Lawrence S. Ritter, the Last New York Giant

Lawrence Ritter, standing, looks on as Lee Lowenfish, left, interviews Red Barber at Polk Award ceremonies, Long Island University, circa 1985. A shy man, Ritter summoned the courage to call retired players and discovered that most of them were eager to tell their stories.

 

In the original preface to his classic work, The Glory of Their Times, Lawrence Ritter recalls reading the obituary of Sam Crawford’s celebrated teammate Ty Cobb in 1961, and deciding “someone should do something, and do it quickly to record the remembrances of a sport that has played such a significant role in American life.”

So began an odyssey of five summers, covering more than 75,000 miles throughout the United States and Canada, in search of those players whose legends had been born in the era of the “dead” ball. “They were not easy to find,” Ritter wrote. “The teams they played for had lost track of them decades ago, and there was no central source of information.”

Nonetheless, he found them. Some, like Lefty O’Doul, were easy to locate, while others, like Sam Crawford, were nearly impossible: I was told that Sam lived in Los Angeles, but when I arrived at the address, his wife, somewhat startled, said he hadn’t been there for months. Sam didn’t like big cities, she said, so she seldom saw him. Well, then, where could I find him? Oh, she couldn’t tell me that; he’d be furious. Sam loved peace and quiet . . . and above all, he wanted privacy.

After I pleaded for hours, Mrs. Crawford relented some- what. She wouldn’t tell me exactly where he was, but there was probably no harm in giving me “one small hint.” If I drove north somewhere between 175 and 225 miles, I’d be “warm.” Oh yes, she inadvertently dropped one more clue: Sam Crawford, the giant who once terrorized American League pitchers, enjoyed two things above all: tending his garden and watching the evening sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

A long drive and inquiries at post offices, real estate agencies, and grocery stores placed me, two days later, in the small town of Baywood, California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. For the next two days, however, I made no further progress. On the evening of the fifth day, frustrated and disappointed, I took some wash to the local laundromat and disgustedly watched the clothes spin. Seated next to me was a tall, elderly gentleman reading a frayed paperback. Idly, I asked if he’s ever heard of Sam Crawford, the old ballplayer.

‘Well, I should certainly hope so,’ he said, ‘bein’ as I’m him.”

I encountered no such difficulties in locating Dr. Ritter; I was able to reach him after one phone call to his office at New York University and a second one to his home. To my delight, he agreed to be interviewed on the spot, and so, for the next half hour, we talked about the writing of The Glory of Their Times in particular, and about the art of oral history in general:

“I chose to write the interviews as narratives because I wanted to evoke a sense of the past from beginning to end. I don’t like the question-and-answer format you frequently see in magazines, where the interviewer poses a question and the subject responds. They just don’t flow. As to the lack of descriptive detail in the book, that was done deliberately. I don’t think I lost very much—nothing important anyway—because I wanted to induce in the reader a mental image of the past. That’s why, throughout the book, the only photographs I used were of the players as young men. In fact, if I had two equally good pictures, one of the player at twenty-five and another of him at thirty, I used the one at twenty-five.

“Usually, about ninety percent of the time, I was able to get all the material I needed. When I interviewed Lefty O’Doul, he only gave me an hour. I talked to him at his restaurant in San Francisco, and when the noon hour approached, we were interrupted, and he had to go. However, Lefty had this very rapid, staccato manner of speaking, so I got quite a bit in the one hour anyway.

“They weren’t all that easy. Stanley Coveleski, for instance, was not a talker; most of the time, he answered in monosyllables. That’s why his chapter is so short. And George Gibson, the old Pirate catcher: I talked to him for days and days, but most of what he said had already been told to me by Tommy Leach and Hans Lobert. I had a tough time getting anything I could use, and for that reason, his interview was excluded from the original book. I went back, though, ten or twelve years later, and I saw material there that I could weave around into the short piece that appears in the new edition.

“The weaving process? Well, you know that quote in the preface, where I say, ‘I asked, I listened, and the tape recorder did the rest?’ That’s a misstatement. Of course there was a lot of work that went into arranging the various elements. I had a typed manuscript of the conversations, and I would listen to the tapes I made — there are over a hundred hours of them — and after hearing them a few times, I would begin to hear the voice, its cadence, its peculiarities, so that I could recall its sound and character just by reading the transcript. Then I’d begin weaving the material into a narrative.

“I had no particular favorite among the interviews. All of these men became, in the course of our conversations, my friends; they were all enjoyable. Of course, some conversations were harder to get started than others. Chief Meyers, for example. The Chief resented white society, but once he accepted you, he was as warm and open an individual as you’re ever likely to meet. He never forgot he was an Indian, and he made no bones about his resentment, but he wouldn’t let that come between you.

“I didn’t come to these interviews with any preconceived notions that I’m aware of. In fact, I didn’t know what to expect. I had never really talked to old people before. My own grandparents had died before I was born, so I never met them. And as far as the players’ reputations and all, I don’t think that affected me. I’ve always thought, you know, that a baseball fan believes the game’s heyday was during the time of his youth, between the ages of eight and eighteen. Ballplayers at that time of your life aren’t life-size; they’re giants, demigods. I think that’s a fairly typical phenomenon. I was a big Bill Terry fan myself. I rooted for the New York Giants.

“And I deny any myth-making in the cases of McGraw and Mathewson. These were strictly the players’ points of view. Mathewson’s legend was no doubt enhanced by his death as a result of World War I, but he was, by all accounts, a stellar individual. Rube Marquard said the worst thing anybody had to say about him. Now, I put in the book that Matty was a champion checker player. Marquard said Matty was also quite a gambler— cards and dice, but mainly cards—and he was terrific at that, too. They were all just gaga about him.

“Getting back to the matter of old people: I took away from these conversations a terrible fear of getting old. I enjoyed talking with these people. They were bright and very alive. But the more I saw of them, the more I realized how much physical pain they were in. They had reached a stage where their lives were more distressful than pleasurable. And these fellows made no bones about it: old age was hell. It was easily the worst part of their lives. They’d been champion athletes, used not only to getting around, but to getting around better than anyone else.

“Later on, my feelings were reinforced by the letters I received from the players’ widows. Yes, I stayed in touch with all these men for a number of years afterward. I kept up our correspondence for business purposes, among other reasons. I had decided that since these were their life stories, told pretty much in their own words, that I would share my royalties with them equally. Anyway, whenever one of those fellows would die, I’d receive a letter that would usually relate the course of my friend’s final illness. This always had a terrible impact on me.

“What other books on the subject do I like? I like Roger Angell’s books and Tom Boswell’s. I think Donald Honig’s books are excellent, very well written. You might be interested to know that the book that was the inspiration for The Glory of Their Times wasn’t a baseball book at all, but a collection of interviews with old jazz musicians that were written by Nat Hentoff. It was called You Hear Me Talking to You. I was also influenced by a collection of folk songs compiled by a man who worked for the Library of Congress. I believe his name was Lomax. He traveled around the country interviewing old people about the songs their parents used to sing to them. I was very impressed with his work.”

As the interview drew to a close, I thanked Dr. Ritter not only for his time and his insights, but also for the hours of pleasure his book had given me. I had read it during my late teens in the late sixties, and it had changed the way I looked at baseball. I told him that because of the preponderant number of interviews with ex-Giants, I, too, had become a New York Giants fan.

But the New York Giants are no more. Matty is gone, as are Marquard, McGinnity, and McGraw. Gone, too, are the stars that succeeded them: the Meal Ticket, Master Melvin, and Memphis Bill. The Polo Grounds were torn down nearly forty years ago, and now Lawrence Ritter, the last New York giant, has left us, leaving behind not only The Glory of Their Times and numerous other works that help baseball fans see into the past, but also the legacy of a life that will inspire the current and coming generations of oral historians to look after the future.