You Gonna Vote?

Football

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Baseball

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Civic Duty

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Lima News (Lima, Ohio) Oct 2, 1956

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Iowa City Press Citizen (Iowa City, Iowa) Nov 1, 1926

Whoop! Whee! Atta Boy!

Baseball World Series

Favorite Gladiator of All Sports

Middletown Daily Herald (Middletown, New York) Oct 9, 1923

Modern Knot-Holers

The World Series

and

All the Fans who Couldn’t Attend

New Castle News (New Castle, Pennsylvania) Oct 8, 1929

A Little Less Patter and A Lot More Fury

Not parades, not fireworks, not speeches or flagwaving will feature this fateful anniversary of the birth of our nation this year.

Instead grim-faced workmen toiling through the holiday in Fitchburg’s 100 per cent war industries, children and housewives still searching out precious scrap to add to the nation’s resources, civil defense unites going seriously about their protective duties and Fitchburg businessmen unselfishly contributing to the great community effort mark this 166th birthday of our independence.

This is a Fighting Fourth; bullets and bombs replace firecrackers and rockets. It’s time to face the issue squarely and to stop side-stepping and avoiding the sacrifices that must be made in the daily life of every man, woman, and child.

It’s time to show a little fury; to get mad at the things that are threatening the freedom we have gained through 166 years of sweat and struggle. We’re a free nation; we’re a fighting nation — read the battle-cries of the men who have fought to protect this country as they are dramatically presented by picture and story elsewhere in this issue of The Sentinel.

What is your battle-cry for this Fighting Fourth?

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Jul 3, 1942

FIGHTING WORDS FOR THE 4th

IF THERE were no man like Douglas MacArthur to say, “I came through, and I shall return;” if there had been no man like John Paul Jones to shout, “I have not yet begun to fight”; if there were no men like the doughboy at the left, who know such words in their hearts, even if they have not heard them spoken — if none of these men had ever lived, there would be no Independence Day now for America. On this page are pictured some of the Americans whose fighting words have echoed ’round the world. They are shown in the dramatic settings under which the words were spoken.

“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves . . . . The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this Army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or to die.

“Our own, our Country’s honour, calls upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion; and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us, then, rely on the goodness of our cause, and the aid of the Supreme Being, in whose hands victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble actions. The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us; we shall have their blessings and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. Let us, therefore, animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a freeman contending for liberty . . . is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.

“Liberty, property, life and honour are all at stake.”

— GEORGE WASHINGTON,  before Battle of Long Island, 1776.

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“Give me liberty, or give me death.” — Patrick Henry, 1775.

“Damn the torpedoes, and full speed ahead” — Admiral David Farragut, 1864.

“Don’t give up the ship.” — Capt. James Lawrence, 1813.

“Come on you __ __ __ do you want to live forever?” — Marine Sgt. Daniel Daly, 1918.

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” — Nathan Hale, 1776.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Jul 3, 1942

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Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Jul 3, 1942

Hugh Mulcahy, left, is greeted by Hank Greenberg on arrival at Air Force Officers’ school, at Miami Beach. Mulcahy, former pitching star of Philadelphia Nationals, and the big boy who hit home runs for the Detroit Americans are in the same league now.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Jul 3, 1942

It’s All About the Ball

Image from Glimpses Into Baseball History

Base Ball.

As many of our readers are not familiar with the game, we append a description of it, written by our friend Cory O’Lanus, a warm admirer of the game:

“The game is a great invention. It is easily understood. All you have to do is just keep your eye on the ball.

It is all about a ball.

Image from Rob L’s Baseball Memorabilia

They also use a bat. The bat is a club built on the model of the club Barnum killed Capt. Cook with.

This is the reason why the organization is called a club.

One fellow takes a club and stands on a line, and another stands in front and fires the ball at him.

The chap with a club hits back.

The ball flies in another direction.

The first fellow drops the club as though he was scared, and runs like a pickpocket with an M.P. after him.

Several fellows run after the ball; somebody catches it and fires it at somebody else, when the chap who had the club stops running.

Another fellow then takes the club and the same man, who is called “pitcher,” pitches on him, fires the ball at him, when he hits back, knocks the ball, drops his club and cuts his stick for the first base.

Image from Civil War, Washington, D.C.

Half a dozen fellows out on picket duty scramble for the ball.

One reliable B.B. is posted behind the club man, in case the club man missed the ball, to see that it don’t go by and hit the Umpire.

When one side goes out the other side goes in, and when both sides are out it is called innings.

It is quite an intelligent game, depending entirely on the use of your legs. The first principle of the game is running.

When you are “in” you run away from the ball; when you are “out” you run after it.

It is splendid exercise; it keeps you so warm; consequently always played in the summer time.”

The Hillsdale Standard (Hillsdale, Michigan) May 15, 1866

Ralph S. Bauer: Reform Mayor of Lynn

Lynn, Massachusetts postcard image from Jovike’s photostream on flickr

LYNN
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Mayor Bauer of Lynn has spoken. No more shall the woman smoker be seen in that town on stage or screen. The billboards have also been purged of the contaminating influence exercised by the pictorial cigaret and girl. And the ukase will, we are sure, be heartening to everybody who worries about the frailties and peccadilloes of other folks and thinks something ought to be done about it.

Obviously, the Mayor of Lynn is every inch a wowser; Lynn itself, once gay and grimy, has come upon the semi-retirement of “the city that was.” Now its elegy may be written, in true wowserian strophe:

Here lies Lynn,
Sans gin, sans sin,
Sans Nicotin.

Decatur Herald (Decatur, Illinois) Oct 24, 1929

MAYOR BAUER’S REFORM.

Mayor Bauer of Lynn gets his name on the front pages of the newspapers again by issuing an ultimatum against bare-legged girls, but he would accomplish more as a reformer if he used a little quiet persuasion with school teachers and pupils.

We have failed to detect a grave menace in the fashion of bare sun-tanned legs. With all due regard to the sensitive nature of the fair sex, it must be said that most feminine legs are too imperfect in form and natural covering to permit of public display without artificial covering of some kind.

The bare-legged fashion will not get very far because most women have too much common sense to display the imperfections which are more conveniently concealed or minimized beneath sheer silk.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Oct 1, 1929

“The notions that were bred into being years and years ago are now being assaulted and turned topsy-turvy. Our social conduct is changing. We must admit that. Thirty or 40 years ago, if a flapper appeared on the street in the same costume she wears today, she would have been rushed to jail as fast as the smoke left her heels. Now no one cares about the flapper’s dress except Mayor Bauer of Lynn.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Nov 23, 1929

Not yet can they put you in jail for wondering so we wonder what Mayor Bauer of Lynn is going to attempt after he has pulled off that recently announced determination to make the school teachers of his city, men and women alike, cut out tobacco. It might be as well to wait until he has made good on that ruling before thinking up the next play for front page position in the newspapers.

If the Lynn teachers are human beings, the mayor is likely enough going to find it harder to make them quit the smoking habit than it was to give his city a reduced tax rate. It will be more or less like enforcing the Volstead act.

Theoretically, it can be done, and the dry leaders can prove it. Actually, it has not yet been done, and the wet leaders say you can’t prove it can be. Looking at it from a distance, it doesn’t strike us as being any of the Lynn mayor’s business if the school teachers wish to smoke, providing they do it in reason. We shouldn’t say that the women teachers should smoke at any time, and not at all in public. But as for exercising that privilege in their own homes it is hard to see where the mayor has any particular call to get stuffy about it.

As to making the men teachers take the anti-nicotine pledge, he has accepted a real job if the male breed down that way is anything like normal. The joker in the cold deck which Mayor Bauer has picked up appears in the situation as it affects the pupils in the schools.

Mayor Bauer may conceivably make the school teachers as smokeless as he decrees, but we have a natural curiosity to know how he is going to make the boys and girls who go to school quit it. Not that we know whether the Lynn school girls smoke, but many of the boys do, unless down in Lynn boys are no longs boys. For which reason the pupils are going to snicker as they look at their poor hen-pecked teachers who dare not smoke for fear of losing their jobs. And you don’t have to be a slave to nicotine to see the humor of the situation which Lynn’s great reform mayor seeks to bring about.

The Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Sep 8, 1926

Bone Dry or No Football Game

Lynn, Mass., Nov. 26. (AP) — Mayor Ralph S. Bauer saw so much drinking at the Harvard-Yale football game at Cambridge Saturday, he said, that he has ordered the Thanksgiving Day high school contest here to be bone dry or stopped.

Twelve thousand persons at the stadium for the Yale-Harvard contests, he estimated yesterday, were more interested in quart bottles and hip flasks than anything else. Many women “took a pull out of the bottles the same as the men,” the Mayor said, and neither the police nor the faculty interfered.

The Rev. Garfield Morgan, pastor of the Center Congregational Church, according to the Mayor, was approached by some one in a big fur coat who said to him, “you look like an old timer, have a drink.”

“Can this be the same Harvard of which the late President Eliot used to boast?” Mayor Bauer asked. “The factor that made her the dominant educational institution of our land was that she had been building men for nearly 300 years?”

On the Mayor’s order, the police chief will station fifty patrolmen and sergeants on duty Thursday at the Lynn-English classical high game with orders to arrest all persons who drink and to stop the game if drinking becomes serious.

Kingston Daily Freeman (Kingston, New York) Nov 26, 1929

Mayor Bauer, of Lynn, addressing a meeting of the Women’s Republican club at  Cambridge, Mass., this week, said there were about 4,000 too many municipal employes in Boston and that he could discharge all of them without one being missed. “All city governments are ‘good fellow’ governments,” the mayor told his audience. “Public officials feel they have got to get jobs for their constituents and they don’t care whether there exists a job or not.”

The Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) Jun 30, 1927

“THE NAKED TRUTH.”

“The Naked Truth” which is now showing at the Park theatre has caused considerable comment and discussion recently in Boston and Lynn, Mass. The Mayor of Boston, refused permission to present the film to Bostonians, and immediately upon taking this stand, Mayor Bauer of Lynn viewed the film and passed on it as a good and proper picture, bearing a message of beneficial value to the community and permitted the Lynn Auditorium to show the film for four weeks to record-breaking crowds. The film is featured by an all-star cast supported by Jack Mulhall and Helene Chadwick. This is the first showing of the film in this vicinity. “The Naked Truth” is to the point and calls a spade a spade.

The Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) Nov 2, 1926

Image from Shorpy

DOGS MAY ROAM

LYNN, Mass., — Dec. 14. — (By The Associated Press.) — By proclamation of Mayor Bauer, dogs are assured the freedom of the streets if they do not make nuisances of themselves nor obstruct traffic like some political aspirants do. The more he sees of men, the more respect the mayor has for dogs. The proclamation was issued after state authorities urged that stray dogs be rounded up and killed because of the spread of rabies.

Ogden Standard Examiner (Ogden, Utah) Dec 14, 1927

Images of John P. McGloin from the Lynn Museum and Historical Society

Independent baseball will be played on the playgrounds at Lynn this summer with Mayor Fred Manning tossing out the first ball. Former Mayor Bauer stopped the games on the playgrounds when he was in office.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Jul 12, 1930

Mayor of Lynn

Ralph Sherman Bauer

Image from NOBLE Digital Heritage

The following biographical information (from Descendants of HANS MICHAEL BAUER, (BOWER)) tells of Mayor Bauer “pulling himself up by the bootstraps” and making a life for himself:

Notes for RALPH SHERMAN BOWER:

His father died when he was only seven years old. Even at that extremely early age he became the main support of a family consisting of his mother and three sisters, the youngest a nursing baby. The family then living in Philadelphia and it was there that Ralph S. Bauer began his career in the newspaper business. The result of his first day’s sales as a “newsie” was cents. From that time on, every dollar he has ever had has been made by his own business ability. During the first 15 years of his life, there was no kind of human poverty this family did not face, and through it all, held together as a family and received such education as could be obtained under such circumstances.

When Ralph Bauer, yet in his teens, determined to exchange the environment of Philadelphia for cultured Boston, his [wealth] when he landed amounted to 27 cents. Many were the hours of loneliness that were his, with neither kith nor kin nearer than the PA metropolis. Many were the night he slept on a Boston Common bench with the star-studded blue dome of the heavens above, his only coverlet. Oft were dreams rudely disturbed by the smart blow of a patrolman’s night-stick on the thin soles of his tattered shoes. Always with warm appreciation will remained his memory of one of Boston’s guardians of the peace, who drew from him the tale of his struggles for existence. Never will he forget the warmth of the coat the officer tucked about his lusty body while he promised to rouse him from his slumbers in time to get his share of the profits from the early morning edition of the Herald. True to his word the officer awakened the sleeping lad and provided him with a good hot breakfast. If that man is still alive today Ralph Bauer would like to know his whereabouts, for he has never forgotten his kindness to a little lonely lad in a great city, far from his lived ones. He was graduated from the Boston Latin school and immediately thereafter obtained a position in the mailing department of the Boston Herald.

Play Ball!

THE SPRING MENU.

“I must diet,” said the player, “I am training for the season;
The more I work and the less I eat, the slimmer I will get.
The way those drummers gorge themselves is simply out of reason;
I swore to eat small luncheons, and I mean it, to, you bet!”
The player tucked his napkin in the crevice o’er his collar
And picking up a bill of fare he scanned it for a while,
Then, reaching in his pocket, slipped the “dinge” a silver dollar
And gave the following order in a loud and lordly style:

“Tomato Soup, some bluefish, please —
Be sure and fill the platter;
About six lamb chops served with peas —
Go heavy on the latter.
About a dozen bullfrogs’ legs,
With Tartar sauce around ’em;
A good big plate of scrambled eggs,
And give the date you found em!
Then some dessert, ice cream and cake,
A dish of charlotte russe,
And coffee. Now, old stocking, take
That score card and vamoose!”
The treasurer of the ball club heard and joy was in his heart,
Because the meal was table d’hote instead of a la carte.

Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California Apr 5, 1906

Billings Gazette (Billings, Montana) Apr 11, 1920

BASEBALL SEASON OPENS IN LIMA

By BERTON BRALEY

“Play — ” no, we won’t start it that way!
And there is an excellent reason
For since men first started to play
“The opening game of the season,”
Each bard and scribe of the newspaper tribe
Has wrinkled his hard-working brow
Then started “Play –” — Nix on those old-fashioned tricks,
WE’RE gonna be different now!

“Play –” — Antediluvian stuff!
WE’LL use some ORIGINAL dope.
WE’RE cleaver and snappy enough
To pull some new phrases, we hope;
We’ve always averred that a scrivening bird
Should certainly know how to do
The opening day without starting it, “Play –,”
WE’RE gonna do something that’s new.

“Play –” there’s the darn phrase once again.
We’ll prove to all manner of men
That we’re an original cuss;
“The season has started, the fans are light hearted,
The game has the crowd in its thrall,
“Play –” (ain’t it the deuce) “Play –” (oh what’s the use?)
“Play –” (gosh, I can’t help it)
“PLAY BALL!”

(Copyright 1923, NEA Service, Inc.)

Lima News (Lima, Ohio) Apr 9, 1923

Baseball just wouldn’t be baseball — without the umpires!

HIZZONER, “THE UMPS,” READY FOR OPENER

By JAY VESSELS
Sports Editor
(Associated Press Feature Service)

New York, (AP.) — Those mobile-faced umpires, the real war horses of baseball, are going back to the firing line for another season of calling them “like they see ’em.”

That is just what 1930 means for those keen-eyed warriors to whom Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Lefty Grove and other glittering diamond stars are just so many more ball-players.

Out there on opening day will be such baseball disciplinarians as Tom Connolly, Bill Dinneen, Clarence “Brick” Owens and George Hildebrand of the American league, and Bill “Catfish” Klem, Ernie Quigley, Cy Rigler, and Charley Moran of the National.

Some of these men have been clicking an indicator in the big leagues for 25 years and what they know about the great American pastime would fill more bookshelves than all of the volumes written about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Take Tom Connolly who, at 60, has been running major league ball games for 32 years. He has been with the American league alone since 1901 and there are few in this land as conversant with the playing code as “The Duke of Natick.” Connolly probably knows more firemen than any other American. You see, Tom used to look for congenial company at the local fire halls in the days when the umpires kept themselves more aloof from the ballplayers. He still pursues this custom.

There is Brick Owens, younger in years, but a big league umpire at intervals for 22 years. He has been with the American league since 1916. Naturally “Brick” acquired his odd sobriquet because of being hit with a brick. That occurred when the big arbiter was officiating in an independent game out at Pittsburg, Kans.

High among the picturesque characters who enforce the laws of baseball is Bill “Catfish” Klem, himself. Probably the greatest ball and strike expert in the business, Klem has been a National leaguer since 1905. A scribe once angrily referred to Klem as “looking like a catfish.” That was way back in those days when such uncouth things even appeared in the newspapers, but all along Klem has stuck to the nickname, laughing with the baseball world at what some would consider plain slander.

Bill Dinneen is one of the older umpires. He is 54 and has been in the American league since 1910. Dinneen pitched baseball for  15 years and says he still finds himself pitching every game he works. “I know what the batters can hit and what they cannot hit,” said the veteran. “Consequently, I say to myself, ‘If I were pitching I would hand this bird a curve, low and on the outside, etc., etc.'”

A brother “umps” of Dinneen’s is George Hildebrand, an American leaguer of 17 years’ experience. He took up the indicator after an injured knee spoiled a career in the Pacific Coast league where he was noted for his speed.

Three of the better known National league arbiters are Charley Moran, Ernie Quigley and Cy Rigler. Quigley, who has been in the senior loop since 1913, is widely known as a football and basketball official. Rigler has been in and out of the umpiring ranks since 1906 and Moran who has been calling them since 1918. “Uncle Charley” Moran is the man who coached the “Praying Colonels” of Centre college to a brief but high position in the football world.

A dignified and colorful lot are these old masters of the diamond. They certainly can’t be judged by what the pop-eyed fans will be hollering after April 15.

Morning Herald (Hagerstown, Maryland) Apr 12, 1930