A new version of my Jim Brown card

I'm just back from a lengthy Christmas-New Year vacation of nearly three weeks' duration.

Pretty much everything that has been posted here since Dec. 16 was done in advance and scheduled to appear at regular intervals while I was gone.

The readers kept in contact during that period with lots of inquiries and discoveries, etc., which I'll get to as time permits.

I also spent a great deal of time working on my custom card creations. Besides venturing into some new types, I did a few updates to my 1955 All American-style cards, generally replacing sub-par photos that had been the best available when the cards were first worked up several years back.

One of those that got a face lift was my Jim Brown creation. The new version is shown at left, the first attempt is below (they share a common back). Obviously no set of second-generation All American cards would be complete without a Jim Brown card, but when I made my initial homage, I didn't have much to work with as far as a college-era photo. The running pose shown on the original creation ( ) was a low-resolution black-and-white that didn't frankly was not my best job of colorization.

A recent check of the cyber world, however, turned up a couple of Brown-Syracuse photos that were new to me and I chose the portrait you see here. On the Syracuse player that Topps included in its original 1955 All American set, the gum company went with a generic football player profile in an orange helmet.

In doing both this Syracuse card (originally completed about 2006) and a later Ernie Davis card, I harkened back to an older Syracuse mascot/nickname. In the 1950s and before, Syracuse's athletic team were sometimes called the Saltine Warriors, evidently having something to do with Indian artifacts found on the campus during construction .

The caricature of the Indian that appears on my cards was taken from a felt pennant that dates to those pre-political correctness days.

Keep checking back on the blog as I get caught up on my vacation backlog.

Thanks for your support.