The glory of their times ebook

ISBN Author Lawrence S. Publisher HighBridge. Release 04 March Search for a digital library with this title Search by city, ZIP code, or library name Learn more about precise location detection. Is it a book about whaling in the nineteenth century? Indeed it is. It probably contains more information on the subject than any learned treatise written before or since. Nevertheless, any schoolboy knows that Moby Dick is not really about whaling. It is about trying to attain the unattainable—and sometimes making it.

And, on its own terms, that is also what this book is about. It most assuredly is. But it is about much more as well, because what baseball was like in the early days is told here by the players themselves, by the men who —wearing tiny gloves, wielding heavy bats, attired in uniform shirts with upturned collars and sleeves below the elbows—were playing in major-league baseball games 50, 60, and almost 70 years ago.

These are their life stories, told in their words. And in recalling those days, in remembering what their teammates and their opponents were like, in reminiscing about their victories and their defeats, they re-create with dramatic impact the sights and sounds, the vigor and the vitality, of an era that can never return. Here is what it felt like to be young and a big leaguer in a high-spirited country a long time ago. The narratives contained in this book are chronicles of men who chased a dream and, at least for a time, caught up with it and lived it.

They were pioneers, in every sense of the word, engaged in a pursuit in which only the most skilled, the most determined, and, above all, the most rugged survived. They are proud of what they did, and they talk of it with enthusiasm in their voices and happiness in their eyes.

This is also the story of America at the turn of the century and prior to World War I. Jacques Barzun, the distinguished Columbia University philosopher, wrote that whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball. Here, illustrated in microcosm, is the exuberance and unbounded optimism of a nation confident of its ability to shape the future to its will and mold its own destiny. At that time the words welfare state, corporate image, and organization man were not even a part of the language.

So it was in baseball as in America at large. Most history, whether of baseball or of war, is written many years after the event by outsiders desperately trying to reconstruct the way things were. This book has been written by the participants themselves. For them, yesterday, their day of glory, has more immediacy than today. They do not have to reconstruct. All they have to do is recollect. They do not have to try to imagine what it would have been like. They were there. They do not have to try to analyze yesterday from the perspective of today.

To them, today is strange and different, and the way it used to be is the natural way. They are more used to analyzing today from the vantage point of yesterday. Of course, this book was really not written at all. It was spoken. And, as spoken literature, it is characterized by the simplicity and directness of the spoken word as contrasted with the written word.

My role was strictly that of catalyst, audience, and chronicler. I asked and listened, and the tape recorder did the rest. I first thought of this book back in , when Ty Cobb died in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of seventy-four.

It seemed to me then that someone should do something, and do it quickly, to record for the future the remembrances of a sport that has played such a significant role in American life. Ty Cobb symbolized America from the turn of the century to World War I perhaps better than any other single figure, just as Babe Ruth symbolized America between the wars and, in so many ways, Mantle, Mays, and Koufax do today.

It seemed obvious that there was only one way to go about this, and that was to take a tape recorder and go and talk to as many old-time ball players as one could find and ask them what it was like. Of course, there are not very many men still alive today who played major-league baseball as long ago as about A twenty-five-year-old in would be over eighty today.

Furthermore, I did not know where they were, what kind of people they would be, or how they would receive me, a person who had never been professionally involved in baseball in any way. Since then I have traveled over 75, miles throughout the United States and Canada, and have spent countless hours reliving the legend that baseball in the early decades of the century has come to be. We talked in modest, middle-class homes, in elegantly furnished mansions, and in run-down shacks.

We talked on farms and in cities. We talked for two hours and we talked for twelve: and although I had no idea what to expect when I started out, what I found was a group of friendly and intelligent men who were not only delighted to talk about their experiences, but who were also able to articulate them in such a way as to bring them vividly alive today, often half a century or more after the fact. They re-created their lives and those of their contemporaries with warmth, insight and compassion.

They told their stories with pride and with dignity, and also with joy. These autobiographies are reproduced here as they were told to me between and I had feared that the presence of a tape recorder would be inhibiting, but it was not.

It was always placed in an inconspicuous spot where neither of us could see it, and invariably it was soon forgotten. I was quite surprised that not one person objected to its being there. In preparing these interviews for publication I have done very little editing of the tapes. I have eliminated my questions and comments and have selected and rearranged the material to make it more comprehensible than the verbatim transcript of a six-hour conversation could possibly be.

Also, because of space limitations and inevitable repetitions, I have deleted a good deal of material in order to reduce hundreds of hours of tape to manageable proportions and to improve the readability of the book as a whole. By and large, however, the editing has been minor, and I do not believe it in any way diminishes the authenticity of what remains.

This is their story, told in their own way, and in their own words. The reader may wonder at the detail contained in these narrations, the near total recall of events that took place a half century or more ago. If so, he can join me in that wonderment. The memory of man is a remarkable storehouse indeed. Many of the people I talked to had to think longer to get the names of all their great-grandchildren straight than they did to run down the batting order of the Chicago Cubs.

Psychologists assure me, however, that it is not at all unusual as one gets older for the more distant past to be remembered more clearly than what happened three weeks ago, especially if the distant past was particularly memorable. Initially skeptical, I spent weeks checking a great deal of what was told me. I pored through record books and searched out old newspapers and other primary sources to verify a fact or an incident.

But almost without exception I found that the event took place almost precisely as it had been described. And in those instances where something had been added, the embellishments invariably were those of the artist: they served to dramatize a point, to emphasize a contrast, or to reveal a truth.

But let me tell you about my father first. Like I say, he was the Chief Engineer of the city of Cleveland. As far as he was concerned, the only important thing was for me to get a good education. But as far back as I can remember all I could think of, morning, noon, and night, was baseball.

Now listen, Dad would say, "I want you to cut this out and pay attention to your studies. A ballplayer? What do you mean? How can you make a living being a ballplayer? I wanted you to be a stonecutter, same as I was when I came over from the old country. You wanted to be an engineer. So you became an engineer. Now Richard wants to be a baseball player.

But Dad would never listen. The thing is, I was always very tall for my age. I had three brothers and a sister, and my sister was the shortest of the five of us. She grew to be six feet two. So I was always hanging around the older kids and playing ball with them instead of with kids my own age.

Bill Bradley was the Cleveland third baseman—one of the greatest who ever lived—and he also barnstormed with his Boo Gang after the season was over. So by the time I was only fifteen or sixteen I knew a lot of ballplayers, and I had my heart set on becoming a Big Leaguer myself. One of my friends was a catcher named Howard Wakefield. He was about five years older than I was. In he was playing for the Waterloo club in the Iowa State League, and that summer—when I was only sixteen—I got a letter from him.

I think Howard thought that I was at least eighteen or nineteen, because I was so big for my age. Except for that, I was ready to go. Now if they could possibly arrange to send me some money for transportation…. Well, pretty soon I got a telegram from the Waterloo manager.

I mailed the letter to Iowa, and then I waited on pins and needles for an answer. So every day I waited for the first sight of the mailman and tried to get to him before he reached the house. As it turned out, I could have saved myself a lot of worrying.

Because no letter ever came. Three weeks passed and still no answer. Maybe it was against the rules to send transportation money to somebody not yet under contract? Maybe this and maybe that. I gave some excuse to my folks about where I was going—like on an overnight camping trip with the Boy Scouts—and I took off for Waterloo, Iowa, on my own. Sign in. Audios 3 Hours and Under! The Glory of Their Times. Ritter Various.

Description Creators Details "Oh, the game was very different in my day from what it's like today. Ritter - Author Various - Performer. Languages English. OverDrive Listen audiobook MP3 audiobook. Why is availability limited? Sign in Cancel. William Jennings Bryan Self - U. Politician as Self - U. Politician archive footage. James J. Jeffries Self - Boxer as Self - Boxer archive footage.

Bud Greenspan. Storyline Edit. Add content advisory. Did you know Edit. Quotes [first lines] Narrator : This is the story about the early days of baseball. User reviews Be the first to review.