Babe, Big Train and Persian palaces --
a Baseball Hall of Fame curator's screen play
By Tom Hoffarth, columnist
July 5, 2010
Babe Ruth, third from right, and Walter Johnson, third from left, are in this 1924 photo with actor Douglas Fairbanks, center, in the catcher's gear. But why? (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - Tom Shieber enjoys the chase.
The senior curator for the National Baseball Hall of Fame had come across a photograph that grabbed his attention - Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson, pictured together with a bunch of strange Persian palaces in the background.
And a few other people in the frame who probably weren't baseball players, but ... isn't that Douglas Fairbanks, in catcher's equipment?
What's the deal? Why did it happen? How did these people get together?
What has Shieber gotten himself into now?
"I had to find the story behind this," he said as he lifted the photo from a stack he had pulled out that day during a rare behind-the-scenes tour of the Hall of Fame's basement, leading a group through a series of unmarked doors behind the first-floor gallery of plaques.
Moments earlier, Shieber had the group in the libraries' archive section, explaining how stats and books were stored. He hadn't made it over to the really cool stuff - the artifacts room, where boxes of bats, balls, gloves and anything historically used in games were kept in pristine condition. Only about one quarter of the Hall's collection gets out in the three-floor exhibit at a time. The rest is kept below.
But here, in the photo storage facility, where humidity-controlled coolers are vital to the preservation of some half-million prints, Shieber raised the temperature a little as he described the process of a typical resourceful pursuit of the truth.
Ruth and Johnson were prime examples of how much work goes into making sure we've got the fact down for posterity's sake.
The Hall of Fame had been given a scrapbook from Ruth's former press agent, Christy Walsh.
Through a grant called "Saving America's Treasures," a national trust for historical preservation, Shieber was put in charge of disassembling this collection and identifying what was worth archiving.
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum senior curator Tom Shieber, in the Cooperstown facility's photo storage room, holds the Babe Ruth-Walter Johnson photo that took him to his Netflix account to try to authenticate. (Photo by Tom Hoffarth)
First strange thing Shieber noted: Ruth is wearing an odd "New York" jersey, capital letters across the front that is more like what the current Mets wear instead what his "NY" Yankees uniforms would have been customary back in the 1920s and '30s.
Johnson is in street clothes. In the background, a bunch of buildings that made it look as if they were in the Middle East.
"I thought maybe they're attending the World's Fair," Shieber said.
It's fairly well known Ruth often went on barnstorming tours to the West Coast every fall. Johnson, a Southern California native from Fullerton, didn't do too many. That helped Shieber narrow it down to probably the '20s.
Shieber was aware of a game where Ruth and Johnson played each other in the city of Brea, on Halloween 1924 - the only time they did such a thing on all of Ruth's tours.
Local historians recall how Ruth homered twice off Johnson - one blast purported to be 550 feet - and also pitched a complete-game victory.
Something told Shieber to look closer, go deeper.
He pulled more photos the Hall had of Ruth and Johnson. One of them happened to be with Fairbanks, a donkey cart, and the words "Thief of Bagdad" written on the side.
"So now I'm thinking, `This must be a movie set,"' Shieber said.
It was. With more research, Shieber puts the date at Nov. 1, 1924 - a day after their Brea exhibition - when Ruth and Johnson ventured over to Fairbanks' United Artists Studios in Hollywood, where he was filming "Thief of Bagdad."
While Shieber felt he'd put all the pieces of this puzzle together, something nagged at him.
This time, he went to an unlikely source - his personal Netflix account. He rented the movie "Thief of Bagdad." He studied it. Stopped and paused it.
"There was a scene I found that matched the picture perfectly," Shieber said with a sense of sleuthing success.
Simply ruthless.
Shieber, who maintains a blog about his undercover adventures called BaseballResearcher.blogspot.com, will be in Anaheim this week. He's coming along with a 100-plus-artifact display from the Hall of Fame that will be included in the Anaheim Convention Center-based All-Star Fan Fest starting Friday and running through July 13.
Perhaps Shieber's visit this way will include a side trip to Brea. Or a nearby Hollywood studio. Just to make sure.
More on the work Shieber does in Cooperstown on Tom Hoffarth's blog: www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth
This Keystone Photo Service archive shot of Babe Ruth, center, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., left, and Walter Johnson helped Hall of Fame senior curator Tom Shieber decide the exact date of Ruth's trip to United Artists Studios in Hollywood was on Nov. 1, 1924, to visit the set of the movie "Thief of Bagdad." (SenatorsCollectables.com)