1963 Topps Football with "Purple Skies"

[obctom]

Hi fellas,
The Don Bishop was, for me, by FAR the toughest to differentiate. I had multiple copies of the card & kept scanning them at super-high resolution in order to see if there were any red print dots in the sky, until I finally found one. It's almost impossible to see with the naked eye.

The jumping-off point for my quest to complete these was the RB Wooden Puzzles site. Unfortunately it hasn't been updated for many years, and in fact the owner indicated he couldn't say for certain if any of the other Cowboys had variations, other than what he listed, since he had seen so few of them.

After some serious card-hunting and research, I discovered that the #79 Sam Baker card does have a purple variation, and so does #83 Jerry Norton; those two weren't listed as having PS versions on the RB Wooden Puzzles site. The Baker variation is hard to see, but the one for Norton is clear once you realize there's what appears to be a red/purple shadow on the grass between his legs; the one with the "shadow" does have red print dots in the sky.

Please check my side-by-side scans, complete with descriptions, on my Flickr page at https://flickr.com/photos/obctom/alb...57719927518051

I'd like to think all of the purple variations have been discovered now, but based on the super-subtle differences in some of them, there still might be more out there. Hopefully not the Jim Brown though!

Having to acquire two Lilly RCs was almost as hard as trying to acquire two Nolan Ryan rookies, in order to have the regular and Milton Bradley versions of the 1968 Topps baseball!

Tom