1965 TOPPS PUSH-PULL CASEY STENGEL
Topps produced a wide variety of non-sport sets throughout the ’50s and ’60s. If you had an itch for cars, planes, space, flags, Elvis, The Beatles, Batman, or Hopalong Cassidy, the company was there to scratch it.
On occasion, a baseball star or two would slip into these sets. Babe Ruth found his way into both the 1963 Valentine Foldees issue and the 1966 Comic Book foldees offering; Ruth was joined by Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax in the Who Am I? set from 1967.
One of the more elaborate non-sport concepts of the era was the 1965 Topps Push-Pull set. The cards were made up of small black boxes with a louvered front panel; a picture card was inserted behind the louvered window, with a tab attached for the purpose of moving the card up and down.
Each picture card revealed two distinct images when shifted behind the slats, and the pairings were generally people, places, or things that had some relation to one another: Rock Hudson/Paul Anka, Thomas Edison/Albert Einstein, Great Wall of China/Taj Mahal, Statue of Liberty/Empire State Building. And in case you were wondering where Topps stood in terms of its Cold War allegiances, Nikita Kruschev/Gorilla…
The baseball inclusions in this set were almost exclusively Yankees-related: Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra/Mickey Mantle, and Casey Stengel/Casey Stengel.
And no, your eyes do not deceive you– the Stengel was in fact the only card on the checklist that pictured a single subject. Of course, in keeping with the theme of the set, the card presented two faces of the Old Perfessor: “Casey Stengel Wins” showed him smiling in Yankee pinstripes, while “Casey Stengel Loses” went with a picture of dour Metsy gloom…
Very cool! I’ve never seen/heard these before.
I have those 1967 Who Am I cards but they’ve been scratched off, which I’m guessing kills their value.