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.

The Bums' Rush

In 1959, the Dodgers and Giants played only their second year in their new hometowns. The Dodgers finished their first year in LA in 7th place (71-83), the Giants 3rd.

The 1959 season would be very different and the Dodgers would forever dump the bums nickname they lovingly adopted years before. But this team would prove to be a diesel train.

The Giants were off to a good start. In first for a few days, never lower than 4th. In first again on July 4th, and except for 1 day staying there until september 19th. The Giants were riding the Pennant train comfortably.

The Dodgers were trailing, sometimes from 5 games back. Then they found their groove and after the first game of a double header on Sptember 19th at San Fransisco they were tied for first and finished the season up 2 on the Braves and 4 on the Giants.

Oh, the Dodgers went on to win their second World Series, the first in LA.

Eddie Germano’s The Bums' Rush
Eddie Germano, the sports cartoonist, found the Bums rise interesting enough to devote a cartoon to it. On it, you see the pennant bound train (pennant special) carrying the Giants. On the balcony, a man* is relaxing, awaiting the train’s arrival at the next stop: the World Series. But he’s a bit surprised. A bum with an LA label on his old hat is quickly gaining on his handcar.

The drawing is a Germano original. I love this addition to my humble collection of Dodgers memorabilia.

*this probably is Horace Stoneham, the Giants owner at that time.

Duke Snider Auto

In 1988 ‘the Duke of Flatbush’ was published. A biography of Duke Snider, Dodgers retired #4. The Duke, born in Los Angeles, played center field for both the Brooklyn and the LA Dodgers. Winning the World Series in 1955 and 1959.

Since I started to branch out my interest from the LA team to the Boys of Summer, Duke was one of my instant favorites, right up there with Campanella.

Loved that guy’s smile. And his signature. It’s straightforward and curly and very recognizable.

So, when I saw an auction for a Snider auto, I decided to go for it. It was one of a lot that came from Mile High Card Company auctions. Fastforward... I got it way too cheap, which made me doubt if the document might be just a xeroxed copy. A few weeks later it arrived.

The document is a typed out first page of ‘the Duke of Flatbush’, signed with the famous Snider autograph. It was not a copy and when I felt the back of the piece of paper there was relief from the pressure of the pen.

I compared the auto to others by Snider. It looks legit! I might send it to PSA to get it authenticated, but for now, it’s going in a frame.

Branch Rickey

A long time, the period of my Dodgers in Brooklyn was a time of yore. Black and white images of people I did not really know. This totally changed when I read Kahn’s The Boys of Summer and Kearn Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year. Many biographies and moving images like in the Lords of Flatbush and the Hollywood movie 42 later, I can say I love the Brooklyn times as much as I do their years in Los Angeles.

Reese, Snider, Robinson, Campanella, Hodges all played at Ebbets Field and under the management of Walter O’Malley won their first world series.

In the 20’s and 30’s, though, the team was known as the daffiness boys and them bums. Things weren’t good in Brooklyn. After their World Series appearances in 1916 and 1920 it took the boys in blue eleven years to reach another one.

Then, in ‘43 a new guy arrived in Brooklyn and he had a plan. He had won four World Series with the Cardinals, and stood at the birth of the modern minor league farm system. He introduced the batting helmet and batting cages. But he wasn’t done. Branch Rickey was aware what a treasure trove of talent the negro leagues were. In 1947 he added Jackie Robinson to the roster and history was made. That same year the Dodgers reached the World Series losing to the mighty Yankees. Rickey was the founder of the Boys of Summer who would blossom in the 1950’s.

For some time now, I wanted to own something related to Rickey. Because of his mark on baseball history in general and the Dodgers organization in particular. Also, we share our birthday. 89 years apart, but hey... it’s something.

Earlier this year I came across an auction of a letter signed by Rickey. It’s short and to the point. One Leslie Stockton sent some snapshots to Rickey and a request for an autograph, which he sent him back. I fell in love with it because I wanted his autograph and this letter could just well have been sent my way. I bid again and again and it finally was mine. It's a fantastic piece of Dodgers history

The letter is dated September 12th 1949. A day after finishing a four game series against the Giants, winning 3, only five weeks after he was on the cover of Newsweek magazine, some weeks before and a year before Walter O’Malley bought him out for 1,05 million dollars.

I love to look at details and I wonder what the little scratch of ink is just below his signature. Was it placed there before Rickey signed it or after? It makes the letter a little more special in my opinion.