Wednesday, October 18, 2006

1960 Phillies experts, anyone?

Holy crap.

I was emailing with my dad about the late Johnny Callison and he sent me scans of the program from the awards dinner he was at in the spring of 1960 -- Dad was getting a citizenship award from the Committee of Boys' Work of The Union League of Philadelphia for a bunch of volunteer work he'd done in high school, and he tells me:

"The autographs are Phillies except for two... one is a bank president and the other is Harry Litwack (the head coach of the Temple basketball team almost forever before John Chaney) and all were seated at my table because I didn't feel like table hopping. The speaker page shows Yankee pitcher Lefty Gomez gave a speech."

Scan of the program listing
Scan of the signatures page

It's a good thing most 17-year-olds these days know better and would get every single person within sight to sign something. Mr. Vernon "Lefty" Gomez! Wow! And it shows John Quinn, the GM of the Phillies, also gave a speech. Lefty Gomez is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and Harry Litwack is in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Anyway, I am trying to figure out who the Phillies signatures are, going from the 1960 Phillies roster. I've picked out so far:

Ken Silvestri (was a Phillies coach that year)
Harry Anderson
Ken Walters
Johnny Callison
Cal Neeman
Jimmie Coker
Bobby Malkmus
Bobby Del Greco

The ones I can't figure out are to the left of Harry Anderson, basically. One's probably that bank president he mentioned. Maybe the other one's a coach, like Silvestri? They're not listed on baseball-reference. Maybe neither of them are Phillies signatures and he just forgot after you know, 46 years or so.

Any ideas? Isn't this just plain neat? The funny part is, he somehow assumed that I wouldn't care about players from before I was born. Little does he know...

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