Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

i was checking out the stamping/details of various gloves and noticed that each of the "major brands" (this is subjective, i know) have a patented method of securing the wrist. can anyone (without looking back at their gloves) name the types for "conventional" back gloves:

1)rawlings
2)wilson
3)spalding (aka rawlings?)
4)macgreger
5)nokona

if you want to participate in this contest (no prizes awarded) you can email me your answer (so that no on else reads them) and i can announce the winners

edyue@yahoo.com

(no cheating

Since it's not a choice I'll let you know that Sonnett used "Se-Kur Strap."

mvalz has the 1st quiz entry with 3/5

2) wilson
4)macgregor
5)nokona

+1 extra credit for being the 1st to hand his quiz in

2nd entry for glove-works

a perfect score!

1)rawlings
2)wilson
3)spalding
4)macgregor
5)nokona

+3 for naming patents for wilson, spalding and macgregor that i hadn't heard of

3rd entry jdrasher

another perfect score

1)rawlings
2)wilson
3)spalding
4)macgregor
5)nokona

(i must confess, i couldn't have named them by memory:)

would anyone care to venture a conjecture as to why these companies developed special wrist attachments? And who was the first?

Your question brings to mind one of my favorite glove related cartoon images; the one used by Nokona to demonstrate the effectiveness
of their famous and much loved (among almost all of us) R*******R.
In this cartoon it really looks quite possible that the fielder might in fact be carried completely out of the park by the force of the line drive he's
just leaped for and caught. His glove will stay on, no matter what else happens. And the ball will stay caught.

hey mike, do you have a digipic of that cartoon? sounds funny

ed

Hey Ed,

Sorry I don't, but if you have the Catalog Source Book, go to page 63. There's a very tiny version of the guy, right under the portrait of Carl Erskine.

Mike

A fellow named Jim Huff handled Nocona's advertising in the '40s through '60s and was an artist. I think a lot of the artwork especially some of the Nocona covers from his era, came from his brush. On these cartoon figures they highly resemble the style of an entertaining cartoonist for the "Dallas Morning News" covering this period and for the life of me, I cannot remember his name. He and Jim, who lived in Dallas, may have known each other. The "News" cartoonist penned some great Southwest Conference cartoons during football season using the schools' mascots that were humorous and enjoyable.
Ron Carlson has a large Nocona poster with either Jim's or this artist's artwork that I think he's selling.

MCCLANAHAN, WILLIAM J. (1907-1981). William J. McClanahan, cartoonist, the son of Samuel Mortimer and Molly McClanahan, was born on December 2, 1907, in Greenville, Texas. He was raised in San Angelo and Dallas, where he attended Highland Park High School and graduated in 1927. He subsequently enrolled in engineering at Southern Methodist University, but dropped out to marry his high school sweetheart, Eloise Dunagan, and to study at the Dallas Art Institute. While he was there, he began his newspaper career as a sportswriter covering high school football games for the Dallas Morning News.qv Throughout the 1930s McClanahan held a number of sports-reporting jobs at both the News and a sister paper, the Dallas Journal.qv He interrupted his career to enlist in the Army Air Corps during World War IIqv and attained the rank of captain. He remained in the Air Force Reserve until 1967, when he retired as a lieutenant colonel.

After his discharge from the service in 1946, he found his true vocation as a cartoonist. He returned to the News sports staff that same year to write, edit, and draw cartoons. His first regular sports cartoon appeared on August 4, 1946. McClanahan, considered by many people to be the first well-known sports cartoonist in the South, was an innovator. He is perhaps best remembered as the "father of the Southwest Conference cartoon mascots"; as the popularizer of the "Grid Gram," a column that was, according to him, a "visual boxscore of a football game"; and as the inventor of the challenging "Texas Sports Exam." In 1957, after the retirement of senior News cartoonist John F. Knott,qv McClanahan joined Jack Howells (Herc) Ficklen as an editorial cartoonist for the paper, a position he held until his retirement in 1973. His last regular cartoon appeared in the News on December 29, 1972. McClanahan won numerous awards, including the Southwest Journalism Award in 1970, numerous National Freedom Foundation awards, the 1967 Dallas Press Club Award for Cartooning, several Congress of Freedom Awards, the Dallas Chamber of Commerce Sportsman Award, the National Foundation for Highway Safety Award, the Lincoln National Life Foundation Award, and the 1972 Hella Temple Award. In retirement he published two books, a collection of cartoons called Texas: The Way It Used to Be (1968) and Scenery for Model Railroads (1958, 1967). McClanahan died of a heart attack in Dallas on September 7, 1981.
(Ironically Bill and I were from the same hometown)

Hi Joe,
Thanks for the Wm. J McClanahan biography. It was fascinating.
Mike