Scrapbook scores a homer

Lori Holcomb
The Enquirer

Its pages have browned and cracked with age and some of its edges are torn. Taped inside are faces from baseball’s golden days of the 1940s and 1950s — when many players lost their prime years to military service and multi-million dollar endorsement deals didn’t exist.

Thomas Wentworth, 66, handled the relic with kid gloves, delicately turning each page of the scrapbook he created more than half-century ago.

“My mouth dropped open when I saw it,” he said last week. “I had totally forgotten about it.”

Like opening the front door to a long-lost childhood friend, the book’s unexpected return revived forgotten memories of his youth in Battle Creek.

“Looking at it, I think of Wiltshire Avenue and the little house where six of us lived,” he said of his family.

Wentworth left Battle Creek in 1962 after graduating from Western Michigan University. His parents moved out of his childhood home in several years later.

Along with the scrapbook, many of his baseball cards and prized memorabilia was misplaced or sold in the transition. He didn’t even think about the book until after he began to clean out his deceased mother’s house three years ago.

Little did Wentworth know, but Battle Creek resident Pat Dougherty had almost two decades ago paid $20 to a customer for a box of random memorabilia. Dougherty owned B.C. Comics Store, which he said closed in the early 1990s.

While most items brought into his store had no monetary value, the scrapbook with a cowboy wrangling a bull on its cover caught his eye. Inside were the scribblings of a child, along with clippings, pictures and cards from the heyday of Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and Ted Wellington.

His son advised Dougherty the book had no value. But something told Dougherty otherwise.

“Looking through the book, I thought, ‘Holy mackerel, there’s a lot of history in there’,” Dougherty said. “My mantra is, you care more as you get older, so I thought it was worth it to try to find the guy.”

He put the book in his safe, where it eventually was forgotten under stacks of other papers and files. But by February he had rediscovered the scrapbook and called the Enquirer asking for advice on locating a man.

“I was going through some old files and I found this scrapbook,” Dougherty said. “It looks like someone put a lot of work into this.”

He said the only clues were the dates 1950 and 1951 in the book, which had the name “Tommy Wentworth” stamped in it.

With a few clicks, a search engine brought up a Thomas Wentworth in Bertrand, 100 miles southwest of Battle Creek. Several phone calls and a few weeks later, a Federal Express package reunited Wentworth with the time capsule from his youth.

The two men have never met.

After receiving the scrapbook, Wentworth said he’d like to know “how the heck it got to that card shop.”

He said the book is almost exactly the way he remembered it, with few or no items missing. Wentworth said music and sports were the two most important elements in his youth and both are still pretty high on his priority list. The retired high school band director still makes trips to Detroit, Chicago, South Bend, Ind., and even Florida to catch games.

Wentworth said he is still shocked to have the book back and plans to thoroughly read each page soon. Afterward, he said he will try to find out if it has any monetary value and then preserve what is left.

Dougherty said regardless of the book’s worth, it made his day to give Wentworth back a sentimental piece of his past.

“I just hope he pays it forward,” Dougherty said. “If we all did nice things for each other, it would be a much better place.”

Lori Holcomb can be reached at 966-0675 or lholcomb@battlecr.gannett.com.

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