Nash: FBI returns stolen Harry Wright letters to auction seller
From SABR member Peter J. Nash at Hauls of Shame on July 28, 2013, with mention of SABR member Dorothy Seymour Mills:
Back in the 1950s, Dorothy Seymour Mills held Harry Wright’s letters in her own hands at the New York Public Library’s famous Spalding Baseball Collection. She was conducting research with her late husband, Dr. Harold Seymour, for his Cornell University dissertation and their groundbreaking book Baseball: The Early Years which are both considered the first scholarly works dealing with our National Pastime. The NYPL’s Harry Wright correspondence archive was a key component in the Seymour research because it was a comprehensive day by day record of the man considered the “Father of Professional Baseball” spanning from 1865 to 1894.
Mills and her husband took copious notes documenting each letter they cited in their work as originating from the pages of four giant scrapbooks of Wright’s letters which were housed in the library’s manuscripts division. A few of the most important documents the Seymour’s discovered in the treasure trove of missives were poignant letters to Wright from pitcher Jim Devlin who had been banished for “throwing games” in one of baseball’s first gambling scandals. The down-and-out Devlin was begging the magnate Wright for any type of work possible to help feed his struggling family.
In July of 2009, those very same letters from Devlin that Mills utilized at the library over sixty years ago appeared for sale in Major League Baseball’s All Star Fanfest Auction conducted by auctioneer David Hunt. The letters were offered by Hunt as a “Cache of Rare 19th Century Letters With Relation to Harry Wright.” Hunt told the New York Times that his consignor found the stash of letters in a “grandparents estate” while Harry Wright’s granddaughter, Pam Guzzi, asked Times reporter Jack Curry, “Why would someone have them if they weren’t related to him? Why would they be in their grandmother’s attic?” The NYPL President and CEO at the time, David Ferrerio, told the Times the situation was very “disconcerting” and added, “We try our hardest to make sure we’re protecting the collection.”
Read the full article here: http://haulsofshame.com/blog/?p=22852
Originally published: July 29, 2013. Last Updated: July 29, 2013.