Bart Stinson
The predawn hours aren’t very different, half a century later. The street’s still quiet, rain still splatters on the sidewalk, and a cardinal still calls from the neighbor’s tree. Only the cast of characters has changed. I used to share simultaneous dawns with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Now we’re scattered among several time zones, and among the living and the dead.
Today, nobody knows or cares if I rise with the cardinal. But 52 years ago, adults were staring down driveways and listening impatiently for my bicycle tires to come crunching through the gravel, because I was the paperboy.
It’s difficult for Millennials to imagine how central the newspaper was to our daily routine in those days. Adults rose early to read it before work. Households negotiated unspoken agreements to distribute and exchange the sections so multiple family members could read the paper simultaneously. My sister, who recently retired as a college professor, first learned to read in “the funny papers.” It set an agenda for the day’s conversations. Sometimes it set the tone.
My least favorite part of the paper route was collecting. Maybe “least favorite” is a euphemism. I hated collecting, which required me to come back in the afternoon or early evening, prime recreational hours, to chase elusive adults for my money. Even the ones who didn’t hide from me could eat up the clock with molasses-like conversation.
But there was one slow-moving adult I loved to go visit. She was an unmarried, childless woman who had spent her career at the front desk of a Detroit hotel and was living out her final years in a small trailer in our little town. Her hotel hosted out-of-town professional baseball players for the season, and she had stories. She always paid her subscription promptly, but she could have gotten six months behind and I would never have dropped her from my route. I was a cover-to-cover Baseball Digest reader, so I recognized most of the ballplayers’ names she mentioned. Everybody would have recognized one of the names, Ty Cobb.
There had been an “autobiography” ghost-written by Al Stump. The elderly baseball hero was dying of prostate cancer that spread into his spine and pelvis. He was in awful pain. Under heavy medication and the influence of alcohol, he said some pretty mean stuff to the people around him, according to Stump. Cobb’s autobiography came out shortly after his death. A former West Point varsity baseball player by the name of Douglass MacArthur wrote the foreword to the book. But I didn’t read it. Sales were disappointing to Stump, who didn’t earn much beyond his $300 advance from the publisher.
He turned against Cobb and wrote a tell-all article for True magazine about the dying man’s last days. He followed that up with his own sensational version of Cobb’s life, Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Ever to Play Baseball. We know now that it was slanderous. Important parts of it were false. You could call it a “fake” biography. Ron Shelton wrote and directed a biopic based mostly on Stump’s magazine article, starring Tommie Lee Jones as Cobb. Shelton added a scene in which Cobb attempted to rape a Reno casino cigarette girl, but couldn’t consummate the act due to impotence. He later admitted fabricating that scene “because it felt like the kind of thing that Cobb might do.”
Al Stump
When you tell a really good suite of lies that fit together, they form a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. The various lies lend credibility to one another. The second is more believable because of the first, and the third is more believable because of the second. There is a piling-on by casual accusers who don’t bother to check out the truth of earlier accusations.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. You’ve got to care whether it’s true or not. No matter how well it fits with your other beliefs and opinions, you’ve got to care whether it’s true. Otherwise, you’re part of the problem.
Even PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns joined the posthumous lynch mob. He could have researched Cobb’s bold public comments in favor of admitting Blacks to major league baseball, or Cobb’s praises of Mays and Campanella, but he dramatically repeated Stump’s dishonest claim that Cobb was a racial bigot. I believed it for years. This is the power of gossip. It’s why college librarians belabor the distinction between primary and secondary sources. Burns obviously satisfied himself with secondary sources (Stump and imitators) and never looked for primary sources like police, hospital or morgue records.
Ty Cobb’s reputation is under rehabilitation by people who rely on the primary sources. We are fortunate that his sport is the subject of scholarship, not just gossip. The Society for American Baseball Research publishes The National Pastime, a footnoted, peer-reviewed journal. In it, meticulous researchers have not only discredited Stump’s accusations of psychotic violence and racial animosity, but have uncovered evidence that Stump swindled collectors and auction houses after Cobb’s death with forgeries and fraudulent memorabilia. Through Ken Burns, Ron Shelton and others of similar integrity, he has swindled us, too. For 50 years, Stump and ilk deprived us of a genuine American hero, and I resent it.
I had never heard of primary and secondary sources when I was on my paper route. But my customer was a primary source, alright. She was there. And she said Ty Cobb got in some fights with the guys, but he was always a gentleman to her, always courteous.
