Jefferson Burdick revisited

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Posted By: Bill Cornell

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I recently received an email from Sean Kirst, a writer based in Syracuse, about Jefferson Burdick. Sean read some of the posts here after Adam W's trip to the Met and was glad to see that there are others interested in Burdick. He had a collection of some of his columns from The Post-Standard published last fall as The Ashes of Lou Gehrig and Other Essays. I bought a copy and recommend it highly. One story is a short bio of Burdick that includes a photo of him not seen before.

Sean was kind enough to send on another article that wasn't included in his book.

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Copyright 1997 Post-Standard, All Rights Reserved.

The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)

August 1, 1997 Friday Metro Edition
Sean Kirst; columnist

HEADLINE: THE KING OF CARD COLLECTORS HAS NO STATISTICS ON HIS GRAVE


A million dollars' worth of baseball cards, on Wolf Street tucked in cartons.

John DeFlores saw them. Thousands of cards. Jefferson Burdick had them
stacked and filed in his apartment. In the late 1950s, DeFlores helped Burdick pack
up the collection. They were shipped to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of
Art.

Burdick sorted them there. He cataloged them. He left the museum, went to the
hospital and died. The son of a Hastings dairy farmer left behind the most
important collection of baseball cards in the world.

He left them behind for me, and for you. He could have sold them. He could
have used his lifetime passion as a means to a quick buck.

Instead, the man universally regarded as the father of card collecting made
sure his collection was available to all.

"He was always talking about posterity," recalls DeFlores, 89.

Today, the baseball world begins assembling for the Hall of Fame induction in
Cooperstown. Many of the game's immortals will fly into Syracuse. Their
planes will pass above Central Square and its Hillside Cemetery. Burdick is buried
there, on a bluff rising above an old baseball diamond.

Burdick's ashes lie between his parents, in a grave marked only by a piece of
blank cement. "We always put those on the graves where you know no one would
ever put up a headstone," said George Perfield, 74, the cemetery caretaker.

An unmarked grave. It infuriates DeFlores. "He deserves a stone," DeFlores
said. "Not a little stone, either. He could have sold one card and paid for a
big stone. It should have room, a lot of room, for a lot of writing: 'Here lies
the greatest card collector of them all."'

DeFlores maintains the Met, as beneficiary of a collection worth a fortune,
should pick up the bill. "One card," he said. "They could sell one card, and
buy the man a stone."

Burdick and DeFlores for years worked back-to-back on a bench at
Crouse-Hinds. Burdick was frail, his body twisted by a crippling arthritis that led to an
early death. DeFlores had seen that kind of struggle before. His older brother
never had the strength to walk, yet became a Linotype operator.

DeFlores saw a similar courage in Burdick. The two men were close friends.

To the best knowledge of DeFlores, Burdick never attended a professional
baseball game. He was a bachelor. He lived to collect. In 1939, he published a
book laying out the catalog system for baseball cards.

Today's great collectors say Burdick saw the future. He pursued rare cards
when the hobby was perceived as kid's stuff. The late Frank Nagy of Detroit, for
instance, once compared Burdick's role in the history of baseball cards to
the mythical role of Abner Doubleday in the birth of baseball.

"Burdick is my hero," said Alan Rosen of New Jersey, who claims to be the
world's largest dealer in old sports memorabilia.

For decades, Burdick was a prophet without honor. While baseball card
collecting turned into a billion-dollar industry, the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown
made no provision for honoring a peripheral pioneer like Burdick. "Maybe there
should be," said Jeff Idelson, executive director of communications for the hall.

In 1993, the Met made the Burdick collection into a permanent attraction.
Tens of thousands of visitors have now viewed the Burdick cards, which feature
the rare Honus Wagner tobacco card of 1910.

"It absolutely serves as a gateway (to a new audience) for the museum," said
Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met. "It brings in young people, who then
go on to other things."

Holzer doesn't feel the Met is obliged to buy Burdick a tombstone. He said
the card display, unique to any major art museum in the world, serves as the
monument that Burdick himself wanted. But in Central New York, host this weekend
to baseball's immortals, one truth remains unchanged:

The Babe Ruth of a great hobby has no last card of his own.


Sean Kirst is a columnist for The Post-Standard.