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#1
06-06-2012, 12:50 PM
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Quote:
they found out he worked for the armada de mexico, the mexican navy as an office manager. they called in a favor and the navy scoured their records for a couple of weeks until they found his resignation letter. but before i got that far i contacted every boxing promoter, manager, organization on planet earth to try to find this guys autograph. that's the insane part, there is no end to it. it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of leads, even the obscure ones, because i have found out that the obscure ones sometimes pan out. i contacted everyone with the same last name that i could find. hundreds of them, you send out letters, you email and email and email, you write stacks of letters until you cant write any more. you offer rewards. you google every key word you can think of, you have to know your way around ancestry.com , google, spokeo, all sorts of other search programs. you run gov't records, wwi registration, census records. and it's all a race against time, because every year, someone that knew him passes away, files get thrown out, signed checks get tossed. you contact libraries, museums, halls of fame. gov't agencies, family members, friends, acquaintances, anybody, anything forever and ever, and ever, and if you are very lucky, you find 1 autograph. this is what I did for many obscure boxing autographs, sometimes i got lucky, sometimes I didn't. If the guy is living, but is a recluse, like leroy jones or jose roman, or alfredo evangelista, you have to read all you can about them, you have to try to get in their head, figure out what makes them tick, you have to try to think like them. you have to figure out what is important to them. it's obviously not signing autographs. you have to try to locate them. they don't want to be found. family members will cover for them, tell you he doesnt live here. you have to figure it out, find a side of them that you can reach, an empathy side. Or find a close relative that has sympathy for your cause that can get an autograph for you. i wrote to evangelista and as far as i know, i am the only one to ever get a letter back from his with autographs. but i didnt go in cold. i didn't just ask him for an autograph. that request goes in the trash can. i wrote a long letter that worked up to an autograph request. i found out what his interests were, why he is the way he is. i made a connection. he thinks everyone who wants an autograph just wants to sell it for money. he's apprehensive that way to sign for strangers. so i decided to not be a stranger, but it took time and a strategy. all this and more goes into find an autograph of a long ago deceased person, or a living person who doesn't want to be found or sign autographs. It's a crusade, it really is. Once you start, you enter a strange world, and you can't be afraid of insanity. It's like a really good private eye, only you are a collector so it is much more personal for you. Last edited by travrosty; 06-06-2012 at 01:03 PM. 
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#3
06-06-2012, 01:55 PM
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Quote:
yes, it's not like putting on fake moustaches and trench coats and meeting a dark stranger in an alley and exchanging cash for a paper bag or anything. But it's the constant perserverance that is insane. sometimes a few years, with correspondance inches thick. and hundreds and hundreds of emails. All failing and you find yourself not any closer than you were at the beginning. but you keep trying. There are many times you say to yourself that you have to stop, that it is a lost cause but you gotta keep going, you have too much emotionally invested to stop. It's when the guy is living but you can't find him that is really frustrating, because you know he is out there somewhere. if the guy is dead for a long time, the trail is cold for a reason, a lot of time has passed, but for the living recluse who doesn't want to be found, it's very frustrating. Leroy Jones who passed away a couple of years ago, didn't want to be found at all. Jose Roman, who evidently lives in the tampa area, and works at a grocery store, doesn't want to be found. Frustrating. He could sign a few autographs and make a little money, but he evidently doesn't want anything to do with boxing. i think these guys who fought for the championship and lost had a sense of failure, that they didn't want to talk about it, that they felt they got cheated and wanted to move on with their lives. Last edited by travrosty; 06-06-2012 at 01:58 PM.
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#4
06-07-2012, 11:04 PM
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I actually tracked down the biographical info that is listed for Castleton in the various baseball encyclopedias.
The Turkin-Thompson encyclopedias of the 1950s-60s, as well as the 1969 and later editions of the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia simply listed him as "Roy J. Castleton b. 1886 Salt Lake City, UT", with no exact birth date, and no death info. When the 1969 Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia was published, it contained far more detailed birth and death data than any other previous work. The fact that there was no death info for Castleton wasn't particularly surprising, since he could quite possibly still be living, at the age of 83. If he were still living, though, no researcher had been able to locate him (if anyone was even trying). He was listed as "Among the Missing" in a listing put together by one of the other founding members of SABR, Bill Gustafson, in the early 1970's. In November 1976, I had occasion to spend a few days in Salt Lake City, and had always wanted to visit the LDS genealogy library there, to work on my own family history. I quickly found out, though, that the vast majority of books they had on the section of Virginia where I grew up were ones that I had already seen, and I really ended up doing very little research on my own family. I decided to work instead on some of the "Missing Ballplayers." I was able to find a book of cemetery records from Texas that gave the full name, birth and death info of the 1915 player who had been listed as Reeves H. McKay (actually Reeve Stewart McKay) - who is included in the T210 Texas League card set, and got a bit of data on some other players. I also did some work on Roy Castleton. I didn't find any birth or death info for him at the LDS library, but I did find a marriage record, with the name of his wife (probably in a published book of Salt Lake City marriage records!). Since I was in Salt Lake City, it only seemed logical to see what else I could find on him there. But, I knew that HOF Historian Lee Allen had started his player questionnaire project in 1959, and if Castleton could be easily found in SLC, Lee would probably have found him long ago. Anyway, that night in the motel I thought I'd just call all the Castletons in the phone book and see what I could find. After several calls and talks with people who had never heard of Roy, I hit pay dirt - I found Roy's wife! I don't remember how she was listed in the phone book - it must not have been under Roy or Esther, maybe it was listed with her initials. Anyway, she was living in a nursing/retirement home. We had a nice talk, she told me about moving to the Los Angeles area, and how she came back to SLC after Roy died. She provided me with his full name - Royal Eugene Castleton (rather than the Roy J. listed in baseball sources), and the dates and places of his birth and death. I passed that info on to Cliff Kachline, who was the HOF Historian at the time, and that's what's been listed in the Baseball Encyclopedias ever since. And yes, I did ask her about the possibility of getting something that Roy had signed. They didn't have any children that might have saved something, and she said that in moving from LA back to SLC after Roy died, and then moving into the nursing home, she had gotten rid of pretty much everything she had except some clothes, and items that you might expect, like a couple of photos and decorative items in the room. Certainly there was no room in the nursing home for old business papers, letters, etc. So, no, she wasn't sitting on a hoard of autographs, contracts, scrapbooks, uniforms, or anything like that. She did seem to enjoy our conversation, and was somewhat surprised that someone would be interested in those few years from her husband's life. I've often wondered if anyone after me ever talked with her about her husband and baseball. Roy Castleton didn't hide - he simply went on with his life after baseball, moved away from his hometown. Maybe some people ran across him in LA who remembered him from his PCL days, who knows. If researchers in the 1950s and 60s had had the same internet resources that we have today - telephone directories, real estate records, vital records indexes, the Social Security Death Index, etc. - Roy certainly wouldn't have remained "Among the Missing" for so long - and might have signed an autograph for everyone who asked him!
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#5
06-08-2012, 06:22 AM
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JimStinson
Excellent post Tom, The amazing part to me is that he spent almost his entire life after baseball as an "accountant" and "Book keeper" which means he would have signed if not thousands than hundreds of items in that capacity. Along with having been fairly active in the minors in the mid west and also PCL. BUT.....Nothing !
And too this was a man that died in 1967 ! Not 1927 ! The closest I have came to what could be called a lead. Is the mother of his nephew (now deceased) who helped take care of his wife in the Salt Lake nursing home. Her husband ended up with the wife's personal effects and supposedly some of Roy Castleton's before he moved from Salt Lake to California but even SHE was surprised to learn he had been a baseball player. I too did a cold call search of the Castleton's in the SLC directory as he had quite a few siblings that remained there for their entire live's and what is especially strange is that of the relatives I found that were related to him , none knew that he had been a baseball player.
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