Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales
Jack Bales, Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus, has been keeping busy since he retired last August after more than 40 years at the UMW Library. His article, “‘He will do just what is best, no doubt’: William Hulbert’s Calculated Dismantling of the Chicago Base Ball Association,” was published in Base Ball 12: New Research on the Early Game (2021). Using original documents and primary sources such as the baseball club’s 1876 corporate charter, newspaper articles, and Hulbert’s letters and business records, the author details how the baseball club president shut down the Chicago Base Ball Association and, in so doing, disenfranchised many of its investors so he could form the new Chicago Ball Club. Base Ball is an annual peer-reviewed book series that promotes the study of the sport’s early history by publishing original research and analysis. Bales will discuss his work at the eleventh annual Frederick Ivor-Campbell Nineteenth Century Base Ball Conference, to be held virtually from April 22–24. He will also participate in a panel discussion on Chicago baseball executive and National League President William Hulbert.
Bales’s latest book, The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl’s Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series, is scheduled for publication on June 21 by The History Press of Charleston, South Carolina. Using books, newspaper articles, memoirs, interviews, court records, archival documents, and never-before-published photographs, the author traces the story of how a young Chicago woman unwittingly set in motion events that indirectly changed baseball history.
Bales spoke on the nineteenth-century children’s author Horatio Alger, Jr. in February for UMW’s William B. Crawley Great Lives Lecture Series. He has published many works on Alger over the years and will host the convention of the Horatio Alger Society, a book collectors’ organization, here in Fredericksburg from June 3–6.