Tag: Harold Seymour

Names You’ll Recognize

Over the years we corresponded with some well-known people in baseball. You’ll recognize these names, which are signed to letters in our correspondence file: Ford Frick, Charlie Segar, Dave Grote, Charles “Chub” Feeney, Larry MacPhail, Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, Bowie Kuhn, Marty Appel. These letters were written in response to our requests for information to be used in the Seymour books, information that many businesses other than baseball businesses would be glad to distribute. But most of the answers these famous people gave were in this vein: No, we can’t give you that information; it’s not our policy to do it. Only Larry MacPhail and Marty Appel of the Yankees said Yes, we’ll send what you need.

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Lawrence “Larry” Yaffa, like many Brooklyn boys of the twenties and thirties, wanted to become a ball player. Here is his story.
Continue reading “Memories of Brooklyn Baseball”

Early Baseball

Over the years Seymour, with my help, published many articles, most of them on baseball history. In 1956 The New-York Historical Society Quarterly printed his “How Baseball Began,” explaining that the game came originally from England and had been played there long before Abner Doubleday supposedly “invented” it in Cooperstown in 1839.
Continue reading “Baseball Articles and Speeches”

The Casey Award

In 1991 The People’s Game won The Casey Award, given annually by Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine. Editor Mike Shannon said it won conclusively over all finalists, including George Will’s Men at Work. Since Seymour didn’t feel up to traveling to accept the award at the Spitball banquet, I arranged to have a local photographer make a videotape of his necessarily-short acceptance speech; by then his health was in steep decline. I prepared his remarks in about five short sentences, writing them in very large type on a card, so that he could read them before the camera. He did so, weakly and ineffectively, but he accomplished the task. The Cooperstown Hall of Fame asked for a copy of this video for its archives, and I sent it.

Continue reading “Baseball Honors”

Media Attention

Partly because we were living in the New York area when the second volume came out, Oxford University Press obtained considerable media attention for it, including radio and TV interviews. Mike Wallace interviewed Seymour on his radio show in August of 1971, complimenting Seymour afterwards on a good performance.

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Teaching College History

Fenn College in Cleveland became Seymour’s second college-level teaching position; he had taught at Presbyterian College in South Carolina, and during world War II he left teaching to run his father’s marine contracting business in New York City.

Continue reading “College Teaching Without Baseball”