5 from 1955 Bowman

My COMC spring cleaning box was almost entirely made up of cards for my two set-building projects, 1955 Bowman and 1972 Topps.  Here I'll show a few highlights of the 1955 Bowman cards.  I'm currently just over one-third complete with the 1955 Bowman, with 107 out of 320 cards.

Gil Hodges.

I'll start off with Night Owl's nominee for someone who should have been in the Hall of Fame a long time ago, the Dodgers legend Gil Hodges.  I would say that this is my first good card of Hodges.  That's because this is my first card of him produced while he was playing.  I do have a good managerial card of Hodges, from the 1972 set I'm building.  And then I have a couple of cards from later, the Hygrade All-Time greats, and the 1985 Circle K Home Run Kings.  When the Circle K set was produced, Hodges was 29th on the all-time home run list with his career total of 370.

Enos Slaughter.

This is my first good card of Hall-of-Famer Enos Slaughter, too.  I have the Hygrade of him, and also a Pacific Legends and a Swell Baseball Greats.  Slaughter was from Roxboro, NC, a place I visited at least once when I was in grad school in Durham, NC.  Roxboro has a prominent "Home of Enos Slaughter" sign when you enter town.

Mickey Vernon.

Then we have Mickey Vernon, pictured with the Washington Senators.  It's slightly jarring going through the 1955 set to see how different the teams are then as compared to today.  In about 65 years, a lot has changed.  To be precise, there were only 16 teams back then, and 5 of them have undergone major changes since -- the A's, Giants, Dodgers, and Braves all later moved while retaining their team name, while the Senators later moved and became the Twins.  So, there are only 11 teams from the set that still exist in the same form.  One of those, the Orioles, was brand new at the time.

Lew Burdette.

Here we have Lew Burdette of those Milwaukee Braves.  I showed another card of Burdette before, in the TCMA set of the 1957 Braves.

Bill Jackowski.

Finally, we have NL umpire Bill Jackowski.  It goes without saying that the umpire cards are a highlight of the set.  Jackowski was the home plate umpire in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, the game with Mazeroski's famous home run.

That's all for today; thanks for reading!