NY Times Story On The Death of Barry Halper [Archive]

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12-20-2005, 04:55 AM

Posted By: bruce dorskindBarry Halper, Baseball Memorabilia Collector, Dies at 66 By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN Barry Halper, who began collecting autographs as an 8-year-old hanging around the Yankees' minor league ballpark in Newark and went on to assemble the nation's most acclaimed private collection of baseball memorabilia, died Sunday at a hospital in Livingston, N.J. Mr. Halper, who lived in New Vernon, N.J., was 66. The cause was complications of diabetes, said his son Jason. Mr. Halper, a limited partner in the Yankees' ownership since the 1970's, was something of a one-man Smithsonian. He once owned at least 80,000 baseball items, most having been displayed at his former home in Livingston, where a visitor pressing the front doorbell heard a rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Mr. Halper had some 30,000 baseball cards, more than 3,000 signed baseballs, hundreds of autographed bats and more than 1,000 uniforms dating to the 1870's and hanging on a dry-cleaner's carousel at the home. He reveled in the historic but also the arcane. He once owned the uniform that Lou Gehrig wore in his 1939 farewell speech at Yankee Stadium and the bat that Babe Ruth leaned on, as a cane, in the famed photograph at the stadium's Babe Ruth Day in 1948. But he was also the proud possessor of Ty Cobb's dentures, which a dentist's daughter bought at auction for nearly $8,000. Faced with declining health, Mr. Halper disposed of most of his baseball treasures to enable the orderly payment of estate taxes. In November 1998, the Major League Baseball commissioner's office purchased about 20 percent of his collection, then donated the items to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which housed many of them at its Barry Halper Gallery in Cooperstown, N.Y. In September 1999, Mr. Halper auctioned the bulk of his collection at a widely publicized Sotheby's auction in New York for $21.8 million. Mr. Halper grew up near Newark's Ruppert Stadium, once the home of the Yankees' Newark Bears of the International League, collecting autographs and uniforms from the players. He befriended many baseball figures over the years, and they often presented him with items. His friendship with Joe DiMaggio produced an autograph adorning the otherwise unclad photo of DiMaggio's former wife Marilyn Monroe in the first issue of Playboy, from 1953. One day, when DiMaggio was visiting his home, Mr. Halper showed him an original copy of the magazine. As Mr. Halper told Ira Berkow of The New York Times in 1998: "Joe said - he didn't look too thrilled - 'What do you want me to do with this, sign Best Wishes?' I said, 'No, but I'd love to have you sign it.' He said, 'O.K., but I don't want anyone to see it in my lifetime.' I promised I wouldn't, and I haven't." Mr. Halper was enthralled by documents evoking baseball history. He owned a questionnaire filled out by Jackie Robinson when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers' Montreal farm team for the 1946 season, breaking the color barrier. In that document, Robinson listed his ambition in baseball: "To open doors for Negroes in Organized Ball." Mr. Halper, who owned about 1 percent of the Yankees, according to his son Jason, had formerly been president of Halper Brothers, a paper-products company in Elizabeth, N.J. In addition to Jason Halper, he is survived by his wife, Sharon; his son Steven; a daughter, Marni Stark; two sisters, Elaine Cahn and Barbara Katz; and five grandchildren. Although Mr. Halper sold the bulk of his collection, he kept items evoking sentimental attachment, among them a glove bearing Mickey Mantle's name that hung from a peg in Mr. Halper's home office. The Sotheby's auction catalogue listed a glove worn by Mantle "circa 1960" for an anticipated bid of $10,000 to $20,000. What was that homebound glove worth? "Nothing," Mr. Halper once said. "It's my glove. It just happens to be a Mantle model. But it's from the days I played softball."