Licence Plate Topper

Topper

Licence Plate toppers, you don’t see those a lot nowadays. In their heydays during the 40s, 50s and 60s they were mostly used as mobile billboards. Advertising companies, events or places you should visit.

Vernon Co.
One of the companies that produced toppers was the Vernon Company based in Newton, Iowa. The branding company was founded in 1902 and still operates from Newton today.
Apparently the borough of Brooklyn found it necessary to advertise its potential as a holiday destination, sometime before 1958. Vernon delivered!

Visit Brooklyn
A brightly colored topper tries to lure people with some of Brooklyn’s mayor attractions. In a circle in the upper left corner, made to look like a baseball we see, starting at the bottom, Brooklyn Bridge. The middle part is for Brooklyn’s team: the Dodgers. There’s the logo, an umpire and a ballplayer. At the top the words Coney Island and the, now defunct, parachute jump. The attraction was created for the 1939 World’s Fair and ceased operations in the 1960s.

All in all it’s a meager Dodgers related item, but it looks amazing, even after rougly six decades. It’s a stretch, but I had to have it.

Pafko at the Wall: Review

Imagine having a drone at the Polo Grounds at game three of the 1951 National League play offs, flying from one vantage point to the next. Catching dialogues, seeing the crowd in a partly empty stadium that still is filled with electricity and hope. You might get something like ‘Pafko at the wall’, a novella that reads like a 90 page poem.
Don DeLillo, famous author and multiple Pulitzer winner, sketches scenes of that faithful day, like no one else. If you want to feel, smell, see and be in the stands on that October 3rd 1951, read this piece.

Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and others take center stage in a cast of extras. Among showers op ripped up pieces of paper and one boy who jumped the turnstiles, defeated the ushers and stadium cops to leave the game with a piece of history.
Then a dance commences between boy and man, focussing in a nine inch circumference red stiched sphere.

The whole thing is a shakespearean play, where the underdogs had to put across the message ‘it’s over, only when the fat lady sings’. And she sung her heart out.
More than 70 years later, a Dodger fan can still feel the pain, but it was never brought so painfully beautiful as in DeLillo’s novella.

If you want more from the lead actors of this play... read ‘The Echoing Green: the untold story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the shot heard around the world’. Reviewed here.

Hollreiser Comic Art

Van Lingle Mungo

Mungo was one of those Dodger players, like Wheat and Vance, whose name caught my eye once my interest in the team focussed on the 20s and 30’s, some years ago.

He’s a five time All Star with a 120-115 won-lost record (3.47 era) in 14 years playing for the Robins/Dodgers and Giants. 

Hollreiser

Well known (sports) cartoon artist Lenny Hollreiser drew this ‘This Day in Sports’ portrait of Mungo in 1971. 

He refers in this ‘day in sports’ to Mungo’s seven straight strikeouts on June 25th, 1936. He ended up being that season’s NL strikeout leader.

This is an original piece, ready for printing, with the title, copyright and registered trademark tag lines pasted on top of the original art.

It’s more than fifty years old but it was well preserved and looks very bright and crisp. 

Branch Rickey: Review

A book, barely larger than the leaflet about famous Jewish sports legends, and with a very simple title: Branch Rickey. Jimmy Breslin, author, journalist and Pulizer Prize winner, wrote the 146 page book which came out in 2011.

The title covers the subject in the most evident way. It’s about one of the most important people ever in baseball history. Branch Rickey was a man of God. He believed to his core that man was equal. No matter the color. If you were good in something, you had to get the opportunity to do it.

The book follows Rickey from his succesful days in St. Louis to Brooklyn. He struggled to get the Ives-Quinn Bill signed, but succeded. It opened the way for Jackie Robinson to play in the majors. There is some mention of Robinson’s struggles with racism.

It’s not a pretty written book, very matter of fact full. It’s not entirely correct. Jackie didn’t play his first World Series in 1952, but in 1947. Near the end Breslin finds it neccesary to mention that the Brooklyn team plays in LA now…

It’s a good read when you want to dip your toe in the Rickey story, and the Robinson story for that matter. A good start, but there are more books about these two that go the extra yard.