 First edition | |
| Author | Lawrence Ritter |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | September 26, 1966 [1] |
| Pages | 384 (Paperback edition) |
| ISBN | 0-688-11273-0 (Paperback edition) |
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It is a 1966 book, edited by Lawrence Ritter, telling the stories of early 20th century baseball. It is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest books ever written about baseball.
Ritter got the idea for the book in 1961 upon the death of Ty Cobb, who had been widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the game's history. He was also influenced by the works of John and Alan Lomax, who traveled the country in the 1930s and 1940s with tape recorders seeking out old and almost forgotten American folk songs. [2]
Ritter realized that those who played baseball in the early years of the 20th century were now old men, and he resolved to interview as many of them as he could in order to record their memories. Ritter travelled 75,000 miles to interview his subjects, sitting for hours listening to them tell their tales into his tape recorder. The book retells their stories in the first-person, as they were told to Ritter.
The interviews were made between 1962 and 1966. The book was published in September 1966, following four years of research, interviews and preparation. An enlarged edition was issued in 1984, with the additions of George Gibson, Babe Herman, Specs Toporcer, and Hank Greenberg. A positive review by Wilfred Sheed in The New York Times Book Section helped propel the book, though it never hit the best-seller list. [3] This book has been in print for most of the last 35 years, selling 360,000 copies, with royalties of nearly a quarter million dollars. Ritter presented royalties to the 22 men in the original book and their estates, and continued to write them checks into the mid-1980s. Ritter himself earned less than $35,000 on this classic. Every player in the book, along with his wife, has since died. [2]
A vinyl album containing some of the actual recordings of the interviews was released in the 1970s. More recently, with the popularity of books-on-tape, longer versions of the recordings have been released on audiocassette and CD.
Crawford, Greenberg, Roush and Waner were already members of the Baseball Hall of Fame at the time of the book's publishing. Coveleski, Goslin, Hooper and Marquard were elected after the book was published; Goslin and Marquard directly credited Ritter's book. Toporcer, who died in 1989, was the last survivor among the interviewees. As part of Ritter's research, he interviewed many ballplayers, baseball executives, and writers besides those who have chapters in his book. These individuals included Bill Veeck, Billy Werber, Benny Bengough, Marty McHale, Eliot Asinof, Fred Lieb, and George McBride.
A documentary film for The Glory of Their Times was produced in 1971 by Ritter and Bud Greenspan, showing much of the still photography used in the book, along with vintage film footage and recordings from the audio tapes Ritter used in researching the book. After being rejected by commercial networks for several years due to Greenspan's refusal to edit for length, the film aired on PBS television in 1977.
An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present-day form, it records a fluctuating signal by moving the tape across a tape head that polarizes the magnetic domains in the tape in proportion to the audio signal. Tape-recording devices include the reel-to-reel tape deck and the cassette deck, which uses a cassette for storage.
Reel-to-reel audio tape recording, also called open-reel recording, is magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording tape is spooled between reels. To prepare for use, the supply reel containing the tape is placed on a spindle or hub. The end of the tape is manually pulled from the reel, threaded through mechanical guides and over a tape head assembly, and attached by friction to the hub of the second, initially empty takeup reel. Reel-to-reel systems use tape that is 1⁄4, 1⁄2, 1, or 2 inches wide, which normally moves at 3+3⁄4, 7+1⁄2, 15 or 30 inches per second. Domestic consumer machines almost always used 1⁄4 inch (6.35 mm) or narrower tape and many offered slower speeds such as 1+7⁄8 inches per second (4.762 cm/s). All standard tape speeds are derived as a binary submultiple of 30 inches per second.
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John H. Ritter is an American novelist, short story writer, teacher, and lecturer. He has written six novels and numerous short stories spanning the historical, sports, and sociopolitical genres in the young adult field of literature. His first novel, Choosing Up Sides, published in 1998, won the 1999 International Reading Association Children's Book Award for Older Readers and was designated an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Kirkus Reviews praised Choosing Up Sides, which attacked the once-prevalent views of religious fundamentalists toward left-handed children, as, "No ordinary baseball book, this is a rare first novel." In 2004 Ritter received the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People for his third novel, The Boy Who Saved Baseball."What was it he really wanted is to play baseball that is all he wanted to do and guess what he got to too."
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