The Glory of Their Times
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THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES
The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It
LAWRENCE S. RITTER
THE ENLARGED EDITION
Dedication
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE MEN WHO LIVE WITHIN ITS PAGES
All these were honored in their generation,
And were the glory of their times.
Ecclesiasticus 44:7
Contents
NOTE: Dates in brackets indicate years played in the major leagues
Dedication
Preface to the New Enlarged Edition
Original Preface
1. Rube Marquard [1908–25]
2. Tommy Leach [1898–1918]
3. Davy Jones [1901–15]
4. Sam Crawford [1899–1917]
5. George Gibson [1905–18]
6. Jimmy Austin [1909–22]
7. Fred Snodgrass [1908–16]
8. Stanley Coveleski [1916–28]
9. Al Bridwell [1905–15]
10. Harry Hooper [1909–25]
11. Joe Wood [1908–22]
12. Chief Meyers [1909–17]
13. Hans Lobert [1903–17]
14. Rube Bressler [1914–32]
15. Babe Herman [1926–45]
16. Edd Roush [1913–31]
17. Bill Wambsganss [1914–26]
18. Sam Jones [1914–35]
19. Bob O’Farrell [1915–35]
20. Specs Toporcer [1921–28]
21. Lefty O’Doul [1919–34]
22. Goose Goslin [1921–38]
23. Willie Kamm [1923–35]
24. Heinie Groh [1912–27]
25. Hank Greenberg [1933–47]
26. Paul Waner [1926–45]
Acknowledgments
Picture Credits
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES
OVERLEAF The Boston Red Sox in spring training at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1915. The Red Sox became the World Champions that year, so perhaps the steamroller on which they are posing is appropriate. (Germany Schaefer was not on the Red Sox—he just happened to be in town.)
In the photo are: (1) A fan, (2) Forrest Cady, (3) Chet Thomas, (4) Ground-keeper, (5) Smoky Joe Wood, (6) Carl Mays, (7) Germany Schaefer, (8) A fan, (9) Vean Gregg, (10) A fan, (11) A fan, (12) George Dauss, (13) Dutch Leonard, (14) Babe Ruth, (15) George Foster, (16) Guy Cooper, (17) Charlie Flanagan, (18) Heinie Wagner, (19) Ray Collins, (20) Ray Haley, (21) Rip Hagerman, (22) Joe Lannin (owner), (23) Bill Carrigan (manager), (24) Bill Sweeney, (25) Ernie Shore.
Preface to the Enlarged Edition
THIS NEW enlarged edition of The Glory of Their Times contains the complete text and all the photographs that were in the original book, published in 1966, plus for the first time the first-person stories of four additional major-league players—George Gibson, Babe Herman, Specs Toporcer, and Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg.
The original tapes from which The Glory of Their Times was written are now themselves in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Indeed, it has even been suggested that publication of the book helped some of the men in it get elected to the Hall, because it stimulated renewed interest in the early days of the game and in the men who played then.
Goose Goslin, Stanley Coveleski, Rube Marquard, and Harry Hooper were all elected to the Hall of Fame after the book was published—the Goose in 1968, Stan Coveleski in 1969, and Rube Marquard and Harry Hooper in 1971. On the other hand, Sam Crawford, Edd Roush, and Paul Waner were Hall of Famers well before the book appeared.
Whether the book helped or not is questionable, but there is no doubt about the fact that Rube Marquard was the first Hall of Famer to learn of his election while on the high seas aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2. Rube was elected on January 30, 1971, by the Committee on Veterans, which bestowed on me the honor of communicating the good news to him. It took a while before the shore-to-ship phone was free, but eventually I got in touch with the QE2 and asked for Mr. Marquard. Rube wrote me about it on the following day:
Dear Larry:
I was the happiest and most surprised man in the world when I heard your voice yesterday telling me that I was voted into the Hall of Fame. The reason I didn’t say anything for so long was that I couldn’t. I was all choked up and tears were running down my cheeks.
Yesterday evening, a few hours after you called, everybody was dancing and having a good time and suddenly the Captain of the ship stopped the music and said he wanted to make an important announcement. He said they had a very prominent man on board who had just been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. His name is Rube Marquard and he is right here dancing with his wife.
Well, all hell broke loose, people yelling and clapping, and the band played “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” I was so happy and Jane just loved it too. When we go to Cooperstown this summer, please come with us and be my guest.
Goose Goslin’s experience was somewhat less rapturous. The Goose was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Committee on Veterans in January of 1968. The Cooperstown induction was scheduled for Monday morning, July 22, and the Goose joyously made plans for his big day. “You be sure to be there,” he said to me on the phone. “We’ll have a wonderful time.”
Both of us arrived at Cooperstown on Sunday evening, the day before the ceremonies, the Goose accompanied by some relatives and close friends from home in southern New Jersey. He and his party happily established themselves in several beautiful rooms at the Otesaga Hotel, a few blocks from the Hall of Fame, and all of us enjoyed a bountiful meal, with many toasts, as we awaited the day of days.
Monday dawned warm and beautiful. A large crowd was already on hand as we arrived at the Hall of Fame at ten in the morning. At the appropriate time, General William D. Eckert, then the Commissioner of Baseball, introduced the Goose and presented him with a replica of the plaque that would stand forever in his honor, in close proximity to those of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Walter Johnson.
The Goose, his eyes wet, tried to maintain his composure. “I want to thank God, who gave me the health and strength to compete with those great players,” he said. Then he started to cry and couldn’t continue, until the gentle hand of the commissioner and the applause of the crowd restored his self-control. “I will never forget this moment,” he concluded. “I will take the memory of this day to my grave.”
Finally, we made our way back to the hotel, where a buffet luncheon had been prepared for the new inductees and their guests. Although the lunch was excellent, the Goose could hardly eat because of his exhilaration, not to mention the steady stream of interruptions by congratulatory old friends and autograph seekers.
After lunch we returned to the room and began to make plans for the afternoon and evening. “I think I’ll take a nap for an hour or so,” the Goose said. “Then let’s all walk back to the Hall and take a good look at it.”
Before anyone could answer, however, the phone rang. It was the room clerk. “You’ll have to vacate your rooms within the hour, Mr. Goslin,” he said. “We have a convention arriving and people are already waiting in the lobby for your rooms.”
“What are you talking about?” the Goose protested. “I’m not leaving until tomorrow. It’s a long drive home and I’m tired. We expected to stay overnight.”
“I’m sorry,” said the clerk. “But when we wrote you several months ago we told you that we had reserved your rooms for Sunday night only, and that if you or any of your party wanted to stay longer you’d have to let us know. Since we never heard from you, we assigned your rooms to someone else for tonight.”
And so it happened that on his great day, July 22, 1968, Leon Allen Goslin was honored, acclaimed, and applauded in the morning—and unceremoniously ejected from his hotel room that same afternoon. Sic transit gloria mundi!
To do the interviews for The Glory of Their Times, I traveled 75,000 miles searching for the heroes of a bygone era. They were not easy to find. The teams they played for had lost track of them decades ago, and there was no central source of information. Modern players are relatively easy to locate. Since they are entitled to pension benefits, the Players Association keeps track of their whereabouts. But there were no pensions for those I was seeking, and often no Social Security either.
In desperation, I consulted old baseball record books, which usually contained information on date and place of birth. Then I went to the New York Public Library’s collection of up-to-date municipal telephone directories. I reasoned that many of these men might well have returned to their home towns after their playing days were over, and even if they hadn’t, relatives might still be living there who could help me.
Surprisingly, this worked. More often than not the home-town telephone book had a listing for the last name of the person I was looking for, and generally it was a close or distant relative of the old ballplayer. If they didn’t know where he was, they at least knew some other member of the family who did.
Not that it was any bed of roses from there on in. Far from it. As a case in point, for example, consider the tracking down of Sam Crawford, the top long-ball hitter of the early 1900’s. I was told that Sam lived in Los Angeles, but when I arrived at the address, his wife, somewhat startled, said he hadn’t been there in months. Sam didn’t like big cities, she said, so she seldom saw him. Well, then, where could I find him? Oh, she couldn’t tell me that; he’d be furious. Sam loved peace and quiet…and, above all, he wanted privacy.
After I pleaded for hours, Mrs. Crawford relented somewhat. She wouldn’t tell me exactly where he was, but there was probably no harm in giving me “one small hint.” If I drove north somewhere between 175 and 225 miles, I’d be “warm.” Oh yes, she inadvertently dropped one more clue—Sam Crawford, the giant who had once terrorized American League pitchers, enjoyed two things above all: tending his garden and watching the evening sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
A long drive and inquiries at post offices, real-estate agencies, and grocery stores placed me, two days later, in the small town of Baywood Park, California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. For the next two days, however, I made no further progress. On the morning of the fifth day, frustrated and disappointed, I took some wash to the local Laundromat and disgustedly sat watching the clothes spin. Seated next to me was a tall, elderly gentleman reading a frayed paperback. Idly, I asked if he had ever heard of Sam Crawford, the old ballplayer.
“Well, I should certainly hope so,” he said, “bein’ as I’m him.”
I sometimes wonder what could have prompted me to embark on such a strange crusade, searching the highways and byways of America for old ballplayers, a quest that preoccupied me for the better part of six years. For a long time I thought my travels had been inspired by the death of Ty Cobb in 1961 and that I was pursuing a social goal, recording for posterity the remembrances of a sport that had played such a significant role in American life in the early years of the twentieth century.
But now, on reflection two decades later, I don’t think my journey had much to do with social purposes. Deep down, it was a quest of a more personal nature. It so happens that my own father died at about the same time as Ty Cobb. Still vivid in my memory is the day, when I was nine years old, that my father took me by the hand to my first big-league baseball game. It seems to me now that I was trying to recapture that unforgettable ritual of childhood and draw closer to a father I would never see again—and I think that, through The Glory of Their Times, I somehow succeeded.
LAWRENCE S. RITTER
1984
Original Preface
THIS IS A book about the early days of baseball. It is a book about what it was like and how it felt to be a baseball player at the turn of the century and in the decades shortly thereafter. At least that was my intent when I began working on the book five years and 75,000 miles ago. But now that it has been completed, I am not so sure.
Without implying comparison, I am reminded of Melville’s Moby Dick. What is Moby Dick about? Is it a book about whaling in the nineteenth century? Indeed it is. It probably contains more information on the subject than any learned treatise written before or since. Nevertheless, any schoolboy knows that Moby Dick is not really about whaling. It is about man’s hopes, his struggles, his triumphs, and his failures. It is about trying to attain the unattainable—and sometimes making it. And, on its own terms, that is also what this book is about.
So is this a book about the early days of baseball, or isn’t it? It most assuredly is. It is about Ed Delahanty running away from home in 1887, about Honus Wagner playing third base with a first baseman’s glove in 1898, about Ty Cobb coming up from the South with a chip on his shoulder in 1905. It is about Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Rube Waddell, John McGraw and Frank Chance, Home Run Baker and Wee Willie Keeler.
But it is about much more as well, because what baseball was like in the early days is told here by the players themselves, by the men who —wearing tiny gloves, wielding heavy bats, attired in uniform shirts with upturned collars and sleeves below the elbows—were playing in major-league baseball games 50, 60, and almost 70 years ago. These are their life stories, told in their words. And in recalling those days, in remembering what their teammates and their opponents were like, in reminiscing about their victories and their defeats, they re-create with dramatic impact the sights and sounds, the vigor and the vitality, of an era that can never return. Here is what it felt like to be young and a big leaguer in a high-spirited country a long time ago.
The narratives contained in this book are chronicles of men who chased a dream and, at least for a time, caught up with it and lived it. They were pioneers, in every sense of the word, engaged in a pursuit in which only the most skilled, the most determined, and, above all, the most rugged survived. They entered an endeavor which lacked social respectability, and when they left it, it was America’s National Game. They are proud of what they did, and they talk of it with enthusiasm in their voices and happiness in their eyes.
This is also the story of America at the turn of the century and prior to World War I. Jacques Barzun, the distinguished Columbia University philosopher, wrote that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Here, illustrated in microcosm, is the exuberance and unbounded optimism of a nation confident of its ability to shape the future to its will and mold its own destiny. In the days of Teddy Roosevelt a man’s fate was seen as his own doing, and individual initiative and hard work were viewed as the pathways to success. At that time the words “welfare state,” “corporate image,” and “organization man” were not even a part of the language. So it was in baseball as in America at large.
Most history, whether of baseball or of war, is written many years after the event by outsiders desperately trying to reconstruct the way things were. This book has been written by the participants themselves. For them, yesterday, their day of glory, has more immediacy than today. They do not have to reconstruct. All they have to do is recollect. They do not have to try to imagine what it would have been like. They were there. They do not have to try to analyze yesterday from the perspective of today. To them, today is strange and different, and the way it used to be is the natural way. They are more used to analyzing today from the vantage poi
nt of yesterday.
Of course, this book was really not “written” at all. It was spoken. And, as spoken literature, it is characterized by the simplicity and directness of the spoken word as contrasted with the written word. My role was strictly that of catalyst, audience, and chronicler. I asked and listened, and the tape recorder did the rest.
I first thought of this book back in 1961, when Ty Cobb died in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of seventy-four. It seemed to me then that someone should do something, and do it quickly, to record for the future the remembrances of a sport that has played such a significant role in American life. Ty Cobb symbolized America from the turn of the century to World War I perhaps better than any other single figure, just as Babe Ruth symbolized America between the wars and, in so many ways, Mantle, Mays, and Koufax do today.
It seemed obvious that there was only one way to go about this, and that was to take a tape recorder and go and talk to as many old-time ball players as one could find and ask them what it was like. Of course, there are not very many men still alive today who played major-league baseball as long ago as about 1910. A twenty-five-year-old in 1910 would be over eighty today. Furthermore, I did not know where they were, what kind of people they would be, or how they would receive me, a person who had never been professionally involved in baseball in any way.
Since then I have traveled over 75,000 miles throughout the United States and Canada, and have spent countless hours reliving the legend that baseball in the early decades of the century has come to be. We talked in modest, middle-class homes, in elegantly furnished mansions, and in run-down shacks. We talked on farms and in cities. We talked in 100° heat and in 10° below zero cold. We talked for two hours and we talked for twelve: and although I had no idea what to expect when I started out, what I found was a group of friendly and intelligent men who were not only delighted to talk about their experiences, but who were also able to articulate them in such a way as to bring them vividly alive today, often half a century or more after the fact. They re-created their lives and those of their contemporaries with warmth, insight and compassion. They told their stories with pride and with dignity, and also with joy.