Baseball in the Garden of Eden: Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn

Author:John Thorn [Thorn, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780743294034
Amazon: 0743294041
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

SPORTING GOODS AND HIGHER THOUGHT

With his brother, J. Walter Spalding, Albert had established the sporting-goods business of Spalding & Brother in the spring of 1876. A surviving ledger page from that first year reveals that the brothers contributed $3,000 in working capital in addition to a loan of $800 from their mother, Harriet Irene Spalding. She lived with her daughter Mary Spalding Brown and her son-in-law in Rockford, while also spending considerable time in Chicago with her sons. Despite the small scale of the startup, the sizable diameter of Al Spalding’s baseball circle permitted the fledgling firm to turn a first-year profit of $1,118.53, or a 29 percent return on investment. Harriet recalled this time in her reminiscences, privately published in 1910 when she was eighty-nine:

The first two years after they started in business, Albert played ball in the summer time. I recall an order for shirts that the Indianapolis Club sent in. Walter had the knit shirts all right, but the great difficulty was to get the name “INDIANAPOLIS” put across the front of each shirt. He could find somebody who would cut the letters out of red broadcloth, but no one to sew them on. Walter was telling Albert about it at home, and I said, “Bring them down and I will sew on the letters.” They had to be ready in three days. There were eleven shirts to be lettered, each letter felled with fine sewing silk. Walter marked where they were to go and I remember when I got to the last shirt it was almost dark. I took it to Josie’s, Albert’s wife, who was sick in bed, and asked her how it looked. She said, “Oh, Mother, you have got the N’s wrong side up!” Fortunately they were only basted.

The first two years of their business life were so promising Albert and Walter determined to purchase a factory in Michigan [near the timber from which Spalding model baseball bats were crafted], and at this time Mary’s husband [William Thayer Brown] joined the firm and took charge of the manufacturing department, and for the next five years I spent my time with Mary in Hastings, Mich., with frequent visits to Albert in Chicago, where I greatly enjoyed their little son, Keith.

After Albert Spalding and Josie Keith married in 1875 they spent the winter in Rockford with mother Harriet and family before moving to Chicago, where he would continue to confer with Hulbert on the new league as well as to work on his plan for the sporting-goods business. Ever since the 1874 baseball tour of England, in which Harry Wright had permitted him to take an active part, Spalding was seeing his interests in baseball and business converge. With his stake in the Chicago White Stockings and the inauguration of his sporting-goods business, playing the game no longer gripped him as it once had. Although he was only twenty-eight and could have been expected to play a few years longer, he was intent on becoming a magnate.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.