Hannigan: Dorothy Seymour, the brains behind America’s baseball professor
From Dave Hannigan at the Irish Times on December 12, 2019, on SABR member Dorothy Seymour Mills:
When the American professor and his wife arrived in Mayo in 1973, The Western People was immediately on the case. Word had reached it that the newcomer, Harold Seymour, was a bit of a big deal back home, a writer whose groundbreaking books on the history of baseball had turned the national pastime into a legitimate academic subject.
Arriving in Ireland to finish the third volume of his magnum opus on the sport, hoping the “peace and tranquillity” would increase productivity, he had transported his entire library from Massachusetts to an idyllic cottage, where the New York Times Sunday edition arrived in the post each week.
Describing him as “the baseball don” and its “foremost living authority”, the Western People feature lauded Seymour as a genuine literary celebrity who had produced gargantuan feats of research that helped a country figure out the origins and the formative decades of its most cherished game.
That was the prevailing narrative about him, but turns out it was only half the story. While it was, indeed, his name on the cover of each seminal tome, a lot of the heavy lifting was being done by Dorothy, the woman he married in 1950. And the only time he ever gave her public credit was to mention her in the acknowledgments and to praise her typing skills in interviews.
Read the full article here: https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/dorothy-seymour-the-brains-behind-america-s-baseball-professor-1.4112509
- Related link: In Memoriam: Dorothy Seymour Mills, 1928-2019
Originally published: December 12, 2019. Last Updated: December 12, 2019.