Keeping score at the 1982 Little League World Series

As the 65th annual Little League World Series continues this week in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and huge buzz¹ continues to surround the Keystone Little League team from Clinton County, I am reminded of the Little League World Series games our family attended in the early 1980s when we were living in nearby Montoursville.

We made it to multiple World Series games in 1981 and 1982 at Howard J. Lamade Stadium. My favorite part, as a 10- and 11-year-old, was how the stadium became a melting pot for baseball players and fans from all over the world -- Europe, Asia, South America, Canada...

The Little League World Series was also where I made my first foray into learning how to keep score in baseball -- a skill that would come in handy during my later career in sports journalism.

One of my first scorekeeping efforts came at the Little League World Series championship game on August 28, 1982, when Kirkland, Washington, defeated Chiayi, Taiwan, 6-0. I sat with thousands of others on the outfield hill at the stadium as Cody Webster (pictured at the top of today's post), Mark Swain and Mark Peterson helped lead Kirkland to the title-game victory, which snapped Taiwan's run of five straight Little League World Series crowns.²

In retrospect, I'd say my scorekeeping skills as an 11-year-old were OK. My first mistake was clearly using a pen instead of a pencil, given that mistakes were inevitable. Also, I got a nice assist from my dad on the Taiwanese names on that side of the scorecard.

This prepared me well for my later professional coverage of the South Penn League, Adams County Little League tournaments, high school baseball and softball in southcentral Pennsylvania, and a couple Baltimore Orioles games.

Here, for posterity, is my full scoresheet from the 1982 Kirkland-Taiwan game. Below that is the Kirkland team picture that was included as part of a four-page program insert on the eight teams in that year's tournament.³

Footnotes
1. Check out this great blog entry on Keystone Little League by York Daily Record/Sunday News business editor Cathy Hirko on The Southpaw.
2. ESPN produced a "30 for 30" documentary on the Kirkland Little League team's championship and its aftermath. I haven't seen it, but this New York Daily News article gives it a mixed review.
3. Fun tidbit: The Latin American representative in 1982 was Coquivacoa Little League of Maracaibo, Venezuela, which included future major-leaguer Wilson Álvarez.

Requiem for a 129-year-old encyclopedia volume

I'm a sucker for an old book that seems to be beyond help or hope. Earlier this year, our family was strolling through the Market & Penn Street Farmers' Market¹ in York, visiting old friends and shopping for vegetables.

We came across a shelf full of free used magazines, most of which were 5 to 15 years old. Sitting on the bottom shelf, sticking out like a sore thumb, was a lone, warped volume of an 1882 encyclopedia set:

VOL. XIV
STRANGULATION
VEGETABLE

Clearly, this book couldn't be left behind any longer. It came as absolutely no surprise to my wife that I snapped up the battered book and asked her for a quarter to drop into the styrofoam cup labeled "Donations."²

The book is in bad shape. The back cover is warped and doesn't lay flat; the spine is half-detached from the binding; and two pages, including the title page, are fully separated from the binding.

But it's still a book.

It's 800+ pages are just one volume in a larger compendium -- published in America by S.W. Green's Son from the Edinburgh and London edition of Chambers's Encyclopædia -- of Western civilization's knowledge in the late 19th century.

Some of the contents:

SUHL, a t. of Prussia, province of Saxony, and government of Erfurt, is situated on a small stream, called the Lauter, in a romantic valley on the s.w. side of the Thuringian forest, 32 m. s.s.w. of Erfurt. The Suhl, which in the Sorb-Wendish dialect means salt, is probably derived from the salt springs, formerly much worked. Mining is extensively carried on in the neighborhood, and has been so for centuries. The principal manufactures are iron and steel wares, chemical preparations, paper, and leather. Suhl, celebrated in the days of chivalry as the "arsenal of Germany," still maintains its ancient reputation as manufactory of arms. Pop. '75 10,721. Its history is very interesting; see Werther's Sieben Bücher der Chronik der Stadt Suhl (1847).

TORPEDO. During the war between Great Britain and the United States in 1812-14, this name was applied to certain mysterious boats invented by Fulton and other Americans for the purpose of navigating beneath the surface of the water, and injuring the the bottoms of hostile vessels. In those days of hand-to-hand naval war, these designs (which, by the way, were failures) were looked upon as little less than diabolical. The progress of destructive weapons during half a [century] has removed this aversion.

TOTEM. The ruder races of men are found divided into tribes, each of which is usually named after some animal, vegetable, or thing which is an object of veneration or worship to the tribe.³ This animal, vegetable or thing is the totem or god of the tribe. ... Numerous tribes with totems exist in America, in Australia, the South Pacific islands, and in central Asia; and there are some reasons for thinking that such tribes were once numerous even in Europe among races belonging to what is called the Indo-European division of the human family.⁴

VAMPIRE (Ger. vampyr), called also by the Servians vukodlak, and by the Wallachians murony, is, according to the popular belief of the Slavonic, Romanic, and Greek population of the Lower Danube and the Thessalian peninsula, a blood-sucking ghost.⁵ In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, beings of a similar nature existed - the Lamias, beautiful phantom women who, by all sorts of voluptuous delusions, allured youths to them in order to feast on their fresh, young, and pure blood and flesh. And among Greek Christians there is a belief that the bodies of those who have died in excommunication are kept by the devil in a kind of life; that they go forth from their graves by night and suddenly destroy other men, and also by other means procure food, and thus keep themselves in good condition. They are called Burkolakkä, or Tympanitä; and the only way of escaping from their molestation is by digging up their unwashed corpses and burning them, after the removal of the excommunication.

Sweet dreams!

Footnotes
1. Established 1866.
2. I also snagged a 1958 issue of the religious magazine Horizons and two 1970s issues of The Workbasket. Score!
3. Wow.
4. Wow again.
5. This encyclopedia was published in 1882 -- 15 years before the publication of Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

Happy 125th birthday, Ruth Manning-Sanders

On this date 125 years ago -- August 21, 1886 -- Ruth Vernon Manning was born to John Edmondson Manning and Emma Manning (nee Brock) in Swansea, Wales. Ruth, the youngest of the three Manning girls, grew up to marry artist George Sanders, become Ruth Manning-Sanders and create a rich literary legacy of more than 90 books (and hundreds of retold folk and fairy tales) during the 102 years of her life.¹

Happy birthday, Ruth!

While no book has ever been written about Ruth Manning-Sanders, many have written independently about her contributions to children's literature and folklore, the outstanding quality of her work and her legacy.

So for her birthday today, here is some commentary and praise about Manning-Sanders that I have gathered, interspersed with some photos of the many Manning-Sanders volumes that I am proud and fortunate to have sitting on my bookshelves.

Judith Ridge: "a fantastically eccentric and effective way with language"

Judith Ridge has mentioned Manning-Sanders several times in her blog entries on Misrule, the home of Australian children's books online.

In the June 29, 2010, post "Old Favorites, New Audience," Ridge discusses reading Manning-Sanders stories to a group of contemporary young children:

I decided, though, to read them a story that has stayed with me — dare I say, haunted me! — for more than thirty years. She's perhaps not all that well known or remembered these days, but Ruth Manning-Sanders was one of the most popular authors among my friends. I remember whenever we'd go to the Auburn Library, we'd go straight to the M shelves to borrow (and re-borrow) one of her wonderful collections of folk tales.² I loved A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales, A Book of Princes and Princesses — I love all of them, but I especially loved A Book of Ghosts and Goblins and in that book, I most especially loved the story "Golden Hair". ... So I read "Golden Hair" to the kids at Oxley Park and I can tell you — this ghost story has not lost a shred of its power to enthrall. And that actually doesn't surprise me. Manning-Sanders was an extraordinary writer, with a fantastically eccentric and effective way with language*.³ It was as much the power of her language as it was her stories that captured our imagination as children — and the children in that classroom at Oxley Park, far from Wales and the west country of England where she lived and worked her days.

Ridge also writes about Manning-Sanders in the blog entries "How Diana Wynne Jones changed my life (In Memoriam)" and "Lucy Mangan's Biblio-Attachments."

I strongly recommend that you check out her website and blog.

TimT: "She comes across as an affectionate aunt"

On the Will Type For Food blog, TimT wrote about Manning-Sanders in the March 29, 2009, post "Ruth Manning-Sanders, revisited." Here's an excerpt:

I'm currently reading Folk and Fairy Tales, as retold by Ruth Manning-Sanders. Right through infants, primary and high school I can remember reading books of fairy tales retold by her: she was a prolific reteller of other people's stories. Check out the selected bibliography of her works on Wikipedia - and it's just a selected bibliography! - including such curios as A Book of Magic Horses. I lost touch with Ruth there for a while, but I'm glad to have got this book of Folk and Fairy Tales from the Flinders Street bookstore. She comes across as an affectionate aunt - a little prim and proper, but never trying to educate her readers. Unlike other writers - say, Thurber or Kipling - she never looks for the 'moral of the story'. In the introduction she writes:

It is the prime requisite of the fairy tale that it should end happily. I remember as a small girl hurling the book I had been reading across the floor in a rage, because the heroine, instead of marrying the hero and living happily ever after, just went and died. A thing she had no right to do.

I also love this anonymous comment on TimT's blog entry, which gets to the root of how Manning-Sanders' legacy is spanning multiple generations: "I came across this blog when searching for old RMS books. I just remembered getting every single one from the library when I was a little girl and devouring them. Now I want my little daughter to discover them too and am looking for the old editions with illustrations as I remember them."

Marcus Crouch: "Every present-day story-teller must be in her debt"

In the February 1989 edition of Junior Bookshelf, Marcus Crouch wrote a tribute to Manning-Sanders in the wake of her death the previous October. Some excerpts:

Her personal preference seems to have been for the humorously bizarre, and she had a liking for dragons, ogres and other grotesques. She liked humble, unheroic heroes, simple people keeping their end up by means of cunning and persistence. ... Every present-day story-teller must be in her debt. Her work is peculiarly suited to the domestic, one-to-one story-telling session. It forges a link between speaker and hearer whose strength is best appreciated in the home rather than the hall and classroom. ... For many long-lived writers, death is followed by eclipse. I hope that publishers will [continue to re-release Manning-Sanders'] priceless treasury of folk-tales. We would all be the poorer for their loss.

I'll second that! It would be great if a modern publisher could reprint Manning-Sanders' anthologies (although only if they remain paired with the wonderful illustrations by Robin Jacques).

Footnotes
1. Information for this section comes from Manning-Sanders' Wikipedia biography, of which I have served as the primary author and culled from a wide range of sources.
2. The library is also where I discovered Manning-Sanders, as I detailed in this previous post.
3. Ridge has footnotes in her blogs, too. This particular one is related to Manning-Sanders:

"*I didn't think of that as a child reader, but I discovered it from the inside years later when I was working at The School Magazine and discovered, to my astonishment and delight, that we had unpublished Manning-Sanders stories on file — and I got to edit some of them! Not that you'd dare do much more than a light run-through for fear of disrupting her delicately, yet complexly constructed prose. Apparently the long-lived Manning-Sanders had a similarly long-living daughter, who sent her mother's unpublished stories to the School Magazine — and I'll leave it at that for Jonathan Shaw to fill out the story in the comments!"

Unfortunately, Mr. Shaw has NOT yet "filled out the story" in the comments of Ridge's blog entry.

Saturday's postcard: Aerial view of Wrangell, Alaska

Here's a postcard from the early 1970s along with some facts and background about Wrangell, Alaska, that I have "wrangled" for you:

1. It's really in the middle of nowhere, way down in the southeastern panhandle of Alaska. If you want to get to or from Wrangell, you're going to need an airplane or ferry. Traveling by a combination of ferry and car, the closest major city is Juneau, Alaska, which is only 200 miles away but the trip apparently takes about 12 hours.¹

2. To get from Wrangell to Anchorage, Alaska, using only car and ferry, would be a 1,022-mile journey taking 34 hours. By comparison, it's 1,077 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Des Moines, Iowa, and that trip would only take you about 17 hours by car -- half the time.

3. While Wrangell Island has been occupied by the Tlingit peoples² for thousands of years, Wrangell, in the northwestern corner of the island, is a non-native settlement.

Russians began fur-trading at the site in 1811. In 1834, Baron Ferdinand Friedrich Georg Ludwig von Wrangel (pictured at right), who was in charge of Russian government interests in Russian America, ordered a stockade built in the middle of what is now Wrangell Harbor. This is considered the founding date of the city, which passed to British hands in 1839³ and American hands in 1867.

4. The "Wrangell History" page on the Wrangell Chamber of Commerce website contains some fascinating tidbits that have been compiled by Pat Roppel and the Friends of the Library. Check it out and read all about a "prohibition drink" that involves raisin pie, yeast, water and a hot stove; a colorful description of the city at the turn of the 20th century; seafaring superstitions and more.

5. The aforementioned chamber of commerce website also lists the "perks" of living in Wrangell, which include:

• Parents welcome in school
• No gangs
• Volunteer in schools
• Fantastic Public Library with Free Internet Access
• Medical Facility with Doctors on staff
• Wrangell Fire Department has excellent response time
• Senior Citizen Meals on Wheels

Also, my wife would be pleased to to hear that Wrangell offers workshops and classes for scrapbooking.

6. Wrangell has a newspaper, the Wrangell Sentinel, which claims to be the oldest continually publishing newspaper in Alaska. And it has a library -- the Irene Ingle Public Library. But it does not appear to have its own bookstore.

Opportunity knocking?

Footnotes
1. All travel times and distances are from Mapquest.
2. The Native Languages of the Americas website has a outstanding collection of links to Tlingit folklore, legends and mythology. One of the important mythological figures is "Property Woman," a spirit with curly hair who brings prosperity to anybody who catches sight of her.
3. The British Hudson's Bay Company leased the fort in 1839 and named the stockade Fort Stikine.

Some wonderful reading elsewhere on the web

The internet is so crammed full of great stuff that we should never be at a loss for finding something interesting to read. But sometimes it's just a matter of giving each other recommendations about where to find the truly cool stuff.

Here's a collection of terrific sites where you can read about ephemera, books, history and more.

Do you have a great site to suggest along these lines? Include it in the comments below. I love finding new places to add to my favorites!

On the Ephemeraology blog, Mel Kolstad has had terrific recent posts on block type and tokens.

On Forgotten Bookmarks, Michael Popek has featured a fascinating old sports team photo and a movie inside a book. (Also, check out Popek's "Forgotten Bookmarks" book that's coming out later this year!)

On A Pretty Book, JT Anthony has had dandy recent posts regarding books about Texas and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

On Preserving York, Blake Stough has authored some nifty entries on an old photo of schoolchildren and an old vaccination certificate.

On Rebecca Joines Schinsky's The Book Lady's Blog, in addition to a gaggle of great reading suggestions (including "The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City" by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti), recent posts have included Mid-Year Reflections on Book Polygamy and The Top Ten Books That Influenced J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tracy's Toys (and Some Other Stuff) featured an entry about the comical-looking 1968 board game Pie Face.

On Odd Things I've Seen, J.W. Ocker saddles up beside a life-size portrait of "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

Finally, as today is Friday, you should be checking out the Friday Reads website! Happy surfing!

Julie got an A on her spelling test

This old spelling test was tucked away inside a tanned old copy of "Cyrano de Bergerac" by Edmond Rostand.

Julie Mudge did well on her 20-word test, spelling everything but destinies correctly. She aced resort, martial, forging, supplication, remonstrated, tyrannical, indulge, inviolate, basely, cope, formidable, adversary, irresolution, supinely, delusive, phantom, invincible, vigilant and inevitable.

Belated kudos to Julie Mudge for her excellent effort!

Also, I like the way she dots her i's.

Addendum

I think there's a strong likelihood that Julie Mudge is the late Julie Mudge Caruso of Hanover, Pennsylvania, who passed away earlier this year at age 74.

Advertisement for Hires Root Beer from 1892 children's magazine

Sorry I was away for a couple days! It's been kind of the perfect storm (somewhat literally) of (1) a thunderbumper that fried our home computer's hard drive; (2) an extremely long day at work on the first day of high school sports practice in Pennsylvania; (3) and then, happily, the Otto family taking a mini-vacation to see my mom in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, and attend a Phillies game.¹

But I have a couple makeshift tricks up my sleeve to get things rolling again...

Here's an advertisement for Hires Root Beer that took up one quarter of the back cover of the June 1892 issue of Wide Awake, a children's magazine:

Wide Awake was published monthly from July 1875 until August 1893 by Daniel Lothrop. It was eventually merged with another magazine of its type -- St. Nicholas.²

Footnotes
1. Final score: Phillies 9, Diamondbacks 2. Most amusing moment: Watching Phillies rookie reliever Michael Schwimer walk to and from the bullpen while sporting a pink Hello Kitty backpack, part of the bullpen's hazing ritual.
2. I highly recommend the detailed history of St. Nicholas magazine that the website Flying Dreams has put together. It's a truly stellar and historically valuable labor of love.

Reader comments: Lincoln life mask, Sweetniks and more

Papergreat received much higher web traffic last week after Stephanie Clifford's article in The New York Times titled "Shopper Receipts Join Paperless Age," which includes a mention of this website and linked to the post "An old receipt from L.B. Hantz, contractor, of York."

Thanks in part to that increased traffic, I have another great collection of reader comments to share today. Continued thanks to everyone for making this blog such a participatory experience. It's even more fun we we're working together to dig up fascinating tidbits and tangents. Now, without further ado...

The Life of Abraham Lincoln For Young Folks: Rik Peirson writes: "Out of the blue, I know ... but I have one of the only few Lincoln life masks in captivity -- it's a Clark Mills mask -- done just 56 days before Lincoln's assassination -- given to my grandfather, Ellis Mills Frost, M.D., by the sculptor's son. I'm trying to sell the mask (circa $35K). If anyone has an interest, we have a web page up with pictures and provenance -- at http://www.storyofmylife.cc/lincolnmask"

Checking out Peirson's site, here's some further information on the life mask, which is pictured above in an image from his website:

"Lincoln allowed only two castings of his face. One was done by Leonard Volk in 1860, before the Civil War, and this one by sculptor Clark Mills. Because of the Mills casting process and because of the proximity of this casting to both the end of the Civil War and just 56 days before Lincoln's assassination at Ford Theater, the Mills mask is usually considered to be superior in both physical and historical quality. As closely as we can determine, there are only five known copies done by Mills. One is in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. ... Also, as closely as we can determine, Theodore August Mills was employed for some time by the Carnegie Institute and Museum in Pittsburgh, and during that time, conveyed one copy of the mask to my grandfather, Ellis Mills Frost, M.D., who was a long-time Pittsburgher. ... The mask was broken in storage in Pittsburgh, though luckily the face remained entirely intact. The pieces of the mask have been carefully kept, waiting for [restoration]."

Weekend postcards: Rome and Milan in black and white: An anonymous reader writes: "I think that in the postcard of Rome it's written 'FORO' and not 'FORD.'

You are correct, and I have fixed the blog entry. Thanks, Anonymous!

An old receipt from L.B. Hantz, contractor, of York: After its mention in The New York Times, this post received several new comments:

• Nicole Belolan writes: "I found your blog thanks to the Times article! I share your love of ephemera. I thought you might be interested in this 1866 shoe receipt from York County, PA: http://pickingforpleasure.blogspot.com/2011/02/material-culture-minute-best-things-in.html"
• stephan!e lee (yes, that's an exclamation point) writes: "Great site! I'm glad I found you, also through the Times article. I've been collecting paper ephemera for years. Unfortunately though, I've been scrapbooking mine in another piece of ephemera, an antique photo album from the Western College Women's College. I suppose I should consider digitally archiving them soon. thanks for sharing your collection, looking forward to more!"
• Ginny writes: "I have hung onto several receipts from 9.11.2001. We were in London, scheduled to return home on September 12. We had been to Harrod's and Kensington Palace earlier in the day. When I see the receipts, details of the day come rushing back. We also have several receipts from the 1920s that we found in the walls when we remodeled our home. The previous owner was a tailor, so it's quite interesting to have some touchstones from others who inhabited the same walls (or almost the same walls).

All of those comments speak to the historic importance and deep meaning that some ephemera can have. Do we produce and waste too much paper as a society? Absolutely. But should every scrap of paper be recycled or sent to the landfill? Absolutely not. Our ephemera is the history of who we are. What we hold onto -- or leave for future generations -- helps to define who we were, how we lived and what was important to us.

Baseball-themed advertisements from a 1953 Phillies scorecard: myfirstchoicewastaken writes: "More precisely, the baseball player's name is Reddy Kilowatt."

Yes! I absolutely should have known that and included it in the original post. Thanks for sending me that information. Here's the scoop on Mr. Kilowatt from Wikipedia:

"Reddy Kilowatt is a cartoon character that acted as corporate spokesman for electricity generation in the United States for some six decades. [He] is drawn as a stick figure whose body and limbs are made of 'lightning-bolt' symbols and whose bulbous head has a light bulb for a nose and wall outlets for ears. Reddy was created at the Alabama Power Company by Ashton B. Collins Sr., and debuted March 11, 1926. He was subsequently licensed by some 300 electrical companies in the U.S. and abroad looking to sell homes on using the relatively new technology."

Two mysteries: Who were these people? What did they did do? Two intriguing images were featured in this post last week.

Regarding the postcard of the children and (presumably) the coal mine, my mom makes the great point that the young laborers are not taking a break or waiting for the start of their shift. They are working -- sorting the coal from the stones and/or sorting the pieces of coal by size. I would still love to hear other insights into the sad and compelling scene on this postcard.

Regarding the photograph of "Aunt Lucy Gilbert," (pictured at right) Blake Stough of the terrific history blog Preserving York writes: "In regard to the Lucy Gilbert photograph, there is a person listed in the 1900 United States Federal Census by that name in Columbia, PA. She is shown as 48 years old, the wife of Aaron Gilbert, and mother of eight children, six that were still living at the time. In the household was John Jr., Gertrude, Walter, and Ellen, whose ages ranged from 20 to 12. While I can't say this is the woman in the photograph, it is a strong possibility. ... Now if we only knew WHO the niece or nephew was!"

Doll fads of 1960: Regarding Lada Draskovic and her Sweetniks dolls, Deborah Greife writes: "I have one of the Sweetnik dolls from Italy. I have been trying to research and find more information on them, but this blog is the only place I've found any reference to them at all, other than a PDF someone has that is a scanned image of a newspaper page with the same photo you have here.¹ I'm really trying hard to find out more about these dolls and their creator. Any help would be appreciated."

In my first response to Deborah, I mentioned that Papergreat dug up some more information on Draskovic and her family in this April 6, 2011, post. But much remains a mystery, especially regarding the Sweetniks.

Deborah and I exchanged some further emails and she sent me some great photos (shown below) of her Sweetnik doll. She adds: "I attached some pics of my doll and her cat. I forgot to mention that she has a cat! The cat has no tags but she is wearing 2 bangle bracelets and 1 bracelet has a tin tag that reads: SWEETNIK on one side and the other side reads: 'Brevettato Patented Made in Italy.' ... Maybe with some luck we will get to the bottom of the mystery of the sweetnik dolls. I will contact some doll collector sites and see if I can get more info as well."

This has certainly been a fun one to continue researching!

Here are Deborah's photos:

Footnote
1. Here is the PDF newspaper image that Deborah Greife is referring to. It's from the February 8, 1960, edition of The Leader-Herald in Gloversville-Johnstown, New York. While it is the same photo featured previously on Papergreat, the photo caption sheds some new light on Sweetniks: "DOLLSVILLE -- Unusual beatnik dolls, called 'sweetniks,' naturally, surround their creator, Lada Draskovic, in Rome. The dolls are dressed in loose-fitting sweaters, toreador pants and sandals. Their straggly, woolen hair is done in bright red, blue, orange and green. Selling like hotcakes in Rome, the way-out dolls may soon be introduced to U.S.-ville."