Ken Channer never consciously planned his life around Nellie Fox. His devotion to the late White Sox second baseman, which has ranged from collecting baseball cards to helping get Fox elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, was done for fun.
Fox lives on in the office of Channer’s northwest suburban home. Here on walls and shelves and inside drawers and binders is a celebration of the career and spirit of a man who Channer says helped shape his life.
“(Fox) affected me as a kid, the way I grew up and the way I approached things as being a little bit of a hustler, around the ballpark or in whatever I was doing, because I certainly didn’t have any athletic ability,” he says.
Channer’s devotion to Fox even extended to helping write the speech for Joanne Fox, widow of his idol, for Fox’s induction into the hall of fame Aug. 3. Fox died of cancer at the age of 47 in 1975.
While he declines to estimate the worth of his collection, Channer puts the number of Fox pieces at 250 to 300, not counting duplicate baseball cards. He also has an extensive collection of White Sox memorabilia.
Establishing the size of Channer’s collection in relation to those of other Fox memorabilia collectors is difficult. Through conversations he has had with other collectors, Channer believes his is one of the largest, but he’s not certain. Rick Gordon, a fellow Fox collector with whom Channer has swapped some collectibles, backs up that point.
“I think that’s a little hard to substantiate because a lot of people are secretive about what they have,” says Gordon, a Roselle resident. “What’s great about Ken’s collection is that he’s got a lot of rare things. One of the rarer things he has is a Nellie Fox canceled check. That’s a great piece to have. But there’s so much to collect, I don’t think anybody can have it all.”
Enter Channer’s office and you’re transported to a different time, one where neighborhood buddies played sandlot baseball and pretended they were Luis Aparicio, Al Smith or maybe even Nellie Fox. Eight gloves, their leather darkened by age, occupy a shelf of honor to the left. Bats, some handmade, some bearing Fox’s imprinted signature, reside in racks along the walls. Open a cabinet and you’ll find a box housing a portion of Channer’s 50,000 baseball cards. Or open a drawer and out pops a ball signed by the 1961 White Sox, the signatures as vivid as the day the ball was signed. A ceramic bust of Fox, made by Channer when he was 13, surveys the scene.
“I hear a lot of guys talk about when Mickey Mantle was their hero and they went to the ballpark and can remember the first home run he ever hit,” Channer says. He’s not sure he knows when he first started looking up to Fox. “All I can remember (is that) from the time I started loving baseball, Nellie Fox was my idol,” he says.
Fox was considered a catalyst for the “Go-Go” White Sox of the 1950s. A 12-time American League All-Star, he was the league’s most valuable player in 1959, when he led the White Sox to their first World Series in 40 years. Fox had a lifetime batting average of .288, compiled 2,663 hits and was the A.L. hit leader four times. He was also a three-time Gold Glove winner.
Despite such statistics, Fox was bypassed for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., by members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America during his period of eligibility after retirement. Fox was finally elected to the Hall of Fame by the organization’s Committee on Baseball Veterans earlier this year.
His small size (5 feet 9 inches, 150 pounds), plus his image as a scrappy hustler, endeared Fox to many baseball fans of that time.
Fox fans “fell in love with his style of play and the kind of character he was, more than the mammoth home runs of Mickey Mantle or Henry Aaron or Willie Mays,” says Channer, 50.
Channer’s love of baseball was bolstered by his childhood friendship with Jeff Teach, whose father was senior vice president for A.C. Allen, owner of the White Sox for a time during the early 1960s. Thanks to Jeff’s father, the neighborhood sandlot gang, including a wide-eyed Channer, got to meet Fox at Comiskey Park in 1963. A framed photograph of the occasion occupies a place of honor in his office.
“It was the only time I ever met him,” he recalls. “But I was so nervous I couldn’t remember anything about it the next day.”
Sandlot players must eventually leave their dreams behind, and Channer was no exception. He attended college, got married, fathered three daughters and carved a career as a bond salesman. He gave away his collection of baseball cards to a friend.
Channer’s interest in Fox lay dormant until the mid-1980s, when he began collecting Fox’s baseball cards once again. He decided to see whether the person he had given his collection to all those years ago–State Sen. Peter Fitzgerald–had kept the cards.
“I called up Peter one day and asked if I could have back some of my original Nellie Fox cards,” Channer says. “Peter said he kept all the ones I gave him separate from the rest of his collection and he’d be happy to give me back my entire collection. That was probably a big mistake because it started me off on collecting a lot of stuff.”
A black binder houses the heart of Channer’s collection: 60 8-by-10 photographs of Fox. It also contains such hard-to-find items as an ad with Fox for Red Heart Chewing Tobacco and baseball bucks that used to be packaged with baseball cards.
Although many items in his collection were purchased at card shows, Channer obtained some through his association with the Nellie Fox Society, a Chicago-based organization of business people and former athletes that was formed to get Fox elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
As part of the society’s efforts to persuade the veteran’s committee to elect Fox, Channer produced a 16-minute videotape in 1996 extolling the ballplayer’s attributes. The tape was sent to each committee member. “I don’t know how much of a difference it made, except that was the first time he ever had 75 percent of the vote” necessary for induction, Channer says.
Instead of Fox, however, the committee, which can select only one player a year, gave the nod to former Tiger and Phillie Jim Bunning. Fox was elected on March 5, 1997.
Channer traveled to the induction with his youngest daughter, Katie, 11, whom he refers to as “my best ballplayer,” and met with Joanne Fox. Channer, along with a professional writer, spent part of this spring and summer helping Fox write her speech for the ceremony.
The impetus to write the speech grew out of casual conversations he had with Joanne Fox while conducting business for the Nellie Fox Society.
“To me, it’s as much of a way of saying thank you to him by helping her out any way I can, just because he made an impact on me as a kid,” he says.
Channer says his Fox collection is just about complete. The tremendous rise in prices since Fox’s election to the hall of fame have taken much of the fun out of finding things, he says. Besides, he would be hard-pressed trying to find room for anything else.
But he has one living tribute: One of his cats is named Jake, in honor of Jacob Nelson Fox.
