A Face In The Crowd

[An alignment of dates and events made it opportune to revisit and expand a piece that originally appeared on Facebook in 2020: the day after tomorrow would have been my Dad's 79th birthday; next month will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1974 Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the heart of the piece; and we're coming into the All-Star break for this MLB season. Seems like a good time to swing for the fences with a story about serendipity, geometry, baseball fandom, and photography, though not necessarily in that order.]

I happened to call home from Virginia that afternoon, sometime in the mid-nineties but before the house on Prospect Avenue was sold, and caught my mother with a full head of steam. She was cleaning out the library; more specifically, the sixteen narrow drawers below the built-in bookcases that had been accumulating things for a decade. 

The family photo negatives occupied a couple of those built-in drawers, a disorganized free-flow of envelopes and holders reaching back to the early sixties. We’d occasionally had reason to call on that drawer, but it was in no way an organized archive. If you wanted to find something, it was more a safari with a magnifying glass. Because I groove on history and engage in amateur photography when I’m not doing twenty other things, I asked: “What are you doing with the negatives?”

“Those? They’re in a bag sitting on top of the garbage.”

I might have had a mild infarct. “No they’re not. They’re sitting off to the side, where you put them so I can pick them up the next time I come home.”

She agreed to do so, but was puzzled why I’d want them. To her, the film had been processed, photos were in-hand, and she hadn’t done anything with the negatives in years. To here, there was no sense in keeping them. I’m sure part of that was also a 'cleaning out the past' effect of the divorce; my sister had to similarly rescue my parents’ wedding album from the trash. 

On my next visit, I retrieved the brown grocery bag into which she’d put the jumble of film envelopes, I carried it back to Virginia, and… it sat. Sure, the old negatives got their own tote so they could be better stored, and I sifted through them one year to have new prints made for an album for my father for his birthday, since the family photo albums went with Ma when they split. Otherwise, five decades of transparent celluloid waited quietly in the dark in a succession of closets in Virginia, Maryland, and Texas until 2018, when I finally overcame inertia and procrastination. When I priced out how much it would cost to have them transferred by a professional, I had another photo-related infarct, discussed a flatbed scanner with my wife, and finally began the task of scanning over 4,000 family negatives - frame after frame of Kodak 126, 127, 110, and disc images, plus a few larger formats and a tray of my grandfather’s slides from the fifties that somehow escaped a previous purge. 

The scanner paid for itself by frame 223.

The negatives were - and remain - completely scrambled from years of shuffling in that drawer. Scanning them was a little like time travel: it’s the late sixties and my third birthday, and then BAM it’s Christmas 1983 and then BAM it's Thanksgiving at Grandma's on Sunrise Avenue in the mid-seventies. Science fiction makes you forgiving with bouncing around time, but reconstructing the original sets was a puzzle I wasn't inclined to tackle. I scanned, I assigned a locator type file name, I moved on. Leave something for a lazy day.

During the scanning, a particular set of negatives - scattered across three envelopes - caught my eye as a Yankees fan, as the guy who volunteered to digitize 50-odd years of family history, and as my father’s son. And it led to the sort of treasure that you hope to find when you pull out the pickaxes and start digging.

*   

In 1951, my father was six years old. (That's him in front on the right, with his siblings in 1950). That was the year Mickey Mantle played his first 96 games for the New York Yankees. Mantle was nineteen and would develop into a life-long Yankee; my father, into a life-long Yankees fan. In that regard, they spent their formative years together. Mantle retired after the 1968 season. Eighteen years in the big leagues, three-time MVP, all-star in all but two seasons, 536 home runs, 2,415 hits, a part of seven Yankees world champion teams. He also got at least three books out of the deal.

My father probably could have told you those stats without blinking an eye. He loved Mantle. So did the baseball writers, which is why the Mick got into the Hall in his first year on the ballot in 1974. Whitey Ford, his Yankees teammate, was the other player of then-recent eligibility to make it in. In retrospect, there was no reason for my father - then 29 - to NOT schedule the time off from his job with the state police and make the 80-mile drive to Cooperstown for the ceremony. He’d followed these guys his entire life, and 160 miles round-trip was like going around the block for him.

The ceremony was held on August 12, 1974 outside the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's east facade in Cooper Park, named for James Fenimore Cooper, a statue of whom stands at the park’s center. That afternoon, the Cooper statue was protected by a raised platform upon which media perched. Ticketed attendees (typically dignitaries, HOF members or donors, and other invited guests) sat in rows of chairs in a semi-circle between the podium and the platform. Standing room general admission attendees were fenced off behind the seats, with a healthy aisle between them and the seats, so invited guests could come and go unfettered.

In all, my father shot 18 frames of Kodak 126 color film that day, mostly of the induction ceremony from his place in the general admission pen, plus a couple of the Braves/White Sox Hall of Fame game afterwards. The pictures weren't a surprise - we’d all seen a couple of prints in a family album. My father got there early, if his position - just to the right of the platform, up near the fence and with a clear view of the podium - is any indication. He was by no means alone. The crowd of 2,500 fans was a record at the time. Twenty-one previously inducted Hall of Famers were also on hand.

The photo quality is what you might expect at that distance with a 126. You can pick out Mantle, Ford, and Cool Papa Bell (inducted from the Negro Leagues) if you know what they were wearing. The best photo in the lot is actually an impromptu candid - holy cow! - of Phil Rizzuto arriving before the ceremony, walking the back aisle, arm poised to wave to the standing room crowd. Even that photo has the back of someone's head in it.

As mentioned, my father carried bushels of sports minutiae in his head. He probably could have told you which 21 Hall of Famers attended the ceremony. I squandered this genetic capacity for fine details on books and music. As a result, when I went to write a wrap-around for posting some of the photos to Facebook, I took to the Internet to get the facts and figures about the event straight. While ferreting out those bits and pieces, I stumbled across a photo on one several Hall of Fame website pages discussing the 1974 induction ceremony. The page is gone now (Lane’s Internet Research Rule #5: If you find it, save it, because it will vanish like Brigadoon if you don’t) but it included in its discussion of Cool Papa Bell’s induction an uncredited photograph from the museum's holdings. Taken from the front of the Hall of Fame's member and VIP seating, it looks outward to capture the crowd. While the webpage is gone, a cached copy suggests it might be a picture of a picture, one with the sort of image artifacts suggesting the original source was printed, perhaps on paper or canvas, and that was photographed to produce the Hall of Fame’s image.

 Credit: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

It's a sea of baseball-loving humanity, and it got me wondering if I could spot my father bobbing somewhere out there. One feature immediately struck me as familiar: the photographers on the platform. There's one in a blue shirt and jeans, standing and taking pictures. Nearby, a second photographer in loud plaid pants waits for the ceremony to begin. 

 

The photographer in blue is in most of my father's shots, but there's only one frame in which he's standing taking pictures. That same frame is also the only one to contain the photographer in the plaid pants, almost off the left edge and behind someone's head. Both are in similar poses to the Hall of Fame crowd photo, close enough to suggest the two images weren’t taken far apart in time. 

This led me to consider the heads in the foreground. As a rule, people in general admission who are up front and have a prime view of the proceedings are loathe to move when they’re settled. My father certainly didn't. In many of his shots, an older man with thinning white hair is nearly in front of him. Occasionally to that man’s left another man is visible, taller and with sunglasses. 

 

Both men are visible in the frame that includes the two standing photographers. This made them the human equivalent of a forty-foot-tall red neon arrow with a sign saying "Look here!" They weren't very heard to spot given the clues.
 

 

When I found them, I very quickly noticed a man in a red shirt between them… 

...who I'm pretty sure is my dad, age 29, watching a couple of his sports heroes get inducted into the Hall of Fame, camera at the ready (that dark splotch at the shoulder of the man on the right).

 

This is why you study geometry. This, and to reliably hustle people at 9-Ball.

 

In the wake of figuring out that my dad was in a photo in the collection of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum - which I'm certain he never knew, but it would have tickled him no end - I felt it incumbent on me to reach out to learn what the museum could tell me about their image. Was it on display in the Hall? Was there a higher-quality version in the museum’s collection? Did they know who the photographer was? The goal was to see if there was an even better version to be found.

 

My multi-prong inquiry received a dead-end reply from the Hall’s Coordinator of Rights and Reproductions that, excluding a salutation and signature, read en toto:



“Sorry to say I am not going to help very much.  The photo was a very small photo and it doesn’t blow up well as you can see.”

One imagines the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a lot like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and would have six kinds of documentation tracking for its artifacts. And it does, though a picture of a picture used on a web page (since removed) of an event in 1974 is subject to less historical attention than a photo of Hank Aaron’s 3000th hit baseball or Cal Ripken’s cleats. And while it should probably be that way, knowledge gaps are still bothersome when one is in Albert Popwell mode. I've been in enough blind research alleys to recognize one. If the Hall’s Coordinator of Rights and Reproductions can’t tell me whose work it is, who would know the photographer's identity at this point?   

There are threads to pull. It looks like a photo of a printed photo. Magazine? Maybe. A Sports Illustrated image would surely have a credit, but SI was just one outlet. It's unlikely it was a newspaper, being a color photo, but you never know. Being from the front of the VIP seating, it could be something a member took and sent along. Whatever the answer, I’d wager that fifty years on the Hall's image is the best version still remaining, and the original negative is most likely gone. Especially when I consider the only reason I can even prove my father is in the crowd is because I had the negatives of his corresponding photos - and they were only spared from the landfill by a serendipitous phone call thirty years ago. 

It doesn't mean I won't look. I just obtained a photo of a trial jury from almost a century ago (for a side project) that I didn't know existed until about sixty seconds before I bought it (LLIR #2: Strike like a cobra when you find 'the thing'), so I never say never. I'd like to believe it'll turn up when I most need to see it more clearly.

The universe has always been a little funny that way.





Coming 7/16: A Peek Under The Hood