Mar 01 2007 10:19 AM
I would love to visit this place.
By JUSTIN PETERS
Published: March 1, 2007
It is not clear how the face of the former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley came to appear on a flour tortilla in Los Angeles. When on display, it is usually accompanied by a card noting that “the provenance of the tortilla is sketchy.” However, the card continues, “Radio carbon dating indicates that the tortilla is approximately forty years old.”
“It’s an interesting tortilla,” said Terry Cannon, its curator.
Cannon is the president, founder and general instigator of the Baseball Reliquary, a California-based traveling museum and shrine that serves as a puckish alternative to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Based out of Cannon’s home and assorted Southern California storage units, the Reliquary celebrates baseball’s pioneers and free spirits, those individuals whose greatness could never be charted by the Elias Sports Bureau.
“If Borges liked baseball, this is where he’d want to be enshrined,” said Ron Shelton, the director of films like “Bull Durham” and “Cobb.”
As the O’Malley tortilla illustrates, the Reliquary exists in the gap between baseball legend and reality. “You go to the Hall of Fame, you’re surrounded by uniforms and balls and bats and that’s all great, these are great artifacts. But that’s all they are, they’re artifacts,” said Buddy Kilchesty, the Reliquary’s archivist and historian. “What if the imagination had some say in what the artifacts were?”
Cannon puts it this way: “We always say that what’s important isn’t so much the artifact, it’s the story behind it.” Hence the O’Malley tortilla, which the Reliquary uses to teach the history of Chavez Ravine, the site of Dodger Stadium. Or Dock Ellis’s hair curlers, which help tell the story of race relations in baseball’s post-Jackie Robinson era. Or 12 baseballs allegedly signed by Mother Teresa (fandom), or Eddie Gaedel’s jockstrap (midgets) or a piece of skin from Abner Doubleday’s thigh (ossification?).
Cannon is an enthusiastic 53-year-old with an abiding interest in experimental film, jazz, the American Basketball Association, classic cars (he once edited a magazine called Skinned Knuckles), vinyl records and, not least, baseball. He has, at one point or another, led or participated in groups pertaining to most of these interests. “When I get involved in something, I don’t get involved in a cursory way; I throw myself into it,” he admitted, somewhat ruefully.
He founded the Reliquary in 1996.
“Like so many of us, he’s a guy who reveres — and I mean reveres — the game of baseball, and this is his small way of honoring it,” said Peter Golenbock, a Reliquary member and the author of baseball books like “Bums” and “The Forever Boys.”
It is an irreverent sort of reverence. A life-size cardboard cutout of Sparky Anderson stands next to Cannon’s bed. In his living room, there is a large display case with a triptych of Babe Ruth memorabilia — one of the Babe’s half-smoked cigars, purportedly rescued from a Philadelphia brothel in 1924, and the sacristy box with which Ruth was once administered the last rites. (He recovered.) Usually one of Ruth’s half-eaten hot dogs sits to the right of the sacristy box, but it is currently out for repairs.
Strictly speaking, not all of the Reliquary’s treasures are real. But the Barnumesque quality of much of its collections is intended as a commentary on the nature of baseball artifacts and the reverent way they are often presented. “When you present a display in a professional and straight-faced manner without the appearance of irony, people believe what’s there,” Cannon said.
Take the Eddie Grant monument, for example. Grant was the first baseball player to be killed in the First World War. A commemorative plaque was affixed to a stone monument in the center field of the Polo Grounds until it disappeared after the Giants’ last game there in 1957. The Reliquary created a replica of the plaque and began displaying it in 2000, as a means of telling Grant’s story.
Perhaps inevitably, most people mistook the replica for the real thing.
“They didn’t believe that anybody would bother to replicate the plaque,” Cannon said.
A group called the Eddie Grant Memorial Association hounded the Reliquary to return the plaque. Vin Scully mentioned it on a Dodgers broadcast. Finally, because nobody would believe otherwise, the Reliquary started saying that the plaque was, in fact, the original.
Reliquary members are still sticking to that story — somewhat.
“As far as I’m concerned, it is real,” Kilchesty said. “We found it in an ex-cop’s apartment in Ho Ho Kus, N.J.”
The Reliquary broadened its scope in 1999, when Cannon founded the Shrine of the Eternals, his answer to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Each year, the Reliquary’s approximately 200 members — membership is open to anybody who pays $25 — elect three candidates from a field of 50 nominees. Nomination criteria are fairly arbitrary — alongside such giants of the game as Satchel Paige and Shoeless Joe Jackson, past nominees have included the notoriously light-hitting Mario Mendoza, the fictional character Henry Wiggen from the book “Bang the Drum Slowly,” and John Meeden, a homeless softball player known as “the hobo Roy Hobbs.”
Newcomers to this year’s field of 50 nominees include Jim Brosnan, a relief pitcher and the author of “The Long Season,” the former Yankee slugger Roger Maris (returning to the ballot after an absence of several years) and the dead ball-era saloonkeeper Nuff Ced McGreevey, perhaps baseball’s first superfan.
Some Reliquary members offered previews of their ballots: Shelton, the film director, plans to vote for the 1950s minor league fireballer Steve Dalkowski; Golenbock will select Maris and Brosnan, but not the one-armed outfielder Pete Gray, whose teammates “to a man, hated his guts,” he noted.
Inductees are honored at a ceremony each July at the Pasadena, Calif., Central Library. Assuming they are not busy with baseball card shows (Cannon’s greatest worry), the honorees are flown to Southern California, presented with their plaques at the ceremony and invited to speak. Twenty-four individuals have been elected so far, ranging from Ellis and Minnie Minoso to the Japanese-American baseball pioneer Kenichi Zenimura and Pam Postema, the minor-league umpire.
Many inductees, while pleased at the recognition, are unsure what to make of the honor.
“It puzzled me a little at first,” said Marvin Miller, the longtime head of the players union, who nonetheless traveled to Pasadena to accept his plaque.
The plaques are multicolored acrylic rectangles; they resemble something that might hang on the wall at a Swedish kindergarten. Bill Lee, well known by his nickname Spaceman, thought his plaque would be a nice addition to his chicken coop. Jimmy Piersall, inducted in 2001, keeps his plaque in his bathroom.
The term Reliquary confuses many inductees, too. “Their friends are like, ‘I don’t know whether to congratulate you or to bid you farewell,’ ” Cannon said.
Cannon, who views the Reliquary as a work of conceptual art, is happy to inspire such befuddlement. But those who know him say there is a sobriety of purpose behind the jesting.
“Despite the fact that he likes to have fun, he’s a serious individual and an intelligent one, and he deserves to be taken seriously,” Miller said.
The Reliquary has spearheaded several scholarly initiatives, including extensive exhibits on Mexican-American baseball and the history of baseball scouting.
There has been discussion about finding a permanent home for the Reliquary. Cannon has mixed feelings about this. He enjoys the Reliquary’s itinerant nature, but sees the benefits in settling down.
For one thing, it would give him something to do with the inductee’s plaques, which are housed in cardboard boxes in a cabinet in his study.
“I’d like to have them all in one place and lit from behind, so that when you walk into this room, you just get this wash of color,” he said. He held a plaque up to a desk lamp. “Just a wash of color.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/sports/baseball/01reliquary.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=sports
http://www.baseballreliquary.org/Default.htm