What Baseball Artifact Brings You Back in Time in the Deepest Way?

[dbussell12]

This does not have to be personal memory. It can be, and perhaps is even better, if it is collective, archetypal memory. An artifact that literally draws you back in through time to a recollection of a history or a time long since passed.

This to me is the power of primary baseball historical artifacts; would love to hear your stories and selections.


------


"Marcel Proust was the first person to coin the term involuntary memory, in his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past). Proust did not have any psychological background, and worked primarily as a writer.

Proust viewed involuntary memory as containing the "essence of the past," claiming that it was lacking from voluntary memory. When the protagonist of Proust's novel eats a tea soaked madeleine, a long-forgotten childhood memory of eating tea soaked madeleine with his aunt is restored to him.[2] From this memory, he then proceeds to recall the childhood home he was in, and even the town itself. This becomes a theme throughout In Search of Lost Time, with sensations reminding the narrator of previous experiences. Proust dubbed these "involuntary memories"."

[Metsfan0507]

To me, it's my T206 cards. When i look at them I'm not so much thinking about the players that are pictured, but I think about the previous owners of the cards.

What was their life like in 1909? Were they a little kid begging adults for cards outside the newspaper shop, or were they an adult buying the cigarettes for themselves? Did they live in a city or a more rural setting?

Had the owners ever gone to an mlb game themselves when they were collecting? did they live near a team, could they afford to go? or did they follow the sport through the newspaper and radio?

How did these little pieces of paper survive all this time- did the previous owners keep them in a shoebox? glue them into an album? display them? how did they get passed through the generations while they were basically worthless? did the middle generations appreciate them, or were they a burden inherited from grandpa?

I'll never know the answer to any of these questions, but it is fun to speculate.

[dbussell12]

Originally Posted by Metsfan0507

To me, it's my T206 cards. When i look at them I'm not so much thinking about the players that are pictured, but I think about the previous owners of the cards.

What was their life like in 1909? Were they a little kid begging adults for cards outside the newspaper shop, or were they an adult buying the cigarettes for themselves? Did they live in a city or a more rural setting?

Had the owners ever gone to an mlb game themselves when they were collecting? did they live near a team, could they afford to go? or did they follow the sport through the newspaper and radio?

How did these little pieces of paper survive all this time- did the previous owners keep them in a shoebox? glue them into an album? display them? how did they get passed through the generations while they were basically worthless? did the middle generations appreciate them, or were they a burden inherited from grandpa?

I'll never know the answer to any of these questions, but it is fun to speculate.

Ah... fellow Mets fan! I 100% agree. This is why I don't care so much about 'who' is on old cards strictly speaking and look more for printer marks, wear, or other distinguishing signatures that speak to that kind of accumulated history you're talking about.

One of my favorite cards is a T206 Addie Joss with tape marks and a ton of creases but is deeply, deeply worn. It almost looks like an entirely different card but it glows with a different aura than anything else. Can't be replicated, precisely because it acquired another density as an artifact through time an engagement. And of course Joss' impact on baseball history can't be overstated. Addie Joss day is one of the most important events in baseball history IMO.

There are multiple ways to look at cards or other aspects of baseball history; it sounds to me like we look at them similarly. As historical artifacts; something that remains from a time long gone. It's easy sometimes to get distracted by images and forget the multidimensional backgrounds like you are discussing.

Thanks for sharing this insight!! LFGM!!!!

[Eric72]

I’ve had this baseball since 1988. My father and I were at Wrigley Field that June. During batting practice, this ball cleared the fence and my father wound up with it. The ball sits on a shelf in my home office now. I frequently glance at it and take a moment to go back (in my mind) to that time and place.

[Lucas00]

I love the 1950s aesthetic. Walking through a store and seeing an advertisement for star cals for example would be the coolest thing to me. Advertising in particular from the 50s is nostalgic to me even never having experienced it.

Similarly the roaring 20s give me the same second hand nostalgia feeling. I love the architecture and flashy lights, monster movies. This snapshot of Wajo from his 1924 scrapbook is the best I can show this.

Another that really interests me is Worlds Fairs. Chicago 1893 in particular, but also New York 1939/1964. For this example I'm showing my 1939 centennial paper logo with the original envelope given out at the 1939 new York world fair by Oppenheim Collins. A womens clothier.

[Webster]

This:
IMG_7997.jpg

Pretty fun night for an 11 year old.

[RayW]

As a long time Willie Mays fan, the glove used to make “the Catch” at the HOF has special meaning to me. Mays used a Rawlings Harvey Haddix glove, which has HH on the heel.

[Kawika]

A handful of 1957 Topps cards takes me back to the time when the penny dropped and I got hooked on baseball. It was a great time to be young and a Giant fan. For one more year anyway. However, instead of traveling down that particular memory lane I will present this autographed 1934 Goudey Lou Gehrig as an artifact that evokes history. At some moment between 1934 and the time he lost his motor skills Lou Gehrig, living and breathing, held this very baseball card in his hand and affixed his signature in all its cursive glory.

I have a yearning nostalgia for the era between the two world wars. It's when my father was in his youth. The world he lived in was colorful and exciting - terrific music, fancy women, great athletes. Never mind that he grew up in San Francisco, 1000 miles west of major league baseball. It still had that jazz age gestalt that Gehrig's autograph evokes for me.




Fancy Women


Terrific Music
This YouTube - Manhattan by the California Ramblers - is a sweet jazz melody with great visuals, even with the "jitters". It's part of the soundtrack of my fantasy voyage in time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2rDsY-zge4

Great Athletes
Baseball historians say nice things about the 1928 San Francisco Seals. They won the PCL by eight games and were 120-71. I possess the glass negative from which this photo was printed. [Come to think of it, the neg itself would be a separate cool artifact by the terms of this writing assignment. Wish I had a pik of it. That piece of glass was looking right at those guys, its architecture re-arranged by light rays bouncing off them. Spooky stuff. Too much marijuana in my youth]. Frankie Crosetti is 18 years old here. Thirty years later we see him again via home movie camera waving Norm Siebern home on an inside-the-parker.






My Dad was born at home in a house one short block away from this Mission District street in 1920. He was an altar boy at St Peter's church whose corner and steps are at left. He delivered the San Francisco Chronicle to pitch in with expenses. Some of his customers were Civil war veterans. Imagine that. He saw Henry Oana play.




He attended St Ignatius HS which is by the athletic field to the left of SI Cathedral. In the background the Golden Gate Bridge is under construction. He saw the bridge go from nothing to magnificence.


Thusly this card held by the Iron Horse has a shred of his mana and brings illumination to an era that matters to me. So there. Not sure if I met the requirements set out by the OP but I'm kinda scatterbrained at the best of times and I had fun throwing it together.

[dbussell12]

Originally Posted by Kawika

A handful of 1957 Topps cards takes me back to the time when the penny dropped and I got hooked on baseball. It was a great time to be young and a Giant fan. For one more year anyway. However, instead of traveling down that particular memory lane I will present this autographed 1934 Goudey Lou Gehrig as an artifact that evokes history. At some moment between 1934 and the time he lost his motor skills Lou Gehrig, living and breathing, held this very baseball card in his hand and affixed his signature in all its cursive glory.

I have a yearning nostalgia for the era between the two world wars. It's when my father was in his youth. The world he lived in was colorful and exciting - terrific music, fancy women, great athletes. Never mind that he grew up in San Francisco, 1000 miles west of major league baseball. It still had that jazz age gestalt that Gehrig's autograph evokes for me.




Fancy Women


Terrific Music
This YouTube - Manhattan by the California Ramblers - is a sweet jazz melody with great visuals, even with the "jitters". It's part of the soundtrack of my fantasy voyage in time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2rDsY-zge4

Great Athletes
Baseball historians say nice things about the 1928 San Francisco Seals. They won the PCL by eight games and were 120-71. I possess the glass negative from which this photo was printed. [Come to think of it, the neg itself would be a separate cool artifact by the terms of this writing assignment. Wish I had a pik of it. That piece of glass was looking right at those guys, its architecture re-arranged by light rays bouncing off them. Spooky stuff. Too much marijuana in my youth]. Frankie Crosetti is 18 years old here. Thirty years later we see him again via home movie camera waving Norm Siebern home on an inside-the-parker.






My Dad was born at home in a house one short block away from this Mission District street in 1920. He was an altar boy at St Peter's church whose corner and steps are at left. He delivered the San Francisco Chronicle to pitch in with expenses. Some of his customers were Civil war veterans. Imagine that. He saw Henry Oana play.




He attended St Ignatius HS which is by the athletic field to the left of SI Cathedral. In the background the Golden Gate Bridge is under construction. He saw the bridge go from nothing to magnificence.


Thusly this card held by the Iron Horse has a shred of his mana and brings illumination to an era that matters to me. So there. Not sure if I met the requirements set out by the OP but I'm kinda scatterbrained at the best of times and I had fun throwing it together.

David - have you ever thought about putting any of this to paper in essay or book form? My apologies if you already have and I don't know anything about it... deeply evocative writing and the pictures you just shared with us here are wonderful. I think you hit the nail on the head here and then some. Could have mistaken the Seals manager in that picture you shared for T.S. Eliot...

[Michael Peich]

Wow, David, this is a fabulous post! Thank you sharing everything especially the Gehrig and the '32 Oana. What a wonderful tribute to your father.

Mahalo,
Mike

[dbussell12]

Guys this is some great stuff. I think there's a profound thread here, how tangible materials are portals back in time to places we can reach in our minds; spaces we inhabit with mixtures of personal, ancestral, and collective memories. Much of this recall in my experience is a fusion between storytelling, myth, and how history is passed down and shifts and changes through time aurally and in how we process time through time.

We, of course, are living in time; these objects and materials live in time with us. The Willie Mays glove, the ball you got with your father as a child -- these things acquire deeper power as time goes on because they become mingled with what was and what will never be again, but still is as embodied through the object itself and the memory you retain of it.

Anything Satchel Paige to me is the peak or height of this kind of thing when it comes to baseball history. Satchel himself represents to me the absolute epitome of how baseball functions as story and storytelling. He is one of those figures who seems to himself rise above baseball and tell us something more profound about our humanity and what it is to be human through baseball; his life and times. I can never get enough of his stories or characterizations and depictions. He himself is as mythic of a figure as it gets; artifacts from his time and era that involve him never cease to grab me.

[dbussell12]

Originally Posted by Michael Peich

Wow, David, this is a fabulous post! Thank you sharing everything especially the Gehrig and the '32 Oana. What a wonderful tribute to your father.

Mahalo,
Mike

From what little I have seen and heard from David so far on the forum I remain convinced he could write the baseball book to define all baseball books... I would love to see what would or could come of it. Such lyrical and poetic writing there and the references are just fantastic!

[ruth-gehrig]

Originally Posted by dbussell12

From what little I have seen and heard from David so far on the forum I remain convinced he could write the baseball book to define all baseball books... I would love to see what would or could come of it. Such lyrical and poetic writing there and the references are just fantastic!

I vote you and the other David collaborate for one hell of a good baseball book!! Seriously. Dibs on 1st copy

[dbussell12]

Originally Posted by ruth-gehrig

I vote you and the other David collaborate for one hell of a good baseball book!! Seriously. Dibs on 1st copy

By David squared

If you're interested I've done a fair bit of writing for SABR baseball cards and on Substack working with printing methods and modern image production/reproduction with cards and photos. I'll share here. There's a lot of work on the T206s and the T3s and their industrial American context. The SABR essays are all accessible on their blog --

https://davidbussellarchive.substack.com/

[ctownboy]

Not an actual baseball item but.....freshly mown grass in early May.

Back in the late 1970's I lived in a small town with my mother and younger sister. We didn't have a lot of money so what money I received for an allowance (if I even got one) was very small. To supplement this, I mowed grass and rode my bicycle along our small town roads looking for discarded glass soft drink bottles to be able to redeem.

When I had enough money, I would go to a small grocery store nearby and buy packs of baseball cards. I would then rush home and open them hoping to find Cincinnati Reds cards in general and Johnny Bench cards in particular. Living in southern Indiana, close to Louisville, Kentucky, being a Reds fan at that time was GREAT!!!

Now, almost fifty years later, every May when grass is starting to be mown and that fresh smell hits me, I go back in time and remember the miles of mowing grass and the miles of bike riding I did just to be able to buy new packs of baseball cards.

David