Letters can be an overlooked piece of history. See what a few letters from baseball player Stuffy Stewart to his girlfriend / wife revealed to us.
Show Transcription
[00:00:00] David: Hi, this is David Allen Lambert. I am here with Terri O’Connell and we are your Virtual Historians. Don’t forget to tune in for each episode where we discuss things like virtual reality, history, archeology, and of course, what interests all of us, new technology. Tech is an exciting thing, and it doesn’t matter what aspect of history or family history or archeology you’re involved in.
We’re going to bring it to you first. And we’re going to talk about it with guests, as well as our own conversations about our own adventures and the world of virtual history.
[00:00:37] David: Terri, I’ll tell you something. This winter weather, I’m getting tired of it. It makes me really itch for grass and spring. It’s probably not baseball season yet, but spring training’s gotta be around the corner somewhere.
[00:00:53] Terri: I would hope so.
[00:00:55] David: Your White Sox and my Red Sox. Of course David Ortiz just got elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, or at least voted to be elected in.
I’m very excited about that. The Big Poppy.
[00:01:08] Terri: A lot of controversy on that, I saw.
[00:01:11] David: There really is. There is controversy, of course, because of the whole steroid testing. I’m not going to touch on that because I’m more interested in baseball history.
I got to tell you about something I landed not long ago. I’m constantly shopping on eBay and as I’ve probably mentioned before I collect autograph checks. Well, I bought a check for a ballplayer. His name was John Franklin “Stuffy” Stewart. I thought that was kind of fun. You know, here’s a check from 1915. Well, the same person that had that had a couple of letters that this guy wrote to his girlfriend and I said, wow, these are tempting. I thought I’d dig a little deeper into it. Cause you know, they’re written from a hotel on the road, there was supposed to have baseball content. They’re actually quite fascinating. In fact, actually let me share a little bit about him. So I’m going to share my screen with you.
[00:02:03] Terri: I love it, life on the road.
[00:02:05] David: Exactly, and I’m sure it wasn’t as glamorous as it is now.
So this is him on Find a Grave and he wrote these letters to his wife, Eulalie. Actually back then it was his girlfriend, and there’s their gravestone. She died in 1973. He died in 1980. He was about 85 years old when he died. So that gave me a little bit of information. Not as much as what I had actually kind of hoped for.
Then of course, there’s a picture here of him when he played baseball on the Washington Senators, looks like a newsprint picture cause it’s kinda cut out. But anyways, that’s what I found there.
Then of course he’s in Wikipedia, and on Wikipedia I found this great picture of him on the Senators, all excited and in his pinstripe. He was playing for the Washington Senators. I said, yeah, I need to get a really rundown of what teams he was playing for because obviously he’s these aren’t major league teams in these letters. So I wanted to get his career. There’s a great website called retrosheet.org. I looked him up on that and sure enough, JF Stewart, John Franklin Stewart born in Jasper, Florida in 1894 and died in Florida in 1980. Some of the guys were from up north and then they’ve retired down south, this guy never left.
He started off in 1916 on which would have been the old St. Louis Cardinals. He was a second baseman and he stayed with the Cardinals for about two years until about World War I. I can’t quite tell if he served in the war, that’s why he ended, or it was went down to the minors.
Then he went to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and then the Washington Senators in 1925 off and on until 1929. So his career in the major leagues was more than a cup of coffee, as we like to say. And this is his career after these letters. So he obviously got to start someplace and as it turned out, a lot of his letters recently went up for auction and some of these checks.
So I was kind of delighted to get a little piece of that baseball history and the letters themselves are quite interesting.
[00:04:24] Terri: So while you look for those, I want to tell you that I think it’s very cool that this not only shows us his history in baseball, but it also gives us a little history of the teams, because you said the Brooklyn Dodgers.
[00:04:39] David: The thing that I find is cool. So if you went to like the Brooklyn Dodgers here in 1923. Back then that Dodgers had a different name briefly. They were known as the Brooklyn Robbins.
[00:04:50] Terri: Oh, interesting.
[00:04:51] David: And this gives you the complete roster of everybody who played on the team itself. Let me just see if there are any hall of Famers here that I recognize.
Yeah, Zach Wheat. Zach Wheat was inducted into the hall of fame in 1959. Zachariah Davis Wheat from Missouri. So he was on the Robbins back then, as they called it. But it was the Dodgers. So one of Stuffy Stewart’s teammates was a Hall of Famer and probably other players as well, for all the different teams he played for. But you can get a whole list of all the players and you can find out who their managers were and if they were ever traded or whatnot, you’ll see all of that information right there.
So it says sold by the Jacksonville South Atlantic Team to the St. Louis Cardinals in July of 1916. The letter I have here is may of 1915.
He obviously is writing to his future wife because the name on the envelope is to Mrs. J Frank Stewart, Jr. So in this case they already had been married. Now the previous letter was written in 1914 and that’s addressed to her in Connecticut and it’s Eulalie Edwards and that is the same name that you have on the gravestone, and that’s Eulalie Edwards. So one is a letter written in 1914. But what I find great about this letter, besides talking about being in baseball, he says “we won yesterday six to three. I had one hit out of four times up“, but at the bottom he writes, “Dear, make Mother like you. Please.“
And I’m sure we’ve all had those in-laws situations, if you’ve been married where the in-laws and the, well, the new bride or groom don’t always see eye to eye. And here’s a letter written from a former major league ballplayer, 1915, practically 107 years ago asking his new wife to please, please be nice to his mother or to get along.
[00:07:06] Terri: That’s awesome.
[00:07:07] David: Yeah. So as a human element that isn’t just baseball statistics, and I think that’s true in genealogy, so much of what we have are names and dates. I mean, there’s another website. So I went a little further back in baseballreference.com has minor league stats as well as major league.
And he keeps on talking about in these letters about playing for a team in Valdosta. It’s in Georgia and there he is playing for the team back in 1915. In 1916, Jacksonville and Jacksonville, he then went to the St. Louis Cardinals. But if you click on this, it tells you what league it was.
It was the Florida, Alabama, Georgia League, which was class D baseball. So essentially minor leagues of the time. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it was fascinating. Like I say, the sad thing is this couple never had any kids. So I would think that if it was my great grandfather and grandfather played major league baseball, I’d be cherishing those letters. What I’d give to have letters written by my grandparents back in the day. So a little bit of early spring baseball fever hit my mailbox. Not from say this season, but a season over a hundred and so years ago.
[00:08:22] Terri: Well you know, wishing for spring makes me want to ask you this. Tell us about the historic blizzard that you’ve just gone through.
[00:08:33] David: Yeah, the bombogenesis.
I remember as a kid, you heard of blizzards the big one for us as a blizzard of 78, or just snowed and snowed. And it just didn’t leave for days at seemed. People got trapped on the highway. Yeah, that was a big one. I remember that I was eight or nine years old.
This one was different. We knew it was coming. It hit on the weekends. So, you know, not a lot of people traveling so that a lot of people that was smart, stayed home. It started in the morning and ended at nine o’clock. My power flickered a bit, kept on. Thank God. I didn’t have to worry about hooking up the generator.
But when we went out in the morning, we found out that my hometown of Stoughton. Massachusetts had the most snow in the state, let alone the most snow in New England for the blizzard of 2022.
We got a total of 30.9 inches of snow. Some of the drifts are up to five feet. It’s pretty crazy.
[00:09:40] Terri: Well, I will tell you this, it’s funny growing up in the big city here in Chicago, like you said, I remember the blizzard of what was it, 78.
I was seven. This is hysterical. And you’ll get a kick out of it. I remember the cars were all covered. You just couldn’t get to your vehicles. We had family, friends that lived maybe a mile from us. I remember putting a snow full snow suits on and walking there with the family. I remember complaining that it was just, the walk was long and my dad literally took us and we were like in one piece, snow suits and laid down and pulled us by the hoods, the snow suit. So then we didn’t have to walk.
[00:10:19] David: Oh gosh. Well, I can remember back in the day we’d go out and play in the snow and I had snow boots but my mother and I think I’ve put this on Twitter before. My mother so our feet would stay dry, besides the boots would take bread bags.
[00:10:37] Terri: My grandma did the same.
[00:10:39] David: You put your feet in bread bags.
So I remember that. I remember making snow tunnels. I remember the roads were shut down, this is the blizzard of 78. I remember my mother, my sister and I, and our German shepherds, not on leashes, just wandering next to us walked probably the two miles into town. So we could get the prerequisite milk and bread.
Right, exactly..
Somebody had enough milk and bread. Cause you know, you just never know that milk and bread sandwiches. What is going to sustain you through the storm? I don’t know what we got, but I’m sure we didn’t have power, but the nice thing about at least the winter storms, if you don’t have power, you refrigerator, well guess what?
Take that summer cooler and put it in the snow outside. Hey, it stays cold.
[00:11:25] Terri: We do that in the winter. Like if we buy a big jug of like cider or something, we just leave it outside.
[00:11:30] David: I have problems with anything that might freeze.
[00:11:33] Terri: Tell me this. What did you guys do to sustain yourselves while the blizzard was happening. What’d you do at home? Because you know, this is historical and years from now your descendants are going to want to know what did you do?
[00:11:46] David: What did we do? They’re going to go onto YouTube and they’re going to find this video and say, oh, I’ll tell you, you better be a good kid. Pay attention in school now. My message to the future. We made a soup, like a lentil soup. I with my daughter, Hannah baked a lot of cookies. We watch at least I’ve binged watched the TV show Boba Fett. Which I never would have guessed in a million years. At 40 years later, a person who got about six minutes of airtime in the Star Wars series would have his own series on Disney plus. Let alone to think that you could watch Disney movies anytime you want on an app on your phone, on your phone.
[00:12:38] Terri: Thank you Disney!
[00:12:40] David: I love technology.
[00:12:41] Terri: Yes.
[00:12:42] David: In fact, I just got a new bit of technology, which we can talk about sometime very shortly. It’s been very hard for me. I lost my parents by the time I was 30 and I have a lot of VHS tapes, from home from the VHS cameras, Christmases and things like that.
And I’m going to start converting them to digital. And it’s going to be tough because I haven’t heard my parents’ voice since 1998 and 1999. So I know what it sounds like, I’ll recognize it, but my youngest daughter wasn’t even born and she’s 18 now, and my oldest daughter was three when my dad died.
I mean, so it will be nice for them to kind of see it and probably will bring a tear to my eyes to see them again and hear them.
[00:13:29] Terri: I have a super eight of my dad’s mom to get converted. And there’s a library here that I can go and do that at.
[00:13:39] David: Oh, that’s great.
[00:13:40] Terri: I just need to get up and go do it. But part of me doesn’t want to, because she was very instrumental in our upbringing until she died, which is when I was eight.
And I don’t know, emotionally, if I’m stable enough to hear her voice..
[00:13:57] David: You can do it. You just watch you listen to it in the other room and just kinda sneak in, like it’s, you know, you’re waiting for Christmas to occur. I think the tough part for us is that, I mean, we remember when it wasn’t this type of technology.
I mean, I guess there’s always been some sort of a video recording. I mean, we take for granted now video, what we’re doing now. I mean, we’ll never be able to do that 30 years ago. It would be amazing. You had to go to like the TV show to be on camera, you know, I think a podcasting as a thing.
But for those of us who don’t have our parents or grandparents or whatnot around, and you have these precious tapes, you don’t want to wait forever. It’s magnetic storage. I mean, I’m praying that they are still going to work. Okay. This week I get to see and hear my parents again.
[00:14:47] Terri: That’ll be awesome.
I will tell you this. Back in 2005, my eldest taped my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, and her sisters telling stories of their youth in West Virginia. They didn’t, they thought she was just playing with the video recorder while she recorded them telling their stories. And she asks me all the time.
Mom, have you converted that yet? Cause she wants to see them.
[00:15:11] David: Send it on down. I’ll take care of it for you. Yeah, that would be great. No, I did the same. I actually asked my grandfather’s sister who was actually an older sister who came over, across the Atlantic, in 1910 with her mother and brother to talk about the voyage and talk about growing up. She married. Her husband was a World War I veteran.
She went out to Calgary in 1919, Alberta, Calgary, Alberta, when the roads were still dirt. She had lost her mother to the influenza epidemic of 1920. I mean, there’s a lot of history that she shared and it’s on a VHS tape. I was like, I probably haven’t listened to it in a while, but her daughter just recently, this past week, turned 90.
So I’d like to get a digitized, put it up on YouTube, so her grandson can actually play it for her own daughter, and that other people can see it because she has a lot of descendants now.
The same thing is true with some of the tapes. I did my mother’s cousin. So it would be like 110 or 120 years old.
There are generations that weren’t even born when I taped these things back in the eighties and nineties. Oh.
[00:16:25] Terri: What a gift.
[00:16:26] David: Yeah. Yeah. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be fun. And so remember folks, if you have technological story that you’re involved with, share all us, VirtualHistorians.com.
You can reach it out to us. Remember, you can also let us know if you’ve got something you wanna share in person. We could have you as a guest. Cause it isn’t just Terri and I, as the talking heads on your computer screen, we actually do have guests and hopefully you’ll look at our archive and see some of the past episodes that we have.
And our next episode, I’m going to talk about using eBay to capture your family history or local history.
All right, until next time, this is me and Terri signing off and wishing you a warm winter season and not 30.9 inches of snow. But I’m willing to ship any of my batches of snow to you. Just let me know how you want it delivered.
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