1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Ken Schinkel #256 Name Spelling Variation Pittsburgh Penguins

Description

1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Ken Schinkel #256 Name Spelling Variation Pittsburgh Penguins Here is a card with a quirk that eagle eyed collectors love to point out. The 1972-73 O-Pee-Chee Ken Schinkel #256 Name Spelling Variation Pittsburgh Penguins prints the player's surname on the front nameplate as Shinkel, missing the c, while the bilingual reverse spells it correctly as Ken Schinkel, a small production oddity that gives this high number issue a talking point well beyond its status as a veteran card. Schinkel was born in Jansen, Saskatchewan in 1932 and was the last original Penguin still on the roster by 1972-73, the oldest man in the dressing room and the franchise's living link to its 1967 expansion debut. He had reinvented himself in Pittsburgh after years of bouncing between the New York Rangers and the minors, earning All Star recognition and becoming the kind of honest, defensively responsible winger every coach wants on the ice in the third period. He would soon step behind the bench as head coach of the same club, making him one of the rare figures to serve a franchise as original player, All Star, and coach. The card comes from the tough high number series of the 341 card Canadian O-Pee-Chee set, issued during the season of the Summit Series and the birth of the World Hockey Association, and it pairs the vintage powder blue Penguins sweater with a hot red background that defines the look of this run. The reverse is an authentic Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back, cream and orange, with English and French biography text noting that he is the only original Penguin still with Pittsburgh and one of the real honest workers in the NHL, a cartoon panel, and a lengthy career record grid tracking his seasons with New York and Pittsburgh. It is a bilingual statistical back, not a puzzle back, with Printed In Canada at the base. the photos show a front with a visible diagonal surface disturbance in the upper red background area and light scattered surface scratching through the red field, no hard crease breaking the paper but enough surface texture to matter, corners that show rounding at all four tips with the heaviest wear at the lower left, edge chipping along the left and bottom borders where white shows through the tan, and a cut that is slightly diamond shaped with the image frame tilted a touch counter clockwise inside the borders. The back is clean and unmarked. The conservative estimate reflects the surface disturbance and the tilted cut, and it is deliberately cautious because angled light in hand may reveal a light wrinkle. Grade Estimate: VG-EX 4