A walk through the rooms of Ted Patterson’s old house, off York Road just below Towson, felt as if the entire history of American sports had exploded all over the place and scattered on every chair and table, every couch and bed, every piece of floor and wall space in every single room.
It felt like a riotous extension of the fantasy of any kid who ever spent a nickel on a pack of baseball cards or waited outside a ballpark hoping to grab Mickey Mantle’s autograph.
This was the home of a grownup who’d held onto every instinct connecting sports with romantic notions of heroes, and never wanted to let go of a single memory of enchantment.
With Patterson, the longtime Baltimore sportscaster who died last week at age 76, his home was more than a museum, and far more than a savvy collector’s riches. It was proof he’d led a good life, perched behind microphones as he and generations of sports reporters described superb athletes giving it their best shot.
The first time I walked through Patterson’s house, I left thinking all this memorabilia was a million-dollar collection. The next time I went, I brought a couple of friends whose insights into the value of sports memorabilia are more educated than mine.
“Was I wrong about it being a million-dollar collection?” I asked them when we left.
“Nah,” one of them said. “There’s a million dollars in every single room.”
In Patterson’s final years, I’d ask him why he wasn’t selling some of the stuff. His wife had died, and his son and daughter had no interest in any of it, he said. Why not cash in and spend his retirement years coasting?
“I still enjoy looking at it,” he said simply.
Try to understand: You couldn’t find spare inches in his house uncovered by sports history. When I brought two friends, Alan and Morty Marcus, with me a couple of years ago, Alan recalled, “I vividly remember being in the kitchen, and Ted gently asked me to step off a newspaper lying on the floor from the early 1900s with Christy Mathewson on the front page.”
There was nowhere to walk where stuff wasn’t spread out and stacked or just tossed about. It was everywhere, as if growing organically out of the walls and the floors. Even the beds were completely covered with photos, scorecards, vintage advertising posters and magazines, football and baseball cards. The house had four bedrooms, but I don’t know where the guy slept at night.
He had a basement with dozens of uniforms once worn by major league players like Bob Feller, Rocky Colavito, catcher Ray Fosse the night he was knocked out by Pete Rose, and many more, including a couple of guys named Robinson who played here.
He had the cap Earl Weaver wore on the last day he managed the Orioles. He had a huge photograph of the 50th reunion of baseball’s first All-Star game, autographed by each player.
There were audiotapes of interviews with Willie Mays and Ted Williams and John Unitas and Art Donovan and hundreds more. There was an audiotape of an interview Patterson did years ago with Jack Graney.
Who was Graney? Only the very first guy Babe Ruth ever faced, back in 1914, when the Babe broke in as a pitcher with the Boston Red Sox. There were advertising posters, too. In one, Dizzy and Daffy Dean pitched for Union Leader Smoking Tobacco, no doubt favored by all Little League squirts of that long-ago era.
There were football programs spanning the 20th century. In one of them, from a Southern Cal-Notre Dame game in the 1920s, there were photos of each player.
“This guy’s face looks familiar,” I told Patterson. But the name under it wasn’t. It was a player named Marion Morrison.
He left college and became some guy named John Wayne.
Much of the collection Patterson put together through the luck of access. As a reporter who prowled dugouts and locker rooms, he’d ask if he could have an autographed ball, or maybe a uniform that would otherwise be tossed out, or a pair of spikes.
Over the past year, as his health was failing, he consigned his collection to an auction company specializing in sports memorabilia. They needed a 16-foot box truck and an eight-foot cargo van to haul away all of it.
Patterson was a kid growing up in Mansfield, Ohio, when he started collecting the old Topps baseball cards in 1952.
“And I didn’t throw them out,” he said.
Nor much else, either.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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