In the summer of 1961 I was a 10-year-old Bronx boy, and, like most everyone else in New York, I became totally caught up in the Mantle/Maris home run chase. An avid reader, I read everything I could find about Mantle--"The Mickey Mantle Story," for example--and that led me to start reading about that Ruth guy he was chasing, and that led to Gehrig and the 1920s teams. I was totally enthralled.
I'd always had the autograph bug--I began to write to Yankees at the Stadium, and at their homes in the off-season. When I became a bit older, I'd go to the Stadium with friends and hang out at the players' entrance and get my yearbooks signed. My Bronx neighborhood got a little bigger when I entered Junior High School, and met kids who came from neighboring Elementary schools. One of those kids was Harvey Meiselman, and he showed me his baseball autograph collection. He had check cuts of J. Franklin Baker (Man, did his handwriting look old!) and checks of Ty Cobb, and Mickey Cochrane, and Eppa Rixey, and... and Babe Ruth! Amazing! I learned from him about the "serious" collectors, who tracked down and wrote to old players, and players' families, and I began to do the same. Soon I had Cobb checks, and Cochrane checks, etc., but I was too late for a Ruth check. So I traded a collector in Tennessee ten Cobb checks for a Ruth check. (There were mimeographed newsletters that we all subscribed to, which, among other things, listed collectors' names and addresses. Everything was done through the mail.) I was in heaven when it came. (May seem like a bad deal now, but I got those Cobb checks for free, so, what the hell.)
I began tracking down people who knew the old Yankees, and sometimes I was spectacularly successful. I obtained a signed and inscribed Gehrig photo, for example, from the daughter of a Gehrig family friend. And all of this--except for postage, envelopes, and index cards--was free! (Perfect for a poor boy from the Bronx.)
When I went away to college in 1968 I put it all away. I had other things on my mind. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. And, oh yeah, becoming a physicist. But in 1990, having settled down (I was a physicist, and a husband, and a dad) I took it all up again.
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