[Keith_Loving]

Kelch Returning Brace Collection To Teams

(this was a one-on-one interview we had with Kelch on Thursday afternoon. This all original content for these pages.)

Jeffrey Kelch, CEO of Digital Archive Group, the group that purchased the remants of the massive George Brace collection in a January court-ordered auction, is finally going public with the details of that purchase. And what he had to say was remarkable.

Kelch, contacted this week, isn’t ready to spill all the details, but the headline is that the Brace collection was actually purchased intact. The auction, conducted in the aftermath of the collapse of the Rogers digital images empire, drew only $46,500 as the winning bid -- a modest amount dwarfed by the $1.8 million that the Conlon Collection (also a Rogers acquisition) had drawn the previous August.

“We have been trying to acquire the collection from Mary Brace for the last three or four years,” Kelch said. “But her asking price was a steady $2 million. She finally got someone to meet her price – even though she would only wind up getting about half that. What she didn’t get were the rights.”

Meanwhile, as authorities were closing in on Rogers, he was busily selling the elite players out of the Brace file – Robinson, Mantle, Ruth (with four different teams as a player and coach), Gehrig – seemingly stripping the massive collection of much of its value. But Rogers was no fool. He did not sell the rights, and the numerous court claims on his estate prevented them from reverting to Mary Brace, despite an agreement with Rogers.

“Rogers was all about selling as much as he could as quickly as he could to make a quick buck, and as a result a lot of the best players were gone. But they missed a lot of stuff,” Kelch said. “And the one thing Rogers did – everything he sold, he copied digitally.”

The January auction, conducted by the executor of the Rogers estate, was held to pay off claims with whatever the remaining negatives would bring. But the digital copies were also part of the lot that Kelch’s group won – a gold mine that was still there.

“We had digital copies of everything,” he explained. “Some 250,000 images, with all rights.”

But the wrinkle is that, for all the years that Kelch pursued the collection, he has had a specific destination in mind.

“I have no interest in holding onto these images,” he said. “I bought them with the idea of returning them to the original organizations – images and rights. We intend to return the entire collection back to the teams.”

One thing Kelch did almost immediately was to assure Mary Brace that the collection would not be sold piecemeal, and has kept his word in the months since.

Kelch’s Illinois-based group went about the painstaking process of organizing the collection, even as Digital Archive entered into negotiations with every major league organization separately for their own unique treasure trove. But he wisely did not merely put the Brace photos out in a vacuum.

“We want to work with the clubs to allow them to have a better understanding of the players in the photos, who they were,” Kelch said. “Like Wimpy Quinn; he pitched in five games for the Cubs, went off to World War II, never to play again. He's there.”

An admitted diehard Cubs fan, Kelch said that his beloved Cubbies were one of “seven or eight” clubs which which Digital Archive had come to terms with over the Brace images. The process is ongoing.

“We’re not in a hurry,” he said. “We’re not giving them away. There were a lot of costs involved in production and organization. But we are not selling them to individual collectors.”

For the time being, Kelch is happy to gradually return the Brace Collection to the teams. After all, their cooperation and access allowed Brace and his camera to have a unique place in the history of the sport in the 20th century. A longer term goal for Kelch is to find other such collections from Brace’s contemporaries in order to return them to the teams in order to protect their own history.

“We haven’t even talked about what we’d do if a team does not want its images,” Kelch said. “There’s always the Hall of Fame.”

SOURCE