Sunday, September 9, 2007

The mysterious Mully

Last year at the Philadelphia Sports Card &Memorabilia Show (Which is located in Reading, PA), In the last 10 minutes of the show, I franticly ran through several isles before leaving for the airport. I came across a dealer with some great stuff from the teens and 20's. A wire photo of Norman Tabasco Kid Elberfeld caught my eye first. I of course am a huge Chattanooga Lookouts collector and a collector of Southeastern baseball so the pic caught my eye. It was of Elberfeld in hs New York Highlander uniform. The pose was the Horner shot used for his T206 card. The wire photo was printed in '44 and used in newspaper stories about Kid's death. Kid was manager for the Lookouts a few times and spent his days in Chattanooga. His apple orchard was about 2 miles from our house on Signal Mountain.
Anyway, it was a no-brainer so I grabbed it up. Next to the Elberfeld photo was a stack of sepia snapshots of various baseball players from the 1920's. I thumbed through the stack and found players in Knoxville (TN) uniforms. I bought 2 (dang it, I should have bought the rest) and I bought one shot of a guy in a batting stance in an Indianapolis uniform. The back is why I bought it. The back was written in what appears to be the players hand. It reads:
"This is one of the three pitchers (sic) they took of me he give me this one and sent the other two in to the paper the Indianaplois (sic) Buffalo"
The pic is signed Mully and then he noted "Donie Bush calls me Mully"
I know who Donie Bush was but who was this Mully? Did he ever make it to the Majors? He didn't make the spelling bee. Of all the vintage baseball photos in my collection, Mully intrigues me the most. I've probably drawn Mully half a dozen times in sketch books.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home