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Another Glance Into the Charles Conlon Baseball Collection
I was planning on taking a second look into the fabuous Conlon collection to see how many Conlon photos of Lou Gehrig I could find. Just as I was about ready to post, our friend Don Stokes comes up with a beautiful colorization of a real classic. It’s the Conlon photo of Gehrig in his powerful batting stance at the plate. I didn’t even have to ask Don for this one, he just read my mind…Nice timing Don!
The caption with this photo reads: “Conlon customarily photographed a batter at the end of his swing, but he preferred to pose Gehrig in his bating stance, the better to display Lou’s massive leg muscles, the product of his favorite winter pastime, speed skating. 1930 was one of Gehrig’s greatest years, 41 home runs, 174 runs batted in, and a career-high .379 batting average.” (From Baseball’s Golden Age)
In this article, I’ve posted a few more Gehrig photos from the Conlon collection. There’s no question that Lou, along with Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, was one of Conlon’s favorite subjects. In the coming weeks I hope to post more photos of these superstars from the Conlon collection.
In case you don’t remember, the Charles Conlon Baseball Collection is probably the greatest collection of baseball photos in existence. Conlon took thousands of portraits of major league baseball players in the early decades of the 20th century, and many are easily recognizable classics. Conlon worked for New York City newspapers in the early 1900s as a proof-reader with a photographic hobby before editor John B. Foster invited him to shoot photographs for The Telegram daily newspaper sporting pages, and for the Spalding’s Base Ball Guide annual publication. Conlon’s original glass plate negatives are owned by North Little Rock, Arkansas collector John Rogers. The collection of 8,400 different Conlon glass negatives are housed in the John Rogers Archivewww.johnrogersarchive.com.
Photo Credits: “Baseball’s Golden Age – The Photographs of Charles Conlon;” Don Stokes Facebok page: https://www.facebook.com/Don-Stokes-Old-Time-Baseball-Colorizations-923346241033508/timeline/; and public domain
Information: Excerpts edited from ”Baseball’s Golden Age – The Photographs of Charles Conlon”; and from the Charles Conlon Wikipedia page.
