Morey, Ritter & the Glory of Their Times

[Hankphenom]

Originally Posted by jtschantz

I am curious about a comment made in this thread about someone owning the original tapes. It has been my understanding that the baseball HOF owns the tapes. I really don't care who owns them, I just want to hear more! I also have read the book, but its the voices on the audio book that I really enjoy. I think I have it in every form (LP, casset tape, cd, and now on an ipod). If anyone has any information on the possible release of more of the tapes, let us know more detail if possible.

The Hall of Fame is starting a 3-year project to digitize their entire collection, which includes Ritter's original reel-to-reel audio tapes. Perhaps they intend to make the results available online. Actually, they already have in their audio collection a digitized set of the tapes, which my partner and I, Neal McCabe, used for the currently available Highbridge set (5 hours, 4 cds) when we produced it in 1998. I don't know if this digitized version is available for listening at the hall. Ritter also donated a copy of the original tapes to the Joyce Collection of the University of Notre Dame. Here is a link to a list of the full contents, which I'm sure you will find interesting:

http://www.sports.nd.edu/Baseball/ritter.html

Of course, there is tons of fascinating stuff in the 120 hours of the original tapes that didn't make it into the published set. But, after working on this project for many months, we both agreed that the 5-hour limitation we were working with turned out to be oddly perfect for the goals we intended for our set, which was to recreate as much as possible the magic of Larry's book. For us, the material for any kind of a "sequel" just wasn't there, or we would have done one. Virtually everything we really wanted made it into the 5 hours available, and there was very, very, little that we regretted not being able to squeeze in. It was almost as if that was the way it was meant to be.
Hank Thomas