Redskins Card Museum

About 12 years ago, I was driving home from work and stopped by a newsstand in Denver called Newsland.  Near Newsland was a card shop called Jordan’s (since moved).  I poked my head inside and almost immediately became a collector again (or a kid again?).  I was amazed that all the cards that I collected as a kid (and more) were available at affordable prices.  I have been a Redskins fanatic since I was a kid growing up in Virginia so naturally, my purchases were exclusively Redskins football cards.  I began reading Sports Collectors Digest, discovered eBay, and was hooked. 

At first, there was not much focus to my collecting other than all the cards were Redskins football cards.  I did pay a lot of attention to condition.  This was before card grading became the norm.  That attention to condition certainly paid off later. Eventually, I decided that would try to collect one of every Redskins card.  I quickly learned that I was being too ambitious. With the explosion of the number of sets in the 1990’s, the introduction of parallel sets, and one-of-one cards, it quickly became apparent that collecting one of every Redskins football card was going to be impossible.  So, to make a long story short, after a lot of trial-and-error I narrowed my collecting goals. 

My collecting goals became:

1.  Collect all Redskins team sets from 1935-1972
2.  Collect all major oddball sets from 1933-1972
3.  Collect all vintage Sonny Jurgensen items
4.  Collect all vintage Sammy Baugh items
5.  Collect all Topps (the basic release) Redskins team sets from 1972-present
6.  Collect Redskins rookie autograph cards
7.  Collect whatever Redskins autograph and jersey cards caught my eye

The list is still ambitious and that is ok.  I am not done and do not know when I will be and that is ok too.  I have made significant progress and I am having a blast. My family supports this adventure just like they support all of my goals – completely.

Once the grading of vintage cards became common place and I had completed most of the vintage Redskins team sets, I decided to get my collection graded.  I was fortunate, most of the cards came back with a grade of 8 (NearMint/Mint).  While I was thrilled that I was building a high-quality collection, I hated the fact that my cards were trapped in boxes and binders. The larger items (such as posters), rarely saw the light of day.  Why build a nice collection if it is a challenge to look at it?

That is why I built the Redskins Football Card Museum.  I have to admit the motive is mainly selfish.  I want to be able to look at my cards any time I want to (especially, since the collection now lives 20 miles away in a safe deposit box in the basement of a bank).  However, I also deeply hope that both collectors and Redskins fans come across this site and enjoy what they see.  I try to let the cards speak for themselves.  This blog will contain, I hope, some interesting articles. However, on this site, the images are where you can find the good stuff.  

This site is not a monument to the front side of graded cards.  Horizontally oriented cards are shown appropriately. I have taken the time to scan the backs of everything I own.  I have sized the images so that the backs are readable.  I have tried to organize the pages so that you can scroll through a set of Redskins football cards and enjoy the fronts and read the backs.

Building this site was much more work than I ever expected.  But, I am thrilled that I made the time to do it.  I will be keeping it up to date and changes will occur several times a month.  The site is somewhat bandwidth intensive as the site contains over 1300 images.  However, most of the pages load fairly quickly.  I hope you enjoy what you see and I hope what you see brings back some good memories.