Baseball players in war production

Last week the Society of Tennessee Archivists shared a link to Photogrammar.  From the Yale site:

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).

I was able to search photos that were organized by region, down to the county level.  Then I found the search box.   Baseball.  Bingo!

Here are a few shots of players that assisted in the the production efforts for WWII.

Three major leaguers put the diamond behind them and get to work for Uncle Sam in the California Shipbuilding Corporation. Vernie Stephens (left), former shortstop with Saint Louis Browns, George Stovall, retired manager of the Cleveland Indians, and Vince DiMaggio, of the Pittburgh Pirates, are currently employed as warehousemen at the California shipyards.

Outfielder Vince DiMaggio, of the Pittsburgh Pirates, has been working at the California Ship Building Corporation since last October. He's one of the many former athletic stars who are helping to smash the Axis by building the equipment needed by America's fighting men.

 

Pitching in to stop the Axis short, shortstop Vernie Stephens, former Saint Louis Browns star, has been a warehouseman for California Ship Building Corporation since early last fall.

"Frenchy" Uhalt, center fielder with Hollywood Club, puts his gloves aside to work in the research department at Douglas Aircraft.

Baseball Amusement Machines - part 2

This post was originally published on September 25, 2010, at my Mark's Ephemera blog.

Another set of ads for Amusement Machines from the page of Billboard, via Google Books.  Again, from the 1950s.  Compare and contrast from the previous blog post.

Baseball Amusement Machines

This post was originally published on September 18, 2010, at my Mark's Ephemera blog.

Google Books has again loosed its baseball goodness upon me. Looking through an April 21, 1958 issue of Billboard magazine I stumbled across the Amusement Machines section. What did I find? Baseball games. So I looked around at some different issues of Billboard. More games. These are all from the 1950s. I've tried to match up the press release or news article with an ad for the game. I'm sure that there are still several games that I did not find.























I've got a second installment of these waiting for another post. Don't go far.

Illustrations from "How To Play Baseball"

In the facebook group, Baseball Books, there was a discussion about How To Play Baseball.  A question was asked, "How is it illustrated?"  I assumed that the book being discussed was John McGraw's 1914 How To Play Baseball: A Manual For Boys.  It wasn't.  It was about the 1913 book of the same title by "The Greatest Baseball Players".

I found a copy of the McGraw book on Google Books and extracted the illustrations.  It doesn't answer the original question, but since I didn't want the illustrations to go to waste, I present them here.

The title page states that there are 32 illustrations.  I didn't find that many, just 23.  It appears that Google has clipped some of the photos and they are available if you purchase the book, not just download the pdf.

Apparently Google scanned this from a book that was or used to be in a University of California library.  Thanks for punching your ownership mark on to most of these pages.  Also a tip of the hat to the editor who added the speech balloon to illustration 28.