Today’s card of the day is a 1935 Diamond Matchbook of Gene Augusterfer. I know, matchbooks aren’t cards, but they’re small and rectangular and cardboard, so they’re a pretty good substitute–especially for the 1930s, when few football cards were produced.
From 1933 to 1938, The Diamond Match Company produced matchbooks picturing NFL and college football players. The 1935 set includes players from seven of the day’s nine NFL teams–all but the Green Bay Packers and Brooklyn Dodgers–plus the University of Georgia. Why were the Bulldogs included and the Packers and Dodgers not? I don’t know, but maybe a reader can help us out.
I recently added 1935 Diamond Matchbooks to the Gallery; you can see them all here. A big thanks to Jeff Payne for providing the scans, since I haven’t collected them myself. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add the other Diamond sets sometime soon.
Several of the NFL players in the 1935 Diamond set played in just a handful of games. Gene Augusterfer, the player on this matchbook, played one game for the Pittsburgh Pirates (later the Steelers) in 1935, and that was the extent of his NFL career. I was happy to learn this, because it meant I could add him to the Gallery’s Cups of Coffee page.
Though Augusterfer’s playing career was short, he stayed involved in football. According to Wikipedia, he was the head coach at Arkansas A&M (now the University of Arkansas at Monticello) in 1943 and 1944, and at the Catholic University of America, in Washington, DC, in 1947.
