Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales

Jack Bales’ vocation for more than 40 years was assisting students, faculty, and staff in Mary Washington’s library. His avocation, research and writing, was always an important part of his life as well, and now that he’s retired, the Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus happily stays busy with these interests. Bales continues to present Zoom PowerPoint programs to baseball groups and public libraries around the country on his true-crime narrative and tale of baseball history, The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl’s Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series (History Press, 2021). He is an active member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), and has presented several Zoom programs on assorted baseball topics. He is also an occasional moderator of a SABR book discussion group devoted to the sport during the nineteenth century.

Bales has always liked to focus on topics about which little has been written, as he enjoys digging around in primary, original sources and uncovering new information that sheds light on the historical record. While working on his 2019 book, Before They Were the Cubs: The Early Years of Chicago’s First Professional Baseball Team, he read about Lewis Meacham, a Chicago Daily Tribune sports editor who helped William Hulbert of the White Stockings (the team now known as the Chicago Cubs) found the National League in 1876. Very little was known about Meacham, but Bales tracked down invaluable material in both newspapers and Chicago and Vermont archives. He gave a PowerPoint presentation, “The Mysterious Lewis Meacham: The Untold Story of William Hulbert’s Right-Hand Man,” at a SABR meeting and also wrote an essay on him for the organization’s peer-reviewed Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/lewis-meacham/

Bales said that it took many months of research, as most of what was published was inaccurate, including a fictitious Civil War record. “You know you are going to have a rough time of it,” he recently observed, “when biographical sources for the person you are writing about provide assorted birth dates, various names, two birth places, two burial spots, and even two entries in the popular website “Find a Grave,” both of them incorrect.”

Bales hosted the annual convention of the Horatio Alger Society in Fredericksburg in 2021, 2022, and 2023. He will host it again this May.  Among the persons attending will be Michael Dirda, the weekly book columnist for the Washington Post.

A poster advertises Jack Bales’ presentation at the Brookfield Reads program of the Brookfield, Illinois, public library.

Various research and writing projects continue to keep Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales busy.  After his true-crime narrative and tale of baseball history, The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl’s Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series, was published in 2021, he began presenting Zoom PowerPoint programs to baseball groups all over the country.  Library organizations soon followed, including an in-person PowerPoint presentation and book-signing for the Quincy, Illinois, Historical Society in April this year.  The public library of Brookfield, Illinois, selected the book for its 2022 Brookfield Reads program, and on Aug. 13, Bales spoke before local residents, answered questions and signed books.

Bales has published three books on southern author Willie Morris, and a week after his trip to Illinois, he was in Jackson, Mississippi, signing books and discussing Morris’s life and works at the Mississippi Book Festival.

Bales is an active member of the Society for American Baseball Research and is working on a Zoom program for SABR’s Nineteenth-Century Speakers Series.  The title is “Beer Beats Them: The Chicago White Stockings’ 1886 Season and the End of a Base Ball Dynasty.”

Bales hosted the annual convention of the Horatio Alger Society in Fredericksburg in 2021 and 2022.  He will host the convention again in 2023 and will present a PowerPoint program on Albert Payson Terhune, the author of numerous popular stories about dogs that were published in the 1920s and 1930s.

Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales

Jack Bales, Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus, remains busy and focused in his retirement as he promotes his latest book, The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl’s Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series (The History Press, 2021). Besides participating in podcasts and interviews, he has presented numerous Zoom PowerPoint talks to various groups around the country about how a young woman, Violet Popovich, shot Cub shortstop Billy Jurges in his hotel room on July 6, 1932. It was “an episode of unrequited love,” according to the baseball periodical The Sporting News, and the shooting indirectly led to Babe Ruth’s famous “Called Shot” home run during that year’s World Series. “I spent quite a few years researching and writing the book,” Bales said, “but it was all a lot of fun and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. The Zoom talks—with dozens of marvelous images and photographs—have gone over very well, but then, this fascinating story of baseball history and true-crime intrigue deserves all the credit.”

Public libraries have also been emailing him about Zoom presentations for their patrons—and buying his book as well—and Bales does not foresee retirement boredom creeping up anytime soon. The Chicago Cub Shot for Love landed on at least two “best books of the year” lists, including the Washington Independent Review of Books’ “The Best Book I Read All Year” in the December 29 issue. The reviewer writes in part: “Bales does an impressive job of melding his exhaustive research with a fast-paced tale to bring the story of Chicago Cub shortstop Billy Jurges and showgirl Violet Popovich to well-deserved prominence. . . . A book to be savored. . . .”

Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales. Photo Credit: Erin Wysong.

Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales’ book, “The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl’s Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series,” was the subject of an article in Chicago’s Daily Herald.  The book and article focus on 21-year-old Violet Popovich, a former chorus girl with the Earl Carroll Vanities, who shot 24-year-old Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges in Jurges’ room on July 6, 1932 at the Hotel Carlos in Chicago. Read more.

UMW Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales was recently quoted in an article in The Free Lance-Star about Beheshta Nassari, a local young woman who came to Fredericksburg as a 18-year-old refugee from Afghanistan. Determined to graduate from high school before the cutoff age of 21, Nassari learned English in three years, and, in the midst of a pandemic, completed her junior and senior year requirements. For that, Nassari’s counselor at James Monroe High School nominated her for a scholarship through the Horatio Alger Society, which is holding its annual convention this weekend, organized by Bales.