SABR member’s warehouse of baseball memories could be left stranded
From Billy Witz at the New York Times on August 7, 2013, on SABR member Gary Cypres:
It is an overwhelming chore to process all that the eyes can see in the brightly lighted, 30,000-square-foot warehouse that is home to the Sports Museum of Los Angeles: thousands of old uniforms, pieces of equipment, trophies, plaques, newspapers, photographs and other artifacts. And not just because there is so much of it, but because it seems so out of place, this Brooklyn Dodgers and Yankees-centric collection being housed across the country from its ancestral home.
But for Gary Cypres, who built most of the collection bit by bit — often bid by bid — over the last 20 years, there is a bigger chore than grasping its size and location: what to do with it all.
Cypres turns 70 in October, and if there is something eternally youthful about collecting sports memorabilia, it has not obscured the realization that he will not be around forever.
And so, rather than one day leaving his wife and five children with the burden of dispersing his collection, Cypres is looking for a good home for it.
“The reality has finally caught up with me,” he said. “There is a realization when you get to my age that you’ve sort of had your fun. But it’s very hard for collectors to sell. It’s like giving up a tangible piece of your life, especially when you have a collection like my Dodger collection. When you take a piece here and a piece there, it destroys the continuity.”
But Cypres may be forced to do just that. The Dodgers are not interested in taking the entire collection, and he plans to see whether someplace in Brooklyn like Barclays Center or the Brooklyn Museum would be interested in a long-term loan akin to those made to museums by private art collectors.
Read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/sports/baseball/warehouse-of-baseball-memories-could-be-left-stranded.html
Originally published: August 8, 2013. Last Updated: August 8, 2013.