Anyone Collect 1959 Bazooka Football?

[jefferyepayne]

The Tom Tracy is brutally tough. I've never seen one come up for auction besides the one I have.

Agree this set is under appreciated. It is one of my favorites.

jeff

[finalscore]

The 59 Bazooka's are one of my favorites to. Groza and Tracy were the last two I needed way back when to complete my set. Here are some scans of one of my boxes (empty of course!).

Originally Posted by CowboysGuide

I've seen lots of complete Bazooka boxes from the 1971 football set, but never seen any from the 1959 set. Does anyone have a complete box they could post a photo of?

[brian1961]

Mike---

Thanks ever so much for taking the time and trouble of posting the photos of your fabulous 1959 Bazooka Alan Ameche box. A king-sized gem.

For the gentleman who asked, Bazooka marketed a box containing a large number of individual one-cent twin chews of their wonderful bubble gum. These fit the category of penny candy, which existed at that time and was sold at small grocery stores, drug stores, and dime stores.

Topps wanted a way for kids to purchase more than a few pennies' worth of gum at one time, so they developed this type of box with 20-25 individual twin chews. I do not know exactly when Bazooka first issued a box of this design, but I am rather certain they wanted to increase sales of their product, and since they were already offering the regular wax packs and cello packs of trading cards, come 1959 they decided upon the perfect incentive to goose those sales of Bazooka gum---with a free prize baseball and then football card.

They were by no means punched off the box. As the others have said, they were purely hand cut cards, which caused all sorts of condition degradation on top of the other condition problems that arose from their manner of sale.

This is a great set, in every way.

As an aside, I am so glad Bazooka got the much better pose and natural happy expression of all-time great Johnny Unitas, rather than the looney-looking appearance Johnny gave the photographer for the other shot, chosen for the 1960 Topps. ---Brian Powell

[TanksAndSpartans]

Mike - thanks for showing the box - a picture is worth a thousand words (Anyone catch that Jeff authored one of the articles in the GG issue the box is sitting on?)

Brian - great explanation - thanks.

[jtschantz]

Looking for the Groza

[quinnsryche]

That box is AWESOME! The Jim Brown is absolutely beautiful also. Thanks everyone for sharing your pics and info.

[jefferyepayne]

Mr. Tracy himself.



jeff

[quinnsryche]

Originally Posted by jtschantz

Looking for the Groza

There's a Groza up on ebay right now if you have a spare 2K lying around.
Seriously, what's it actually worth?

[Beansballcardblog]

Again, new to the forum. Thanks to all that posted their info on this set. Didn't know anything of it. Really loving the education that I'm getting here!

-Kin

[jefferyepayne]

Glad you like this thead! In my opinion, the '59 Bazooka set is one of the nicest looking football sets ever produced. Just a really nice, clean design and I love the large card size.

There's a lot of great sets out there and lots of knowledge about them so feel free to start threads on anything as somebody here is probably very knowledgeable about it.

jeff