Baseball of the bygone days: A memoir by Jimmy Wood
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on August 25, 2014:
When The Baseball Encyclopedia first came out in 1969, and even twenty years later when Total Baseball followed, Jimmy Wood was a mystery man. We weren’t sure where he was born; Canada and England were both reasonable guesses; today we think Wood was born to English immigrants on December 1, 1842, most likely in Canada. Moreover, we suspected that the death date both encyclopedias listed was wrong, but even as late as Total Baseball‘s seventh edition in 2001, SABR’s Biographical Research Committee offered us a death date of November 30, 1886, which we continued to list.
Personally I had long known this was wrong because I had uncovered correspondence between Wood and A.G. Mills from 1926, inviting Wood to take part in the celebrations surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the National League. In 2004 baseball’s great detective, Peter Morris, wrote to me and some others: “I’ve found an intriguing candidate. A James Wood, 84, died in New Orleans on November 30, 1927. I have no proof that this is the player and there was no obit or death notice in the Times-Picayune, but it’s intriguing for several reasons: [1] Our player’s son had died in New Orleans four years earlier; [2] there was no James Wood of appropriate age in New Orleans on the 1920 census; [3] our ballplayer’s granddaughter told Lee Allen that he died in 1926 or 1927 (although she thought it was in NYC).”
Two years later, the Biographical Research Committee reported in its newsletter:
Jimmy Wood Found.
James Leon “Jimmy” Wood has long been one of our most interesting missing players. He was very prominent in the National Association as both a player and manager. In 1874, he decided to do a little home surgery when he lanced an abscess on his leg with a pocket knife. An infection led doctors to amputate his right leg. Wood was written up as a mystery in Lee Allen’s column in the Sporting News on April 20, 1963. Wood moved to Florida and did well investing in citrus groves. His daughter Carrie married William Chase Temple. Temple moved to Pittsburgh and became extremely wealthy and it was he who established the Temple Cup. Wood’s granddaughter, Dorothy Temple, married major league pitcher Del Mason. It sounds like it would be an easy task to find Jimmy Wood, but that was not the case. Allen’s column suggested that he died in Brooklyn in 1926 or 1927. We could never find any proof of that in Brooklyn. It turns out that the date was about right; the location was just 3000 miles off. In our long and fruitless search for Wood we had tracked him to Quebec, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, and Pennsylvania without finding a death certificate. Peter Morris was able to find a death certificate in California showing that he died November 3, 1927 in San Francisco. The birth matches what he have and his body was sent to New Orleans for burial next to his son. This is a great find. Wood was on our Top 20 Most Wanted list so Peter wins the Find of the Month award.
So who was Jimmy Wood, and why was he worth a search that lasted nearly fifty years?
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2014/08/25/baseball-of-the-bygone-days-a-memoir-by-jimmy-wood/
Originally published: August 26, 2014. Last Updated: August 26, 2014.