1946 Material Added; 1954 Delayed

The work on the 1954 Western International League pages has come to a temporary stop again. There’s a web-site where I get the Tri-City material and it’s down for another weekend (it was up for 3 1/2 days last week). So, I’m working a bit on 1946 material on this page which will eventually be transfered to its own page. You can now go back and find:

• All but a couple of Clancy Loranger’s stories on the Capilanos games for the Vancouver News-Herald, and all of his columns dealing with the Caps,
• All of Alf Cottrell’s On the Sunbeam columns which dealt mainly with baseball,
• Daily standings through July 3.

Alf’s columns—there are eight or so—range from the light to the serious. He has one on Bob Snyder, another Clarkson has written for him, yet another deals with the horrific Spokane bus crash. And there’s one on the NIMBYs of 62 years ago upset at having a baseball park anywhere near their homes. Some things never change.

The columns are always interesting, and eventually, I’ll get around to posting Ken McConnell’s columns from the Province. What’s really cool is the sports cartoons I stumble upon. The Sun and Province always had great cartoonists going back before World War One. This one on your right (click on it to enlarge) accompanies McConnell’s piece I’ve posted from May 20, 1946. The cartoonist by this time is someone named Ray Tracy. This one uses some clever drawing tricks; to avoid trying to do a good caricature of Vancouver’s manager, he has him hidden. Brown is done from a profile shot of an old photo. Tommy Turner ran the Capilano Brewery at the time. The tattered W.I.L. pennant (from 1942) is a nice touch. My guess this cartoon’s supposed to deal with the Caps’ puny offence under Johnson, who finally had enough and walked away from the job in mid-season.

The standings, of course, have been a pain to do as it turned out there were a couple of late games not picked up by the newspapers so I didn’t know they existed. I think there’s still one W.I.L. game for which I cannot find a score. That’s in addition to the papers getting them wrong.

While adding the standings, I corrected some misspelled names in the linescores. But there are two names I’ve just left from the AP linescore; I can find no record of the players though I think I know who they’re supposed to be and made a note for that appropriate date.

I’m also going to flesh out a few of the Victoria game stories where there’s just a sentence. Sid Thomas had columns in the Colonist involving the Athletics, but I don’t think I’ll post any. All I’ve seen so far is constant spin (after a litany of the bad play of the previous evening) that management was doing all it could to make the team win. Unfortunately, he has no player profiles or funny stories or anything like that.

In the meantime, the 1954 page remains on hold as of August 23rd due to the availability problem mentioned above.