John M. Smyth Sporting Goods

[mikesglove]

John Smyth was born on a steamer ship enroute from Ireland in 1843. His family was in the process of immigrating to America. They all settled in Chicago and the young John fell in love with typography and studied it in school and became so proficient that he began working in the newspaper business at age 13. John went looking for other opportunities at age 24 and with $250 he opened a second hand furniture store. He was successful owing partly to the good will he showed after the Chicago fire of 1871 when he extended no interest credit to customers replacing furniture lost in the fire. By 1894 the company grew to such an extent that it was incorporated and turned over to his sons to operate. They expanded the business into a general purpose mail order operation akin to Sears & Roebuck. Their catalog was called "The Dictionary of Economy" and ran to 1200 pages.



The baseball equipment section was just two pages in the main catalog and the company also issued a special baseball catalog. The 1903 supplemental catalog below has some nice color swatches of uniform fabric in addition to two pages of baseball gear. Note the buckle web fielders glove. Victor Sporting Goods may be the supplier of these models for John M. Smyth. Victor was one of the first to incorporate the adjustable buckle web.






The 1912 catalog pages below show the Smyth Co. logo. Some of the glove descriptions suggest Victor or Wright & Ditson, such as "The Cobb Model", "Major Leaque" and "Collegiate". I could not find an example of a Smyth Co. branded glove but their are some likely candidates on JD's site. If a collector can identify the stamped logo letter "S" incorporating a diamond and circle on their gloves, maybe they can post a picture.




below is the Chicago store in the 1960's. Three generations of the Smyth family continued the business until they over-reached in the 1980's by opening seven satellite stores which could not support themselves. The family eventually sold the company to Levitz furniture in 1994.

[deebro041]

Once again great info MikesGlove! Looks like a great catalog. Interesting to note the ad for Spaldings Baseball Guide in bottom right corner.
Dan