Alva Review-Courier -

It is human nature to harbor a desire to be around great people, and to keep lasting mementos of the experience. One way of accomplishing that goal is to collect a notable person’s “John Henry” on paper. But the difficulty of doing so tends to vary inversely with that person’s degree of fame and with their willingness to give signatures.

Now for example, you take Albert Einstein’s signature. His autograph wasn’t widely available, and memento seekers used to grab every scrap of paper he ever touched that wasn’t nailed down, even table napkins on which he might have scribbled a few hurried words. A large percentage of his personal checks were never cashed – the payees preferring instead to retain something that he had signed.

But for pure desirability and “collectability,” few autographs are as widely sought after as those of sports heroes. Therefore, let us discuss a circumstance involving none other than “The Babe” of baseball.

The day after my father, Ralph “Hoppe” Kilbourne graduated from a Kansas high school in 1919, he hopped a freight train, and headed for the sunny environs out west to try his hand at playing baseball for the Chandler (Arizona) Bears and San Francisco Seals. To supplement his meager minor league income, he became a member of the “Harbor Lights” band, playing a steel guitar on the radio in San Francisco. He also worked as a marble mason – one such job was laying marble in the William Randolph Hearst mansion in California.

At times Dad would play exhibition baseball games with show business celebrities such as Buster Keaton or Joey Brown, but his real excitement came from playing games with major leaguers such as George Herman Ruth, better known as Babe Ruth. After one such game, dad managed to get “the Babe’s” autograph on a baseball

Dad passed away in 1952, leaving a modest estate – and the autographed baseball. The baseball was put away and rarely seen by family members during the next few years. And so it was largely forgotten, until my mother retired from piano teaching in 1980. At that time, she sold her house and most of her belongings, and moved in with her granddaughter who was then living in Germany. It was only then that all family members realized the prized baseball was missing.

Needless to say, the baseball has never reappeared – perhaps being sold for a dollar or two at one of several garage sales “in a box of various and sundry stuff.” An unadorned baseball of that vintage, would be worth comparatively little. But by adding the signature of a major sports figure of that time, it might command thousands of dollars in the markets of autograph seekers.

Famous people are not always open to sign their names for the swarm of enthusiastic collectors of signatures that might want them. But in this article, and several future pieces, I’ll offer some of my more memorable experiences with getting autographs of special persons, which in most cases deals with golfing personalities at the Colonial golf course in Ft. Worth. After all, the golf season is now in full swing.

Several years ago, TV coverage of the U.S. Open golf tournament at historic Pinehurst No. 2 opened with a shot of Payne Stewart’s bronze statue, posed in his moment of victory in the 1999 tournament held at the same location. His statue’s body and right fist were thrust forward, while he pirouetted on one foot like a ballet dancer, with the other foot held high behind his head.

The bronze likeness captures the man’s extreme zest for life at that moment, but of course, it could not exhibit the color contained in the man’s usual garb. Missing from the artist’s fashioning of the cold, hard bronze were the vibrant hues of his flashy knickers and shirt, the highly polished fashionable shoes, the jaunty short-brimmed cap – and of course, the fire in his strikingly pale blue eyes. As many sports writers of the time had said, “If you’re going to look like that, you’d better be able to back it up with performance.”

(Next time, getting Payne’s autograph.)