The First Historian Of Baseball
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.
At the time Seymour was about to be awarded his Ph.D. for the first dissertation on the history of American baseball, he was interviewed by the Cleveland News. After all, “The Rise of Major League Baseball to 1891” was a highly unusual title for a doctoral dissertation! News reporter Joe Madigan quoted Seymour as explaining, “No historian has ever deemed the subject worthy of scholarly investigation, despite the fact that baseball is a reflection of the development of American life. Learned men are sometimes very stuffy, you know.”
Before he was able to find a teaching position at the college level, Seymour taught junior high school history in Norwich, New York. He accepted the position with the assurance that he would also be coaching baseball, but when he arrived to start work he learned that the chemistry teacher had been given the baseball position and that he, Seymour, was to coach wrestling-about which he knew nothing! So he enlisted the star wrestler to help him, learned the moves and how to help his boys, coached them and traveled to meets with them, and produced a winning team, popularly called “The Purple Matmen.”
Continue reading “Coaching Wrestling, Not Baseball”
By Harold Seymour, Ph. D.
“Wanna mind the bats for Cincinnati today?”
The voice was that of Babe Hamburger, a Brooklyn clubhouse attendant, who had just passed me with his hands full of food one Sunday afternoon about 1925 as I was standing near the Ebbets Field pass gate on Cedar Place.
How could a boy graduating low in his high school class get into college? Through his knowledge of baseball!
Continue reading “Baseball At Drew University”
In a trip to visit the National Baseball Library at Cooperstown in 1994 I delivered Seymour’s ashes to Tom Heitz, then the Library’s Director, in the hope that he could arrange for interment in Cooperstown. Tom planned a ceremony to take place during the annual Cooperstown Symposium on American Culture, which attracts about a hundred scholars each year to the Otesaga, a beautiful resort hotel on Lake Otsego in the heart of Cooperstown.