why I don’t
think so requires a lot of back story.
I
first bumped into this small-scale mystery as an unknowing but curious 10 year
old, after my folks bought me the ’62-63 hockey set as a Christmas present.
That era’s Topps cards showed only players from the Bruins, Black Hawks, and
Rangers (the Canadian teams and Detroit belonged to Parkhurst) and it quickly
struck me that there was something wrong with the Topps personnel selections
for the New York team. The cards were numbered by team and, within each team,
position. The Bruins (1-22) and Black Hawks (23-44) started with the coach,
then two goalies, then the defensemen, then the forwards, then the team
picture. But the Rangers (45-65) had no coach, one goalie, and incongruously –
Frank Paice, the team’s trainer when the cards originally came out, and still
the trainer when I obtained them in 1969, and still the trainer when I came
home for Easter break as a sophomore in college.
Pick any juncture and it never made sense. No card of the coach? One goalie? The trainer? Who the hell wants a card of the trainer? My focus as a kid was the coach part. Future Hall of Famer Doug Harvey had come in from Montreal to become the Rangers’ player-coach (the NHL’s last to make it through a full season, by the way) and frankly, he killed it. He led the team to the playoffs for the first time in four years, made first-team All-Star, and won the Norris Trophy as the top defenseman (for the seventh time in eight seasons). If there had been an award for top coach he would’ve won that, too. He had a three-year deal at $25,000 per to play and coach for the team and observers figured that by succeeding in his first year, he had cleared the highest hurdle with flying colors. If anything were going to change for the 1962-63 season, it was assumed (Harvey even hinted) that approaching his 38th birthday, he’d retire as a player and just coach the team. Some of Harvey’s old Canadiens teammates thought Harvey might even wind up as Coach and General Manager and player.
On
June 4th Harvey quit as coach.
Days
later he said he also wouldn’t return to the Rangers as just a player and was
retiring from hockey.
The
Rangers kept both the coaching job and Harvey’s roster spot open until August
22 when they talked him back – as a player only – for a then-record salary of
$30,000. On August 30 they announced that General Manager Muzz Patrick (who had
just given Harvey a $5,000 raise for a lot less work) would coach the team with
the assistance of former goalie Emile Francis. The smart money was on Patrick
spending an undetermined period of time trying to talk Harvey into becoming
coach again and if he failed, to
officially make Francis the coach.
On
December 28th, Muzz Patrick gave up, resigned as coach, and named as
his own successor… George “Red” Sullivan.
Needless
to say this screwed up Topps’ hockey card preparations. The deadline to finalize
the set looks to have been around mid-September and we can conclude this by the
fact that Topps didn’t touch Harvey with a ten-foot pole, but it did make a
card of veteran Bert Olmstead, who had been obtained by New York in a summer
draft. Olmstead retired from hockey on September 20 – but he’s still in the
set. Topps didn’t know if Doug Harvey would be player-coach, or just coach, or just
player, or none of the above. As if more uncertainty was needed, he broke a
knuckle in early September diagramming a football play on a blackboard. It looked
like he would be in the Rangers’
Opening Night roster, but given his reputation for being erratic, nobody could
know for sure (later, his “reputation” turned out to be one part bipolarity and
one part self-medicating it with alcohol). It looked like Muzz Patrick was the coach, but would
that still be the case when the cards came out? It looked like Emile Francis would eventually be the
coach – but when? (turned out: after Sullivan washed out – in 1966). But the
DefCon 1 level confusion still wouldn’t explain why they’d decide to make a
card of the trainer instead of a coach – any coach. Yet there he was, #61 Frank
Paice. And by the way there was no card of any kind of Doug Harvey in the Topps
set.
This
only bothered me for the next fifteen years.
In
early 1985 I wrote a couple of pieces on Topps proofs for Krause’s Baseball
Cards Magazine, mostly to pass the
time as I waited to move to Los Angeles to take up a job as the sports director
and sportscaster on Channel 5 there (hey, I was a kinda player-coach too!) Just
weeks before my move at the end of August I was contacted by a man in New
London, Connecticut, who said he and his friend had been remodeling the
friend’s rec room and in the ceiling they had discovered a lot (a lot –
as in hundreds) of what he believed were Topps Proof sheets, and the same day
saw the magazine with my article at a newsstand somewhere. Could I come up and
evaluate things for them? Which is how I happened upon the greatest find of
proof sheets ever, not counting the Topps Guernsey Auction four years later.
And of course I happened upon it when I hadn’t worked in literally ten months
and was going to have to borrow the money from my kid sister for the bus to JFK
Airport to get to L.A. for my new job.
What
these men had found was, simply, all but approximately one of all the 1962
Topps Baseball, Football, and Hockey uncut sheets, and aluminum printing
plates, that you’ve ever seen, or seen for sale, in the last forty years. They
literally fell out of the guy’s ceiling. Those Topps NFL proofs with the wrong
player’s photo on card after card? They were in there. The baseball All-Stars
without positions? The photos from the second series of the ’59 set – including
Koufax - printed without borders or names or anything? The ’62 Topps Don Zimmer
with the Mets, not the Reds. All of them. Full color sheets. One-color sheets.
Two-color sheets. Three-color sheets. Fronts. Backs. How? How? How? “I remember now, the guy I bought the house
from, he used to work at the printer’s in town, he told me this room had extra
insulation.” Even though a lot of the aluminum had rusted and in some cases
that had stained the sheets, I estimated what they had might be worth six
figures. They thanked me by letting me buy one sheet of my choice at way below
value. I took the baseball sheet with the most variations from the issued cards
(the All-Stars without positions including Mantle, and the Zimmer-Mets ID, and
a few others) and they only took my last $200. Even with that I had to cut the
sheet up to split the cost with a fellow proof collector with a similar
microscopic bank account.
My
second choice just happened to be the 1962-63 Topps Hockey proof sheet that
explained it all. Besides the quaint switch of the photos of Bruins players
Gamble and Mohns, there he was, top row, third from the right: the Rangers’
hand-out photo of trainer Frank Paice faintly smiling up at me. Except, the
card didn’t identify him as Frank Paice. It called him “Marcel Paille” and labeled
him not as a trainer but as a goalie. In an instant, it sort of made sense.
They hadn’t chosen to skip the coach card and put a trainer in instead. They
had simply added a card of a second Rangers goalie, Paille. It might even have
been the case that there was some original idea to make #61 a card of Doug
Harvey because although that run of numbers is otherwise occupied by forwards,
#61 fits into this alphabetical sequence: 59 Rod Gilbert, #60 Vic Hadfield, #61
Paille, #62 Camille Henry, #63 Bronco Horvath, #64 Pat Hannigan. MAYBE #61 was originally
supposed to be Wayne Hall or Bryan Hextall Jr., rookies who didn’t make the
Rangers out of training camp. Maybe it was supposed to be that Hannigan guy and
somebody at Topps was really bad at alphabetizing. Maybe it was supposed to be
Harvey.
(ed. note - Here's the 1962-63 Hockey aluminum plate, in front view):
But
when the final decision was made, #61 became Marcel Paille, complete with the
easiest possible mistake, especially in an alphabet-challenged office where
preparing the Canadian hockey set was probably not high on the priority list:
Frank Paice’s mislabeled picture.
Of
special note: back in New London in the summer of 1985, the Paille proof front
(with Paice’s photo) was blank-backed and the Paille proof back (complete with
Paille’s biography) was blank-fronted. For years I kept an eye out for a
1962-63 Topps Marcel Paille card in any form, and was finally rewarded a few
years ago when one of the aluminum printing plate versions I couldn’t have
afforded to buy in a previous century, turned up. It was the back with the
Paille bio. Then a full aluminum sheet turned up and I got that, too.
And finally, months ago, a full 1962-63 Topps Hockey blank-backed proof sheet
appeared in another auction. Complete with a little aluminum debris on the
back, it is undoubtedly the same one I had gently patted goodbye – presumably
forever - as I was escorted away by the finders, and off to the New London
train station at the tender age of 26.
It
was all revealed. At some point late in the summer of 1962, Topps gave up
waiting for Doug Harvey to make up his mind. They pulled him out of the set,
put back-up goalie Paille in, grabbed the photo of the wrong guy whose name
started P-A-I, and caught the mistake so late in the publishing process that it
was easier and cheaper to rewrite Paille’s name to Paice’s on the front and
re-do the back altogether, than to get the correct photo of Paille.
That’s
when the Topps Vault File Binder Page for 1962-63 Hockey, cards 61-63, turned
up. If you’re unfamiliar with the Topps File Binders, they were a kind of
accounting record of everything Topps issued. Two copies of each card in each
set would be glued onto thick construction paper and kept in three-ring
binders. One would go in face up, glue on the back. Next to it, back up, face
on the front. With only three cards per page, needless to say there were so
many Topps File Binders – a sort of “Proof Of Publication” archive – that they had
their own room at the old Topps HQ on Whitehall Street. I was admitted, once. I
was greatly covetous.
(ed. note - Here's some of the binders, as offered in the 1989 Topps-Guernsey's auction):
I
don’t know how I missed it when they sold the Paille-Paice page in the first
place, but there it was again in a recent auction: slabbed and complete with
the historical evidence of the day they realized the mistake. Paille’s name is
crossed off the front-facing card and “FRANK PAICE TRAINER’ written in, in
grease pencil, on a piece of scotch tape, near his head. The back-facing card
fared more poorly still at the archivist’s hand. The name has been crossed off
and over the English bio is the word – in red – “WRONG” – and over the French
bio, “PLAYER.” Between the cards, in ordinary pencil, written vertically, is
the correct identification of Paice. The same vehement corrections have been
made on the slabbed pages showing the Gamble-Mohns photo switch.
(ed. note - Here's the 1962-63 Hockey binder page, courtesy of Keith Olbermann):
So
Paille/Paice is just a proof and that’s the end of it.
(ed. note - Here's the 1962-63 Hockey proof showing Paice, incorrectly labeled Paille, in front view, courtesy of Keith Olbermann):
Well,
no, not really. As I said, I was in the File Binder room. I don’t know how many
different binders I was shown, from how many different sports, but I can tell
you this with certainty: they didn’t use proof cards in the File Binders that I inspected.
They used issued cards. That was
the point. These weren’t records of cards they intended to sell but didn’t. These were the official,
eternal files of all the cards they actually let loose into an unsuspecting
world. Besides which, to make a File Binder out of proof cards you’d have to
cut up proof sheets. This would take forever. And all the cards on these hockey
binder sheets are meticulously and precisely cut, like they had been cut on a
professional automated machine. There is also nothing of the tell-tale “glow”
that has always accompanied Topps Proofs. They are shinier, clearer. They are
first generation printings, not the later, fuzzier, flatter ones on the cards in
the packs. But the cards in the File Binder page slabs look exactly like the
issued 1962-63 Topps hockey cards, and don’t “glow” like proofs.
More
over, if you hold the slabbed sheets up to strong light, you get the barest
hint of what’s on the glued-down side of each card. Faintly visible on the
other sides of the back-facing cards (like the one with Paille’s biography and
the frantic “WRONG PLAYER” correction) is a thin blue rectangle along the top
and side edges – which matches the design of the front of the cards. I tested
the opacity of the File Binder page (and the slab) using all kinds of other
cards including some of the bright glowing orange backs of 1988 Topps Baseball.
I rested them atop the slab and held everything up to a strong light and you
can’t see anything except the shadow of the shape of the card.
I
would have to break the slab apart AND peel the cards off their construction
paper home (yeah, I’m still thinking about it) to be certain. But I think those
are issued cards glued on there. And I think Topps caught its mistakes in time
to pull all – or nearly all copies of #61 Marcel Paille Oops It’s Frank Paice
(and the Gamble and Mohns mistakes) before they went into the packs.
(ed. note - Here's the 1962-63 issued Hockey card showing Paice, correctly named in front view, courtesy of Keith Olbermann):
(ed. note - Here's detail from the 1962-63 aluminum proof showing Paille's biography on the reverse, courtesy of Keith Olbermann, then his actual 1962-63 reverse):
But…perhaps
those were proof sheets Topps
used for the 1962 Hockey Binders and they weren’t blank-backed. Topps printed
complete proof sheets – fronts, backs, bios, card numbers, cartoons – in 1959
and 1960. But all those ’62 sheets found in Connecticut were one-sided. This
would require Topps to have printed only one-sided 1962 Baseball proof sheets,
only one-sided 1962 Football proof sheets, and then one-sided 1962 Hockey proof
sheets and some two-sided 1962
Hockey proof sheets just…cause?
I
could easily be wrong. The faint rectangles could be glue stains on
blank-backed (or blank-fronted) proof cards. It makes no sense, but Topps
certainly could’ve printed two
different kinds of proof sheets. This could just be my now ancient eyes playing
tricks on me. This could be my 1985 brain cells and wallet crying out for
vengeance. It could all be wish fulfillment.
Or,
they’re unissued error cards Topps printed and destroyed.
For
now I can only offer these postscripts. The next year, Topps did not make the
same mistake with the hockey immortal who inadvertently set this row of dominos
falling. They proudly made a 1963-64 Doug Harvey card. Whereupon Harvey skipped
Rangers’ training camp, was sent down to the minors, returned to New York for
fourteen listless games, and was then banished to Quebec of the American
League. He didn’t return to the NHL until 1966 and then at age 43 exploded back
into stardom as the ace defenseman of the first St. Louis Blues team as it
advanced to the 1968 Stanley Cup final against his old team, the Canadiens.
O-Pee-Chee even made him card #1 in its 1968-69 set, using an image that is
either simply a horizontally flipped version of the shot from his 63-64 Rangers
card, or something from the same photo shoot.
(ed. note - Here's the 1963-64 (Topps) and 1968-69 (OPC) cards of Harvey):
And
as to Paille, he would finally get a real card of his own when Topps got the
rights to all six teams in 1964 and celebrated with the beloved “Tallboys” set.
He’s #92 in that set, what we would call today an SSP (or maybe a SSSP –
especially in good condition).
(ed. note - Here's the 1964-65 Paille card):
On
the other hand – I’ve triple-checked. The guy on the 1964-65 Marcel Paille card
is actually and surprisingly, Marcel Paille!
