Printed on the sides of Bazooka gum boxes that contained 25 pieces of penny gum the 1959 Bazooka cards were colorful large format (nearly 3 x 5") cards that are among today's most popular oddball issues of the 1950s and 60s and certainly the most difficult to complete of all the Bazooka sets. As with any card that appeared on the outside of a box 1959 Bazooka is extremely prone to surface wear. However the hand-cut nature of these cards creates additional condition problems as most grading companies will not assign a numerical grade to a hand-cut card unless the entire border is visible. Certainly children of the 1950s were not sensitive to the future rules that PSA and SGC might apply when grading these resulting in a high percentage of AUTHENTIC grades as opposed to numerical. Indeed 83% of the 1959 Bazooka cards graded by PSA and 535 of those graded by SGC have been awarded an AUTHENTIC grade - extraordinarily high percentages. Presented here is the set's key card certainly its most valuable - the card of the era's most coveted star. Extremely colorful with a large-sized image of Mantle and his bat the card has been well-preserved over the years with just mild creasing (none of which affects the image of Mantle himself to any great degree) and surface wear evident throughout the card. And of course the telltale wavy signs of a period hand-cut are evident in this card - and those same cuts are responsible for the card's AUTHENTIC grade. Still one of the more scarce and highly sought-after Mickey Mantle cards of the era an outstanding example of a notoriously elusive card.