Mayer’s immersion in the annals of black baseball was a gradual process, evolving from his activities as a collector of vintage baseball items. He started, like so many of his fellow obsessives, with baseball cards – “I sold crappy ones to get better ones” – but after watching his collection steadily increase in value during the 1990s, he became disenchanted with the cutthroat industry that card collecting had become, with “people trimming cards and forging signatures.” So he switched to hunting for gloves and bats that had been worn or wielded by pre–World War II Hall of Famers.
“An antique store in Great Barrington had a baseball bat in an umbrella stand,” he recalls. “I picked it up, and it was a Lou Gehrig model – for ten bucks! Three months later, I’m in the same store, and in the same umbrella stand there’s a Rogers Hornsby bat, for $20. I asked the guy why it was more expensive than the one I bought earlier, and he said, Well, Rogers Hornsby was a great player!” (If you don’t get the joke, dear reader, you’re not a baseball fan.)
Eventually, Mayer began focusing on trophies and team portraits from the 19th century, especially those from teams based in the Hudson Valley. It was while trying to track down the contestants in a 1905 game between the Asylum Base Ball Club of Middletown and the all-black Cuban X Giants (an offshoot of the original Giants, under new ownership) that Mayer became intrigued by the pioneers of black baseball, and began his quest to uncover their history.
Although he tends to be self-effacing about the knowledge he’s accumulated in this area – he laughs that, unlike the other authors and historians who’ll be appearing at the library as part of this exhibition, “I’m the only non-scholar speaking” – his research has taken on a devotional quality, and he really knows his stuff. Get him going, and he’ll hold forth on such nearly forgotten figures as Walter Patrice (now 93), who played for the Poughkeepsie Mohawk Giants in the twilight leagues during the Depression years, or on the larger stories of blackball that tallied with the social history of the times – such as the rejection of the Pythians, a black amateur team from Philly, when they applied for membership in the National Association of Base Ball Players two years after the Civil War.
The parallel lines of social history and baseball history are very well illustrated by the Pride and Passion exhibition, which consists of six very large panels that are chockablock with reproductions of old photos of players, teams, uniforms, and one-of-a-kind artifacts (such as a belt buckle commemorating Hilldale’s 1923 Eastern Colored League championship), along with an extensive timeline that contrasts significant developments in the civil rights movement and African-American culture with black milestones on the diamond. In 1966, for example, we learn that Edward Brooke (Rep., Massachusetts) was the first of his race elected to the U.S. Senate since the Reconstruction era, while over in the American League, Emmett Ashford assumed another position of high authority, becoming the first black umpire in the Major Leagues. The exhibition remains on view in the library’s rotunda at 93 Market Street, Poughkeepsie, for most of Black History Month, through February 24.
Mayer, a retired bank executive who lives in Putnam Valley and owns and operates Spring Fever, a vintage baseball memorabilia company ([email protected]), will speak in the library’s auditorium at 105 Market Street on Sunday, January 20, at 2:30 p.m. (If you’d like to see artifacts from his collection, come early.) Additional presentations will follow on January 27 (Larry Lester, of the Society for American Baseball Research, aka SABR); February 10 (Marist College professor Jim Overmyer, on the unprecedented career of Newark Eagles clubowner Effa Manley, the only woman elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame); and February 24 (John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball and a resident of Catskill). All lectures are free and take place at 2:30. For more information, contact the Poughkeepsie Public Library District at poklib.org or (845) 485-3445, ext. 3702.
Bob Mayer lecture, “Baseball in Black & White: Black Barnstorming in the Hudson Valley,” Jan. 20, free, 2:30 p.m., Adriance Memorial Library, Poughkeepsie. Talk presented in conjunction with Pride & Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience, a traveling exhibition organized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which continues at the library through Feb. 24, (845) 485-3445, ext. 3702, poklib.org.
