LOS ANGELES — Now on display at the Los Angeles Central Library through November in an exhibit titled “Something in Common.” There’s a San Diego Chicken costume, a Babe Ruth semi-smoked cigar that probably — maybe? possible? — was taken from a Philadelphia brothel in 1924 and signed a baseball by Mother Teresa. The real Mother Teresa? Well… maybe not.
The artifacts are on loan from the Baseball Reliquary, a veritable organization that combines wonder and whimsy with deep reverence. The vibe lands somewhere near the intersection of Cooperstown and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
The stories these gems tell belong to the ages – as now, aptly, so does Terry Cannon, the cheerful, thoughtful, masterful doer whose curiosity, energy and passion for his projects were boundless. The nonprofit Reliquary was Cannon’s brainchild in 1996. Then came the Shrine of the Eternals, a sort of distant and mischievous cousin to the baseball Hall of Fame, in 1999.
The last few years have been difficult. The pandemic struck, followed by Cannon’s death from cancer in August 2020. Then a seismic adjustment indefinitely closed the Pasadena Central Library, where members of the reliquary and fans gathered annually to pay tribute to initiates as broad and diverse as Jim Bouton (2001), Shoeless Joe Jackson ( 2002), Buck O’Neil (2008), Marvin Miller (2003) and Charlie Brown (2017).
In this summer of baseball when All Stars played at Dodger Stadium and past greats like Gil Hodges, Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat, Minnie Miñoso and O’Neil were honored at Cooperstown, the recent lull sparked concerns that the Shrine of Eternals might would have been silenced forever.
“Absolutely not,” said Mary Cannon, Terry’s widow and co-conspirator, noting the start of a rousing comeback. “We are working hard on it.”
The website, which had been down since January due to technical problems, came back to life in early July. And the sanctuary’s 2020 class will be inaugurated Nov. 5 in a public ceremony at the Los Angeles Central Library’s Taper Auditorium, coinciding the following day with the closing of the six-month exhibit. That class – the broadcaster Bob Costas; Rube Foster, known as the father of Black Baseball; and Max Patkin, the “Clown Prince of Baseball” – has been on hiatus for nearly two years.
“Fantastic,” said Costas, who, like many others, assumed the reliquary had been lost to the pandemic. “But I’d better show up because I’m the only one alive. This is the sanctuary of the Eternals, and the other two are already in eternity.”
The Baseball Reliquary emphasizes the art, culture, and characters of the game over statistics and is funded in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. The thousands of books, journals, periodicals, historical journals, artifacts, original paintings, and correspondence are now housed at Whittier College’s Institute for Baseball Studies.
“Terry and I came up with that and figured that out and put it forward,” Joe Price said, accepting a request from Cannon before his death to take charge and send the reliquary forward. With his infectious enthusiasm and mischievous smile, Price seems like a logical choice.
Now a professor emeritus of religious studies at Whitter, Price, along with Charles Adams, a retired English professor at Whittier, spent the pandemic organizing and cataloging the collection of more than 4,000 books by Library of Congress standards.
Inside, history and historical fiction mingle in a playful way. It’s where Moe Berg, the former catcher who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, crosses paths with the 1979 Disco Demolition Night in Chicago — with mementos of each in the archives. Unfortunately, the yukata jacket Berg “would” have worn in Japan and a partially melted vinyl record “allegedly” from Comiskey Park seem to have lost its certificates of authenticity over the years.
“Academy Awards are always won by movie stars, but everyone else who has their water with them and makes sure they look good — the character actors are more interesting than the movie stars,” said Ron Shelton, who wrote and directed Bull Durham. Shelton took Steve Dalkowski, the inspiration for the film’s Nuke LaLoosh character, into the Shrine in 2009. “In a way, the Hall of Fame honors the movie stars, even though many of them are dishonorable characters. The Reliquary is about everything that isn’t a movie star.”
Shelton and Cannon met when they were involved with experimental film groups in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s.
“He was outrageously brilliant,” said Shelton, whose book on the making of Bull Durham, “The Church of Baseball,” was published this month. “I use strange in the most positive way. Not only did he have his own drummer, he had a kind of vision that went with it. The reliquary is truly a work of imagination. The archive lives in your head and sometimes in your heart.”
The Sanctuary’s inaugural class in 1999 included Curt Flood, who took MLB to court to challenge the reserve clause that prevents players from moving; Dock Ellis, perhaps best known for claiming to have thrown a no-hitter while high on LSD, but who was also a civil rights advocate; and Bill Veeck, the misfit owner who was a master showman.
During the ceremony, Cannon read a letter Ellis had received from Jackie Robinson praising his civil rights work and warning him that people in and out of the game would eventually turn against him. Ellis was moved to tears. Then he donated a set of his curlers.
Those are authentic, just like the burlap peanut bag with peanuts “packaged for Gaylord Perry’s peanut farm”. The sacristy box “allegedly” used by a priest at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to administer the last sacristy to a dying Babe Ruth in 1948? The jockstrap “supposedly” worn by Eddie Gaedel, the shortest person to appear in an MLB game at 3 feet 7 inches? With twinkling eyes, Price admits that the provenance of some of these items is “certainly questionable.”
“You know what was really hard to find was a kid’s jockstrap,” said Mary Cannon, adding a few details to make it look like it came from the 1951 St. Louis Browns. “We went to so many stores to find that thing.”
By definition, the word “reliquary” means “a container for holy relics”. For Terry Cannon and his disciples, more important than the actual authenticity of these “holy relics” is the idea theirs.
A visual as simple as supermarket products can be a powerful force to spark the imagination. As a joke while in Class AA Williamsport in 1987, catcher Dave Bresnahan threw a potato into left field on a false pick-off pitch to trick a rival into fleeing from third base to an out at home plate. A distant cousin of Hall of Fame catcher Roger Bresnahan, Dave waited for the runner with the ball at home plate. He was promptly released and never played again. In memoriam, Mary Cannon cut out two potatoes — at least one of which lives in the archives here in a Mason jar.
“We didn’t know that formaldehyde would make them dark brown,” she said, adding, “There are all these wonderful stories, but there is none, so we tried to create tangible things for people to see.”
Even within the baseball industry, some are unfamiliar with the reliquary. Nancy Faust, the retired Chicago White Sox organist who made walk-up music for batters, had to look it up when she got the call for induction in 2018.
“My husband, Joe, said, ‘What’s this, a joke? A baseball aquarium?’” Faust said. “I said, ‘There’s nothing weird about it.’ When I knew who was going in with me, I thought, ‘Wow! That’s pretty nice company.’ I was honored to be remembered.”
Faust was inducted in 2018, along with Tommy John and Rusty Staub.
“Rusty Staub is a perfect one, right?” said Costa. “He’s not really a Hall of Famer, but he’s an important player. There are other players that aren’t that important, but you put Rusty Staub in before you put Chet Lemon in, because Rusty Staub is ‘Le Grande Orange’.
dr. Frank Jobe, the inventor of the Tommy John operation, preceded the pitcher in the Shrine in 2012. There is a Spaceman (Bill Lee, 2000) and a Bird (Mark Fidrych, 2002). There is also a rich diversity in Jackie Robinson (2005) and his widow, Rachel (2014), the first female umpire, Pam Postema (2000), and various representatives of the Negro Leagues.
Bouton once referred to the shrine as “the people’s Hall of Fame, and inductions traditionally began with Terry Cannon leading the audience in the ringing of cowbells in tribute to Hilda Chester, arguably the most famous fan in history.
As Cannon noted at the 2018 ceremony, Chester’s fame began to fade as the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles and “although she died in relative obscurity in 1978, in our community of fans, Hilda is royalty. And through our annual commemoration, we can make sure that the last bell for Hilda Chester has not yet sounded.”
It also turns out not to be for the reliquary. In memory of Shelton, it was the poet WD Snodgrass who, when speaking, often told his audience that every time he tells a story, it is true.
“Then he would pause,” Shelton said. ‘And say, ‘I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s better than true.’ That’s what the arts do. It’s better than true. And that’s where the reliquary lives.”