Excerpt from “Your 1948 Houston Buffs, Dixie Champions: Brief Biographies By Morris Frank and Adie Marks (1948).
Any historical artifact can get lost, but it’s also true that the chances increase when people get the idea that an item has a personal monetary value that is more important than the item’s pertinence to the preservation of a fuller and more accurate portrayal of history.
So it is with baseball items. Ever since fans fell in love with the romance of finding a 1951 Mickey Mantle rookie card, or an even rarer limited production early 19th century tobacco card of Honus Wagner, or maybe stumbling upon a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, hoarding of things has gone crazy. As a result, some items get sentenced to eons of time in attics, basements, and vaults for decades, only to be later thrown away by descendants, or else. put in garage sales or transferred mindlessly to some other storage space.
I will offer today a modest example from the Houston area.
About 2005, while I was serving as Board President of the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame, we learned through a TBHOF supporter that Mrs. Eleanor Mazar, the widow of former Houston Buffs pitcher Pete Mazar, was in possession of an item that “might” be important to us.
Important? I’ll say! According to our very reliable informer, Mrs. Jo Russell, the widow of late Houston Buffs President Allen Russell, the Mazars somehow had ended up with the only known 78 rpm record copy of the 1947 Houston Buffs Dixie Series Championship Banquet, the first in a long history of Houston winter baseball banquets.
Wow! At first it looked easy. Lead pipe cinch easy. Jo Russell and Eleanor Mazar were on good terms. All we wanted was the opportunity to record the albums with modern technology. In her contacts with Mrs. Russell, Mrs. Mazar seemed eager to help. When we tried to get it done, however, a different wind began to blow.
Appointments to meet and discuss ways of doing the recordings got cancelled by Mrs. Mazar for other reasons. She apparently had been talking with her family and they reportedly had some concern that the records might get broken while they were in our possession. We understood. And we began to explore ways of just coming into the Mazar home and doing the transcription recording on site.
Before we could get anything done, Mrs. Mazar’s poor health caused us all to back way off the idea until that situation clarified. Sadly, it clarified on the extreme downside when Mrs. Mazar passed away on January 20, 2006 at the age of 82. We never found another opportunity through any other surviving family member to pursue the issue.
And more time has passed.
Those historic records now are either one of four places: (1) trashed; (2) sold; (3) given away; or (4) family stored again elsewhere, and just waiting for the first person who comes along with a “what’s this?” attitude to find and trash them. They would not have made anyone rich, but Houston’s baseball history is all the poorer for their loss.
If there’s anyone out there from the Pete Mazar family that happens to read this column, please get in touch with me at
… if you share our interest in making sure these items are copied for history. The Houston Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) will help you get the work done, if it is still possible, and we will make sure that your mother, Eleanor, and your father, Pete, get all the credit they so justly deserve.
Pete Mazar was another of my childhood Houston Buff heroes and I would love to see him and his family be recognized as the people who were responsible for the survival of this important item.
Thank you.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
May 6, 2013 at 2:22 pm |
Very sad, but also an excellent example of how things like this happen.