DePauw Alums Ford Frick '15 & Dave Bohmer '69 Cited in Story on 1907 Baseball Game

November 16, 2015

"In my book, 150 Years of Kendallville, written for the city’s sesquicentennial in 2013, I had a chapter on VIPs who visited the community over the years," writes Terry Housholder in Indiana's Kendallville News Sun. "I included a story that Major League Baseball Commissioner Ford C. Frick (1894-1978), a Noble County native, wrote in his autobiography, Games, Asterisks, and People, published in 1973, about the world champion Chicago Cubs playing an exhibition game in Kendallville in the summer of 1907."

Householder relates, "Earlier this year, David Bohmer, Ph.D, who for many years taught a course at DePauw University on baseball history, contacted me. As a retirement project, he is writing a book about Ford Frick. He wanted to confirm the date of the Chicago Cubs’ visit to Kendallville in 1907 and asked for my help. After extensive research of newspaper files and microfilm, neither Bohmer, nor I, nor researchers with the state library in Indianapolis, could confirm the visit to Kendallville by the Cubs. But what S. Chandler Lighty of the Indiana State Library discovered was a visit to Kendallville by the Chicago White Sox on Thursday, June 27, 1912. He located a one-paragraph article in a Fort Wayne newspaper that told about the White Sox confirming an upcoming baseball exhibition game in Kendallville."

He adds, "From all indications, Frick’s memory of the Major League baseball team’s game in Kendallville was a little off base. Maybe we’ve set the record straight."

Access the complete story at the newspaper's website.

A 1969 graduate of DePauw, Dave Bohmer (pictured at left) served as director of DePauw's Eugene S. Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media and Media Fellows Program from 1994 until his retirement in 2014.

Ford C. Frick, a 1915 DePauw graduate, served as commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1951-1965. Frick conceived the idea of the Baseball Hall of Fame and was himself inducted in 1970. He was inducted into DePauw University's Athletic Hall of Fame in 1989.

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