09/10/2026
1935-37 World Wide Gum Baseball -- an enigmatic baseball series.
Known primarily for its inclusion of the "rookie card" of Joe DiMaggio and the very last card of Lou Gehrig during his playing career, the "1936" World Wide Gum series, produced in Montreal, maintains its rather inscrutable existence due to a general scarcity and an unusual assortment of Major League and International League players.
Long believed to have been manufactured in 1936, it was actually a 3-year series distributed by World Wide Gum Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the Goudey Gum Company. The first cards from the set were issued in 1935 (beginning in late October/early November), the bulk of them in 1936, and the last in early 1937.
Due to team affiliations, chronological designations, and other evidence on their reverse sides of their cards, there is a strong indication that the following players were distributed in 1935:
#15 Bill Delancey
#49 Charlie Gelbert
#51 Joe DiMaggio
#53 Joe McCarthy
#67 Steve O'Neill
#85 Jim Bottomley
#89 Charlie Grimm
#90 Ben Chapman
#94 Chick Hafey
#96 Lou Gehrig
#101 Vito Tamulis
#104 Roxie Lawson
#109 Bill Lee
#122 Tom Abernathy
#127 George Puccinelli
9 other cards ( #2, #13, #19, #56, #91, #97, #105, #106, #132) were possibly issued in 1935 but there is no definitive proof. They may have also been from 1936.
Five cards were distributed in 1937:
#27 Bob Seeds (was optioned to the Newark Bears, a farm team of the New York Yankees, in January 1937)
#76 Joe Vosmik (refers to trade on January 13, 1937, from Cleveland Indians to St. Louis Browns)
#116 Marvin Duke (due to team affiliation)
#120 Norm Kies (due to team affiliation)
#128 Stevie Stephenson (due to team affiliation)
The rest of the cards--at least 106 subjects--were produced and distributed in 1936.
One might conclude then, that there were several different print runs, with varying quantities produced for each series. This is borne out by population figures, where there appears to be a pretty distinct ratio of 2:1 between some cards and others. This means that a number of cards are short printed, but with the exception of the last card in the set, #135 Philip Weintraub, we do not know for certain which ones were produced in more limited quantities until an uncut sheet is located.
It is also likely that World Wide Gum copied the strategy of the U.S. parent company Goudey in 1933, and produced a skip numbered set, filling in the missing numbers in later printings in order to increase sales as collectors frenetically searched for the ones they were still missing.
Since there are a disproportionate number of Detroit Tigers in the set -- 20 total -- it can be surmised that the series originally was made to capitalize on the 1935 World Series, which Detroit won. This further supports a beginning distribution date late in 1935.
