Brown & Blue

While I didn't bid on it, a curious piece of Topps history was hammered on eBay late last year.  Using their own employees for photo shoots was a continuing theme with Topps in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of their antics are a little humorous in retrospect.

This is an original photographic pasteup from the archives of Brown Brothers, a stock photo firm that was big for a good chunk of the Twentieth Century: 

Lelands has been auctioning off the firm's archival items on the 'Bay and also in some catalog auctions but the three notations are masking another Brown reference, namely the friendly "shopkeeper" pounding a baseball mitt, one Len Brown.  Brown was Topps New Product Director Woody Gelman's assistant at the time and he's helping the PR push for those 1963 Bazooka boxes that not only had three package design baseball cards on the revere but five All Time Greats cards within. 

These were the boxes being hawked by Len:

The reverse of the photo shows a lot of decrepit rubber cement along with a notation:

I've blown it up to make it easier to read:

I am surmising this particular piece came from Len's first wife and was in her possession as part of their divorce.  Of note are mention of three 1973-74 test issues; in order these are Deckle Baseball cards from '74, plus The Waltons and The Rookies, both TV shows of the day that Topps tried to make work as card sets in 1973.  I've covered the first two here previously but to my surprise I've never referenced The Rookies, which is one of the tougher test issues of the decade and far harder to track down than the other two, at least from what I've found.

They come from a time when Topps was trying to standardize some of their graphics:

A little text and a puzzle make up the reverse:

The example above is unusual as it's not severely miscut, since most of the set's surviving examples are found that way. In fact, many of its 44 subjects are horizontally-oriented and the cuts can be so bad that the caption is often found above the photo and not below:

Yikes!  It's truly a tough issue and finding well-cut cards is super challenging.   PSA has graded a mere 60 examples overall with nothing above a grade of 7 given. However, 44 of them are in the sole registry set, which is complete with a GPA of 6.898. By way of reference, 255 Waltons cards have been PSA slabbed (nine 9's given) and over 3,000 1974 Deckles, with seventy-six 10's granted somehow!

Silver And Gold (Foil)

Topps doesn't have any New Year's themed sets, otherwise I'd probably be posting about such a thing but as we start our ninth (!) calendar year here, I'm going to turn the WABAC to 1963 and take a quick look at the Bazooka All Time Greats set. I did a short post a while ago on these but want to take a closer look at the "silver" variations that are circulating. Besides, I'm on a bit of a Bazooka research bender these days.

Topps may have thought 1963 would be another year where Fleer issued an old timer's set, as they had for three seasons, but Fleer elected to try a set of current major leaguers, which Topps shut down after one series. The 1963 Topps regular issue only had a single insert, 46 Peel-Offs that would hardly have filled out all seven series of cards while they were competing with Fleer so it's a bit odd their other insert set went into Bazooka boxes destined for the nation's supermarket and variety store shelves. I have to suspect the timing was such that after shutting down Fleer they decided to just put the All Time Greats, which feature  T.C.G. indicia, into Bazooka, which already featured what was becoming a standard three card panel of current players.

So anyhoo, there are 41 All Time Greats, and they are pretty darn snazzy with their faux gold leaf and dimensions (1 9/16" x 2 1/2") almost matching those of T206 and the like. Here's Honus:

You can see how the gold foil scratches easily and retains production marks.  When the cards are in nice, spiffy shape they really pop.  In contrast, here is a "silver" front:

You can see there is no gold foil present, although I have to say they still look pretty nice in this format.  It's easy to think the foil just wasn't applied to the silver cards but that's not the case, as evidenced by the backs.  Here is the back of the gold Honus Wagner card:

The mustard yellow blocks are prominent but on the silver cards, there is no block of color applied:

Clearly these were intended to be manufactured just a little differently.  So what's the story?  Some sources I've seen say the silver cards were issued in larger than ordinary Bazooka boxes (normally they were either 20 or 25 count) of 100 pieces or so, while others offer no opinion at all.  What I can tell you is that the November 3, 1963 Fifth Catalog Additions to the American Card Catalog mention both the gold and black-and-white backs so they were both produced in or by 1963. The 20 and 25 count boxes both state there were 5 Golden Edition" cards in each box. My best guess is that Topps had a final run printed up, awaiting the golden touches and then just used the cards anyway to finish out the 1963 Bazooka baseball issue. They are about three or four times scarcer than the gold cards but not particularly hard to find so some fairly large distribution of them occurred.

Here is the "Golden Edition" checklist, see you all in 2017!

1	TINKER	JOE
2	HEILMANN	HARRY
3	CHESBRO	JACK
4	MATHEWSON	CHRISTY
5	PENNOCK	HERB
6	YOUNG	CY
7	WALSH	ED
8	LAJOIE	NAP
9	PLANK	EDDIE
10	WAGNER	HONUS
11	BENDER	CHIEF
12	JOHNSON	WALTER
13	BROWN	MORDECAI
14	MARANVILLE	RABBIT
15	GEHRIG	LOU
16	JOHNSON	BAN
17	RUTH	BABE
18	MACK	CONNIE
19	GREENBERG	HANK
20	McGRAW	JOHN
21	EVERS	JOHNNY
22	SIMMONS	AL
23	COLLINS	JIMMY
24	SPEAKER	TRIS
25	CHANCE	FRANK
26	CLARKE	FRED
27	ROBINSON	WILBERT
28	VANCE	DAZZY
29	ALEXANDER	GROVER CLEVELAND
30	LANDIS	KENESAW MOUNTAIN
31	KEELER	WILLIE
32	HORNSBY	ROGERS
33	DUFFY	HUGH
34	COCHRANE	MICKEY
35	COBB	TY
36	OTT	MEL
37	GRIFFITH	CLARK
38	LYONS	TED
39	ANSON	CAP
40	DICKEY	BILL
41	COLLINS	EDDIE

Bazooka Joe And His (Older) Pals

While not often thought of as Topps cards, Bazooka issued an almost uninterrupted run of baseball sets from 1959-71, the vast majority of which were issued on the backs of boxes of their namesake bubble gum in panels of three.

I found a really nice scan of a proof sheet from 1963 in the depths of my hard drive this morning:



The Bazooka cards often featured better photography than their Topps brethren. Some years tend to look alike though but dem's da breaks!

You can see how the panels were stripped onto the boxes, from a scan is lifted from Clean Sweep Auctions:



If you click the picture, it will expand and you can see it held five All Time Great cards within:



That Babe is the more common gold version of the cards. There is also one referred to as silver:



Silver cards are harder to find but don't seem to tend toward the pink toning seen on the borders of the golds.

Locked in a battle with Fleer over the rights to various current ball players in 1963, Topps hit the boys from Philly right in the labonza with the insert set as Fleer had issued cards of old timers over the previous three years. There are 41 All Time Greats in the insert set.

There are 36 current players in the '63 Bazooka set, a total that was fairly consistent over the years the cards were printed. Panels are very collectible today and display nicely but there is far less interest in these cards than in the mainstream sets issued by Topps.