The Face of Baseball: Photo Selections from the Detroit and Cleveland Public Libraries

Photographs make history come alive, and baseball images enhance books and articles on the national pastime. While there are terrific collections at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and The Sporting News in St. Louis, less obvious sources include public libraries. Two of the best are the Detroit Public Library (DPL) and the Cleveland Public Library (CPL).

The Ernie Harwell Collection, a part of the Burton Historical Collection at the DPL, consists of 40,000 photographs, countless newspaper and magazine clippings, books, guides, programs, and scorecards. The veteran broadcaster and SABR member donated them to the DPL, mainly in the mid-1960s, and continued to supplement the collection until recently. The clips are filed both by name and by subject.

The photographs are the heart of the collection. They span from 1901 to the mid-1950s, with excellent coverage of the Deadball Era. They are filed alphabetically by name. The pictures are the work of Detroit News photographer William A. Kuenzel, who became the paper’s first staff photographer (and one of the nation’s first) in 1901 at the age of 17. His exquisite images are both portraits and action shots, including a famous image of Ty Cobb sliding into Frank Baker at third base. Kuenzel developed his “Big Bertha” camera, which the Detroit News photo department built and sold to newspapers around the country. He retired in 1953, two years after his 50th anniversary with the News, and passed away in 1964.

Ernie Harwell, winner of the prestigious Ford C. Frick Award, bestowed during the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, saw his first ball game in Atlanta in the summer of 1926 and started working for The Sporting News in 1934. A sandlot second baseman as a kid, Ernie’s favorite ballplayers were infielders Frankie Frisch, Pepper Martin, “Sunny Jim” Bottomley, and Charlie Gehringer. In the early 1930s, when Ernie was making two dollars a week selling newspapers, he responded to an ad offering old baseball guides. When he bought them for $32, his parents were perturbed. When he soon turned a profit by selling them to A. G. Edwards of St. Louis for $75, they were surprised. Ernie was “hooked” on the guides and focused on collecting them rather than baseball cards or photos.

Around 1940, when Ernie started working for WSB radio in Atlanta, he began clipping articles for future reference. He even went back to publications from the 1920s and 1930s (Baseball Magazine and The Sporting News, for example) in augmenting this database. When he was in the Marines during WWII, his collection continued to grow; his wife clipped articles for him while he was gone.

Ernie acquired the photo collection from the son of a close friend of Kuenzel in the early 1960s, after the Tigers had passed on it. Ernie’s entire baseball holdings now took over a large part of his Grosse Pointe home. When the Harwells moved to Florida in 1965 (where they lived until 1981), Ernie decided to donate his collection and make it available for researchers. Recently the Detroit Public Library dedicated a room to the collection, though it is not yet open to the public. Ernie and his wife of 63 years, Lulu, live in the greater Detroit area.

The Harwell Collection is available for research and reproduction but is not currently available online. The library is embarking on a digitization project. David Poremba, an author of a number of photograph books, is the curator of the Harwell Collection and manager of the Burton Collection. 

The CPL has two photograph collections: a general group of 1.3 million images (which includes some baseball) and another 5,000 baseball images. The baseball images are almost all portraits.

The photos come from many sources, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The largest group came from the Newspaper Enterprise Association when it closed its Cleveland office.

The CPL is home to two remarkable collections, the Charles W. Mears and Eugene C. Murdock collections. Mears (1874-1942) was a well-known advertising executive with a penchant for baseball statistics. He left behind 41 scrapbooks, countless clippings, and hundreds of thousands of box scores.

Murdock was a Marietta College professor who wrote a couple of excellent oral histories and a biography of Ban Johnson, the founder and first president of the American League. Gene was a long­ time member of SABR, joining as its 38th member. He left behind hundreds of books, guides, Who’s Who, World Series programs, etc. Most of his photos are baseball snapshots and postcards of varying quality. The highlight of his collection is tapes of 88 interviews with ballplayers (one to two hours each; available for lending), which were the basis of his oral histories, some of which were published in the Baseball Research Journal. They include sessions with Stan Coveleski, Red Faber, Lefty Gomez, Charlie Grimm, Lefty Grove, Jesse Haines, Waite Hoyt, Fred Lieb, Ted Lyons, Rube Marquard, Joe McCarthy, Bob O’Farrell, Roger Peckinpaugh, Red Ruffing, Ernie Shore, Bob Shawkey, and Smoky Joe Wood. 

STEVE STEINBERG’s book Baseball in St. Louis: 1900-1925 was published by Arcadia in 2004. He has a baseball history web site, www.stevesteinberg.net and lives in Seattle with his wife and three children.