{"id":344,"date":"2014-03-21T14:34:25","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T18:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=344"},"modified":"2016-08-29T01:45:09","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T05:45:09","slug":"scd-john-durant","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=344","title":{"rendered":"Sports Collectors Digest: John Durant"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel<\/span><\/p>\n

I have a feeling we are going to see baggy baseball uniforms again in my lifetime. Or maybe in yours.<\/p>\n

Call it the \u201cwhatever goes around\u201d syndrome, but they can only be tight or baggy, and it just seems to me that the black culture or the Latin culture are going to bring this to baseball just as Chris Webber and his teammates at Michigan changed the look of basketball uniforms in the early \u201890s.<\/p>\n

Baseball players have worn the form fitting uniforms since Giants teammates Tito Fuentes and Willie Mays took their pants to a San Francisco tailor in the mid \u201860s and had them recut. Then when double knit uniforms replaced flannels in 1972-73, making the players look faster and sleeker, we were on our way.<\/p>\n

I was thinking about this the other day while looking at some great old picture books of baseball histories by John Durant.<\/p>\n

Durant had a gift for book design, photo research and writing. There was a special appeal to his presentation, and he may have been helped by an association with legendary photo archivist Otto Bettmann, with whom he did a 1952 book called \u201cPictorial History of American Sports, from Colonial Times to the Present.\u201d<\/p>\n

Durant did a lot of pictorials, including \u201cPictorial History of American Presidents \u201c(with his wife, Alice), \u201cThe Sports of Our Presidents\u201d, \u201cPredictions\u201d, \u201cThe Heavyweight Champions\u201d, \u201cHighlights of College Football\u201d, and \u201cHistory of the Olympics from Ancient Times to the Present.\u201d<\/p>\n

But his foundation was baseball, and in 1947, he produced \u201cThe Story of Baseball in Words and Pictures\u201d, a book so nicely received, he continued to update it every few years on into the \u201870s.<\/p>\n

The early chapters include wonderful drawings and photographs \u2013 there\u2019s Father Chadwick, inventor of the box score, and Abe Lincoln, in a drawing, engaged in a baseball game, a field diagram called \u201cThe Massachusetts Game\u201d, and then of course, the Wright Brothers and the Red Stockings, Al Spalding, and on we go. For a young reader, the book was a delight, although its audience was easily composed of young and old, sharing the game\u2019s lore together.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ultimate Baseball Book \u201c and Ken Burns\/Geoffrey Ward\u2019s companion book to Burns\u2019 PBS documentary series borrowed from this style, but I think Durant really had it down.<\/p>\n

We learn in \u201cHighlights of the World Series,\u201d which was first published in 1963, that Durant was a sportsman. The author bio on the jacket says he was on the Yale track team, and went to England to compete against the Oxford-Cambridge combined team on behalf of Harvard-Yale, and that he was a champion hurdler and a member of the New York Athletic Club track team. We believe he was Yale Class of \u201925.<\/p>\n

He wrote prolifically for magazines, including Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Outdoor Life and others, and was a Florida west coast correspondent for the New York Times for many years, writing fishing pieces and other sportsman like articles from his home in Naples.<\/p>\n

In 1948, he published \u201cThe Dodgers,\u201d a 150-page book, with zany photos of Dodger fans, early \u201cDaffyness Boys,\u201d Leo the Lip Durocher, the Dodgers Sym-Phony Band, and a great picture of the entire Dodger team gathered around Bobby Bragan at the piano, in a happy sing-along. Imagine a scene like that today?<\/p>\n

There is a great photo of a vendor selling \u201cI\u2019m For Jackie\u201d souvenir buttons outside Ebbets Field, Pistol Pete Reiser being carried off on a stretcher after crashing into the wall, Hilda Chester \u201ca plump middle-aged woman\u201d ringing her cowbell, and a remarkable photo of a deranged fan pulverizing umpire George Magerkurth on the field during a game. \u201cAt the station house it was discovered that the fan was a hoodlum out on parole. Next day he was back in the can again for an extended rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Durant\u2019s style was to give the photos about 70% of the page, and make the captions fun and entertaining. But his eye for memorable photography was what drove the books, and they contain pictures I have never seen reappear in team histories again.<\/p>\n

In 1949 he published \u201cThe Yankees\u201d in similar style, and there are wonderful photos of Highlanders players, the owners Frank Farrell and Big Bill Devery, a young Jacob Ruppert, derby-hatted fans in the Hilltop Park bleachers, and this curiosity: \u201cCatching the ball is outfielder John Anderson who, in a game in 1904, stole second with the bases loaded. His name has since passed into the language of baseball. Today, ball players describe the kind of a play Anderson made as a \u201cJohn Anderson\u201d although they don\u2019t know who he was or where he played.\u201d<\/p>\n

Memo to The Sporting News: How come the current Baseball Guide doesn\u2019t list all the \u201cJohn Andersons\u201d of the previous season?<\/p>\n

Where else but in Durant\u2019s Yankees book would one find a photo of a young woman with a St. Bernard, captioned as this: \u201cWhen Colonel Ruppert\u2019s will was read in January 1939, people were surprised to learn that the Yankees were owned by three women. Two of them were Ruppert\u2019s nieces, the third was Miss Helen Weyant (below), an actress described as \u201ca friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

I love a reproduction of a New York Daily News headline from October 1, 1927, \u201cBabe Carpenters No. 60!\u201d It was a big moment for the Babe, but baseball was still not fully \u201chome run crazy,\u201d as I learned recently when skimming through a 1928 Who\u2019s Who in Baseball. It turns out that \u201chome runs\u201d was not one of the stat columns shown for players. In fact \u201cWho\u2019s Who\u201d didn\u2019t add home runs until 1939. But I\u2019m getting off track.<\/p>\n

When Durant did \u201cHighlights of the World Series,\u201d his style switched to more text and smaller, and fewer pictures. Perhaps the cost of obtaining rights had forced this upon him, but the book just isn\u2019t as much fun as the earlier ones.<\/p>\n

We see the final updates of John\u2019s books in the mid-\u201870s, and by now, he has presumably passed on; I was unable to track down obituary information. But his books were a delight, and I suspect, would still be fun for a young reader if only for the strange and odd ones he managed to turn up.<\/p>\n

The books are very affordable at used book sites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel I have a feeling we are going to see baggy baseball uniforms again in my lifetime. Or maybe in yours. Call it the \u201cwhatever goes around\u201d syndrome, but they can only be tight or baggy, and it… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2277,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-template-full.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-344","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4s5bl-5y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2928,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/344\/revisions\/2928"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}