Rosemary's Baby: Baseball Autograph Album

[jgmp123]

In my quest to find a .pdf of the Halper Collection, I came across this great article written by Bill Glovin about the "Rosemary's Baby" baseball autograph album.

It looks like in 2003 the original owner planned to keep it in the family. Has anyone seen this album, have additional photos, any info at all about it?

Some great looking signatures and I would love to see more pictures!

http://billglovin.com/PDFs/1934%20Baseball%20Cards.pdf

[Runscott]

Thanks for sharing. Great piece, AND the key signatures were authenticated by Barry Halper!

"Halper, who donated most of his own collection to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown and auctioned off the rest at Sotheby’s for $21.8 million, examines the signa- tures with the intensity of a sports agent looking for a loophole in his player’s contract. “These are definitely authentic; Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth did everything left-handed except sign their names,” he says, before turning a page. "

[jgmp123]

Exactly Scott. I felt it fit right in with everything else going on at the moment in the "Autograph Section"

I just want to see more photo's....

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by jgmp123

Exactly Scott. I felt it fit right in with everything else going on at the moment in the "Autograph Section"

I just want to see more photo's....

Jim, I'm waiting for my 'negative barometer' to chime in - then I'll no for sure whether or not the Ruth and Gehrig are legit

[shelly]

Originally Posted by Runscott

Jim, I'm waiting for my 'negative barometer' to chime in - then I'll no for sure whether or not the Ruth and Gehrig are legit

Gee, Scott, I wonder who that can be

[jgmp123]

I was actually hoping this could be a "feel good" thread and someone could provide some additional details about this album...Can we try to keep it at that?

[shelly]

Originally Posted by jgmp123

I was actually hoping this could be a "feel good" thread and someone could provide some additional details about this album...Can we try to keep it at that?

Ok

[bender07]

Did Halper get the Chapman story wrong? I thought the guy NYY traded Chapman for was an offseason police officer that commented that he liked to attack black people.

[jgmp123]

Originally Posted by bender07

Did Halper get the Chapman story wrong? I thought the guy NYY traded Chapman for was an offseason police officer that commented that he liked to attack black people.

I believe it is correct. He was also best known as the Phillies manager that had the racially charged showdown with Jackie Robinson...

[bender07]

Originally Posted by jgmp123

I believe it is correct. He was also best known as the Phillies manager that had the racially charged showdown with Jackie Robinson...

I couldn't find anything about chapman being a sheriff but wiki has this:


In June 1936, Chapman – then hitting .266[3] and expendable with the arrival of DiMaggio[4] – was traded to the Senators. The trade was ironic in that the player the Yankees received in return was Jake Powell, who would become infamous for a 1938 WGN radio interview in which he stated that he liked to crack blacks over the head with his nightstick as a police officer in Dayton, Ohio during the off-season. Furthermore, earlier in the 1936 season, Powell had purposely collided with Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers' Jewish first baseman, breaking Greenberg's wrist and ending his season after only 12 games.[1]

[Mr. Zipper]

My God... did Halper get anything right?

[mr2686]

Originally Posted by Mr. Zipper

My God... did Halper get anything right?

Yes, I believe he said there's a sucker born every minute.

[jgmp123]

Originally Posted by bender07

I couldn't find anything about chapman being a sheriff but wiki has this:


In June 1936, Chapman – then hitting .266[3] and expendable with the arrival of DiMaggio[4] – was traded to the Senators. The trade was ironic in that the player the Yankees received in return was Jake Powell, who would become infamous for a 1938 WGN radio interview in which he stated that he liked to crack blacks over the head with his nightstick as a police officer in Dayton, Ohio during the off-season. Furthermore, earlier in the 1936 season, Powell had purposely collided with Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers' Jewish first baseman, breaking Greenberg's wrist and ending his season after only 12 games.[1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/sp...ewanted=print&

July 27, 2008
Public Slur in 1938 Laid Bare a Game’s Racism
By CHRIS LAMB

The National Baseball Hall of Fame recently updated Jackie Robinson’s plaque to reflect the courage and poise he showed in integrating baseball in 1947. No plaque or distinction will ever be accorded Jake Powell — nor should they — but his racist comment 70 years ago broke the conspiracy of silence that protected segregated baseball.

During a pregame interview at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 29, 1938, the WGN Radio announcer Bob Elson asked Powell, a Yankees outfielder, what he did during the off-season. Powell replied that he was a policeman in Dayton, Ohio. When Elson asked him how he stayed in shape, Powell, using a common racial slur, replied that he cracked blacks over the head with his nightstick.

Hundreds of outraged listeners called the station. Others called the Chicago office of the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Before the next day’s game, a delegation of black leaders presented a petition to umpires demanding that Powell be barred from baseball for life.

Although Major League Baseball had turned a deaf ear to criticism of its color line, it could neither dismiss nor deny the outcry over Powell’s slur. Landis suspended him for 10 days. The Sporting News reported that it was the first time that a major league ballplayer had been suspended for a racist remark.

L’affaire Jake Powell, as it was called, revealed the hypocrisy of segregated baseball. Landis punished a racist player, yet Landis and the baseball establishment had long practiced racial discrimination against black players.

This was not the story’s only twist. In 1936, the Washington Senators traded Powell to the Yankees for the virulent racist Ben Chapman. Powell never worked as a police officer in Dayton or anywhere else, as he had contended, though, as it turned out, he died in a police station a decade later.

The Powell incident unified those who had begun calling for the end of segregated baseball, and it put the game’s establishment on the defensive. It is doubtful whether Landis, known derisively in the black press as the Great White Father because he blocked attempts to integrate baseball, would have suspended Powell without outside pressure.

Alvin Jacob Powell was born in Silver Spring, Md., on July 15, 1908. He was known as a hustler — on and off the field. During a trip with the minor league Dayton Ducks, Powell tried to leave his hotel room with a circular fan, the drapes and a bedspread.

“He probably would have taken the mattress if he could have got it in his suitcase,” Ducks Manager Howard E. Holmes said at the time.

Powell and his wife made their home in Dayton. He talked about joining the police department, and friends said his remark about blacks was his idea of a joke, according to The Dayton Daily News.

In Powell’s first full season with the Senators, in 1935, he hit .312 and had 98 runs batted in. But by the next year, the Senators wanted to trade him. The unpopular Powell deliberately collided with Detroit first baseman Hank Greenberg, who was Jewish, breaking Greenberg’s wrist and ending his 1936 season after 12 games. In addition, Powell’s creditors had threatened to sue the Senators to settle his gambling debts.

The Yankees had also had enough of Chapman, who taunted Jewish spectators at Yankee Stadium with Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic epithets.

Powell hit .302 in 87 games with the Yankees in 1936, then led the team in hitting and runs during the World Series — the first of four straight championships for the Yankees. Powell’s playing time was reduced during the 1937 and 1938 seasons.

To most white sportswriters, who were silent about the color line, Powell’s words were harmless and unintentional. The columnist Dan Daniel, the longtime president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, said Powell could have been more careful, but “he is a hustling player, aggressive, and always getting into a jam.”

Black journalists, however, railed against Powell and the baseball establishment. They urged their readers to boycott Yankees games and the corporate sponsors of the team’s radio broadcasts. The Yankees, the most powerful team in baseball, were forced to apologize and ask what they could do to improve relations with the black community.

Black leaders kept up the pressure, demanding that the Yankees trade or release Powell. When Powell returned to the field during a game at Griffith Stadium in Washington, spectators threw bottles at him. The Yankees kept Powell for two more seasons but played him sparingly. He was released in 1941.

Powell spent time in the minor leagues before joining the Senators, who then traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1945, his final season in the majors. The Phillies’ manager was Chapman, whose managerial career was best remembered for his vitriolic race-baiting of Jackie Robinson during Robinson’s rookie season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Shortly after Powell’s career in professional baseball ended in the minors in 1948, he was arrested for passing bad checks. While being questioned in a police station, Powell shot himself to death.

“He died in Washington, D.C.,” Powell’s obituary in The Dayton Daily News read, “not as a cop as he often dreamed of being, but as a man arrested on a bad-check charge, the last of a series of his madcap adventures.”

Chris Lamb is a professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He is author of “Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training.

[bender07]

Both class guys

[bender07]

Originally Posted by Mr. Zipper

My God... did Halper get anything right?

He didn't let facts get in the way of a good story!

[shelly]

Originally Posted by Mr. Zipper

My God... did Halper get anything right?

Yes he did. He fooled everyone till the day he died and well after that

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by jgmp123

I was actually hoping this could be a "feel good" thread and someone could provide some additional details about this album...Can we try to keep it at that?

James, you posted about something where Barry Halper did the authentication of a Ruth and Gehrig - that distracts from your 'feel good' desires, and you really should have expected it.

[HRBAKER]

If I wanted to "feel good" I don't think I'd come to the autograph section, just sayin.'

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by HRBAKER

If I wanted to "feel good" I don't think I'd come to the autograph section, just sayin.'

Well, you just made me laugh - so I guess I'm feeling good Thanks.

The rest of this beautiful day is dog-time. Later.

David - without cheating and reading the article, what timeframe did Ruth sign that piece?

[shelly]

Just another tidbit about Chapman. I would have loved to seen this.

In a 1933 game, his confrontation with the Washington Senators' Jewish infielder, Buddy Myer, caused a 20-minute brawl that saw 300 fans participate and resulted in five-game suspensions and $100 fines for each of the players involved.[2]

[ss]

Jake Powell was a coward. When confronted with no one around to help him he, and others like him, always backed down. Chapman was th same.

[David Atkatz]

Originally Posted by Runscott

David - without cheating and reading the article, what timeframe did Ruth sign that piece?

The Ruth/Gehrig piece you posted? Ruth signed that in about, oh... never.

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by Mr. Zipper

My God... did Halper get anything right?

Apparently he gave these two autographs his 'okay' because they were signed with someone's right hand. So he got that right....I mean, 'correct'.

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by David Atkatz

The Ruth/Gehrig piece you posted? Ruth signed that in about, oh... never.

Thanks. I know I asked you directly, but I figured others would jump all over that initial scan I posted. Kind of surprised no one responded - perhaps they thought it was a trick?

Honest, all I know is what was in the link. I did go out to HOS and do a search on 'Rosemary', thinking this piece had to be in there, but nada.

[jgmp123]

I assume the album is still in the original owners possession. If she believes them as real and they keep her happy for the rest of her life, then good for her.

I simply asked if anyone knew anything about the album, but thank you Scott for turning this into another one of THOSE forums.
You seem to be making a habit of that...

[Runscott]

Originally Posted by jgmp123

I assume the album is still in the original owners possession. If she believes them as real and they keep her happy for the rest of her life, then good for her.

I simply asked if anyone knew anything about the album, but thank you Scott for turning this into another one of THOSE forums.
You seem to be making a habit of that...

I'm sorry, let me start over James, so you can feel all good and sweet inside:

Wow - great album with autographs authenticated by THE famous Barry Halper! Those are GREAT autographs. Wow! It really doesn't matter whether or not they are real (as I already know you believe, James) - owning forgeries is GREAT because you get them cheaper and they make you feel really, really good, because you can make believe that you have something valuable!!!!

Thanks, James, for this wonderful feel-good thread.

For future reference, if you post about something that is real, you'll get more of those warm and fuzzes that you are looking for. And before you insult me again, go back and look at my posts regarding autographs and point out just one where I've been unfairly negative. What you'll find is that if I've said an autograph is questionable, a whole helluva lot of others here have as well.

Edited to add - don't get all chapped when I don't respond to your next inane post in this thread. I realize that with 3,900 members, there are going to be a few imbeciles, but I'm running out of tolerance. Sorry.

[jgmp123]

Scott,

I love you too!

Edited to add- Don't get all chapped. I didn't insult you good buddy. I ended it with a smiley...isn't everything okay when you add a smiley?

[jgmp123]

Also before anyone else jumps in...the "feel good" part of this thread is the story of the lady in the article And the album she inherited from her mother. Sorry for getting back to the nature of the hobby. I'll remember to keep everything sinister in the future.