There’s something missing from Chicago’s ballparks these days. Sure, the players, the fans, the hot dog vendors and the annoying drunk yelling over your shoulder. The way some people see it, American culture doesn’t add up to much without these essential baseball ingredients.
But when baseball photographer George Brace, a friend to the game’s greatest players and a legend in his own right, stopped going to Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field this year, few people in the stands even noticed.
But his absence was noted by those on the field. In the last six decades there hasn’t been a baseball player in Chicago who hasn’t met Brace at least once.
“I’ve taken a picture of every player who has been in Chicago since 1929,” Brace says. “Not only Chicago players, but all the visiting clubs as well.”
In all those years, save the four he spent in the Army during World War II, Brace went to at least one game from every Cubs and White Sox series.
“I shot every player on their first day out in the ballpark, and took them again if they were traded and came back with another team,” he said.
While the strike keeps the players home, Brace was grounded this season by failing vision. Having gone blind in his right eye this past January, Brace had adjusted by moving his camera over to use the left. Cataracts in that eye recently stripped him of that option. To talk to him at his house on North Drake Avenue, one first has to get past two squat, barking dogs, one of which apparently bites.
The reward for running that gantlet is a trip to Brace’s basement. Down there is a darkroom and a home office, but no ghosts, nothing out of the ordinary. Well, maybe a few too many filing cabinets, which fill the north walls of two of the basement’s rooms.
If all this seems ordinary enough, consider that these plain cabinets contain the largest collection of baseball photographic negatives, and possibly of negatives of any sort, in the world-more than 1 million negatives going back to the 1840s. Over the years Brace has taken a picture of more than 11,000 professional players, from all 28 clubs. He has shot 193 of the 223 players in the Hall of Fame.
“The ones I missed, I got copies of the negatives,” he said.
By trading and culling through a friend’s enormous collection of old newspaper archives, Brace has acquired negatives of 20,000 other players, as well as portraits of officials, batboys, owners and nearly everyone else associated with the game. Within seconds he can find a negative of any player in one of the envelopes marked with his impossibly neat handwriting.
A peek in a minor-league drawer reveals team and individual photos from Jackson, Miss., and Jacksonville, Fla. Brace has also collected every Baseball Guide-first published by Spalding and now by the Sporting News-from 1886 to the present.
The greats of the past
Born in 1913, Brace was blessed with both excess energy and extreme patience, which accounts for his ability to copy out by hand, over a period of 11 years, all of those Baseball Guides he did not own. Moreover, as a young man Brace had the uncanny sense to write letters to players from the 1800s.
“I have a letter from the game’s first professional, George Wright, who signed the first professional contract in 1869. I wrote to him when he was 89 years old, and he wrote back about his greatest thrills as a player.”
While the basement itself isn’t haunted, a conversation with Brace summons up all the spirits of baseball history. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner and Kiki Cuyler drift through the conversation. From Ted Lyons, his favorite pitcher with the Sox, Brace has a 13-page letter sent to him during Brace’s service in New Guinea.
He loved recently retired Cub second baseman Ryne Sandberg, and says that while “people are on him now, I think he was coming along as the best second baseman who ever played the game.” Another favorite Cub, Ernie Banks, called last year wanting some pictures.
“I got him his first day out in the ballpark,” said Brace, who is also responsible for a famous portrait of Gehrig in half-profile.
“(Gehrig) would order hundreds of that picture and hand it out to his fans, and even after he died his wife ordered them.”
Brace is a calm, grandfatherly sort of man, and-as with many grandfathers-it’s clear he has told these stories before. But they are not worn for the telling, and his enthusiasm and pride bring them all back to life.
“I’ve known every player since (he started taking photos), been good friends with some of them. And I’ve been out there for 65 years, and never once asked a player for the ball. I’d talk to them, but I didn’t want to ask for anything.”
Small talk with Lou and Babe
To hear Brace tell it, how he became part of the history of his beloved sport isn’t extraordinary. Sick with pneumonia as a young boy, he took a doctor’s advice to exercise, often walking 20 miles from his home at 72nd and Western to Wrigley Field, where he would get a free pass for sweeping out the park, or pay 50 cents for a seat in the bleachers.
“I was a big walker,” he boasts. “Every night I would walk eight miles or more after supper.”
During the Depression, work for the Catholic Youth Organization led to a job as a WPA photographer. An ad seeking to trade Baseball Guides brought him to George C. Burke, the Cubs’ official photographer from 1929 to 1951, who took the 16-year-old Brace on as an assistant.
“I would sit between Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth (at Comiskey Park) and talk to them in the locker room. Their lockers were next to each other, so I would sit right there in between them,” he recalls.
Was he nervous talking to the great players?
“For the first few days I was. But we’d talk about anything, about taking pictures, about what they were going to do out there that day. I’d ask them if they’d rather be smiling or serious in their pictures. With the pitchers, I’d ask if they were pitching that day. A lot of the pitchers were superstitious, so I would tell them I’d take them the next day.”
Between 1929 and 1951, Brace was an official Cubs, Sox and Bears photographer.
Although primarily a still photographer, he would occasionally shoot movies as a favor to a player.
“In 1938 Dizzy Dean came up to me and asked me to take movies of the World Series. I took the whole Chicago World Series in color-the three games played here-and gave it to Dizzy. But he didn’t want all of them, he said, `I just wanted me pitching.’ “
Brace lost track of the extra footage after Dean rejected it, but was recently told that documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was able to track it down for his “Baseball” documentary, currently running on WTTW-Ch. 11.
Taking over the business
When Burke died in 1951, Brace inherited the business and transformed it into a hobby, adding free-lance work for The Sporting News and Baseball Digest. Even as a hobby, it completely structured the way he led his regular life. Until he retired in 1978, Brace worked the swing shift at Durkee’s Famous Foods in Logan Square-two days, two afternoons, two nights-in order to make it to the games. His wife, Agnes, who he married in 1942 and who was not a big baseball fan, simply has had to live around it.
Still, every year Brace is issued a field pass, giving him unrestricted access to the field. When Eddie Einhorn and Jerry Reinsdorf purchased the White Sox, Brace introduced himself to Einhorn.
“I told him, `I’m George Brace and I’ve been taking pictures here since 1929.’
” `Yeah, I know,’ he said. `When I was a little kid I used to order 100 8 x 10s from you all the time. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing.’ “
Although the collection is probably worth a fortune, Brace never made money at this. In fact, he barely broke even.
“Everything I’ve taken since 1951, I’ve made a print and given it to the player. If they wanted them for autograph purposes, I’d sell them 1,000 for $25.”
Until last year he sold black and white postcard-size prints for 70 cents, color ones for 80. His daughter, Mary, has since taken over her father’s hobby as a business and raised the price only slightly, to 85 cents and $1.
“She makes a perfect print,” Brace says. “But she doesn’t know the nicknames, I need to help her out with that. She likes the developing, seeing the photographs of the old players, but she has never seen a game.”
Can’t put a value on it
A number of years ago, a rumor circulated that Brace had turned down $2 million for his collection.
“In Gary, Indiana, they ran a headline,” Brace recalls. ” `Chicago man refuses $2 million for hobby.’ “
But it never happened that way.
“An interviewer asked my wife what would happen when I died, and she’d said she would take them out in the alley and build the biggest bonfire.”
Concerned, both leagues sent representatives to see Brace.
“I told them, lay $2 million on the table, and it’s not for sale.”
They didn’t make the offer, but would Brace have accepted it?
“I probably would have thought it over,” he says, “but I don’t think I would have sold it.”
For years Brace nurtured a dream of a Chicago Hall of Fame, but never got together the money to start it, although at least a hundred of his photographs are on the walls at Harry Caray’s restaurant. Many more are on display in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
“I started giving pictures to the Hall of Fame three years before they even started collecting pictures. George Burke told me to send a copy of every picture to them.”
The Hall of Fame hasn’t yet made an offer, but they have asked him not to consider any other. If they ever induct a photographer into the Hall, chances are it will be George Brace.
Those good old days
Like the old-timers he adores, Brace sounds the familiar complaint that the old players were playing more for the love of the game than the money.
“If they got hurt, they wouldn’t let you know, because if someone knew they would beat them out for the job. Nowadays, they tell everybody if they get hurt.”
Brace himself played amateur ball for years on a South Side team, and was on Chicago’s champion World’s Fair League team.
Asked what the old-timers think about current ballplayers’ salaries and the strike, he says their only complaint is the money.
“They would have liked to play in this time, to make that money.”
“(A lot of) the old players died destitute,” Brace adds.
But he thinks that even if the old players had been making that kind of money, a lot of them might have died penniless anyway.
“Back then, the players used to tip everybody. I’d give them a photograph, they’d tip me $10.”
The players also spread their money around town.
“Once I was with (traveling secretary) Bob Lewis, and (Cubs star) Hack Wilson came up and borrowed $400 from him. A while later, Wilson came back for another $400. He was out standing his fans drinks in the taverns.”
Brace reflects for a while.
“Hack Wilson died broke, and his wife wouldn’t claim his body so the National League had to bury him.”
Brace still hasn’t gotten used to the idea of not going out to the park, and this season has gone to the game only three times, throwing out the opening pitch at Wrigley on July 10.
“It’s been my life, gave me exercise, kept me alive,” he says. “Now I have a lot of sitting around that I’m not used to doing.”
He says that if the surgery is successful he would like to be back out there next year.
Brace claims he doesn’t dream about baseball, but he thinks about the old players all the time.
Does he have any regrets, anybody he wishes he had met and photographed?
Brace laughs.
“No,” he says, “Everybody knew me. I met them all.”
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For information about ordering photos, write to George Brace at 2638 N. Drake Ave., Chicago, Ill., 60647.
