1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Frank St. Marseille #65 Bilingual Back St. Louis Blues

Description

1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Frank St. Marseille #65 Bilingual Back St. Louis Blues Nicknames stick harder than statistics, and Frank St. Marseille had one of the best in the league. Everyone in St. Louis called him the Saint, a nod to the surname and to a game so clean and reliable that he became a fixture on the wing through the franchise's first eight seasons. He was a late bloomer who spent years captaining the Kansas City Blues of the Central Hockey League before the NHL came calling, and when it did he arrived as a versatile forward who could play center or right wing, which the back of this card points out along with a wonderful anecdote about his brother writing a letter on his behalf to Lynn Patrick, the general manager of the Los Angeles Kings. He scored 16 goals as a 28 year old rookie in 1967-68 and went on to post four seasons of 20 or more goals, including 62 points in 1970-71, all of it in a Blues uniform. This 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee card, number 65 from the first series, catches him at 32 in a classic seated studio pose against the green backdrop, with the tan border and vertical team lettering that make the issue so easy to identify at a glance. The reverse carries the full bilingual English and French biography and a career record through 1971-72, ending with 358 games, 79 goals and 153 assists, and it is a standard O-Pee-Chee bilingual back, not a puzzle back. First series cards from this 340 card Canadian set are the most available part of the run, which means patient collectors can still find sharp examples of popular original Blues like this one. The 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Frank St. Marseille #65 card is a quiet, handsome addition to a Blues team set and a nice piece of the 1967 expansion story. the green background is smooth and evenly colored, the portrait is sharp with clean facial detail, corners are crisp on the top two with very light softening at the bottom left, and centering runs about 58/42 left to right with a small amount of tan edge wear along the bottom border. The reverse is clean and bright with no writing, no tape and no paper loss, and it is not a puzzle back. EX-MT 6 is conservative here, because the surface and gloss are intact and the only deductions are the light bottom corner softening, minor edge wear and modest centering drift. Grade Estimate: EX-MT 6