THE BASEBALL BIBLE : For 48 Years, It Was the Product of Colorful, Devoted Editor

Some years ago when J.G. Taylor Spink owned The Sporting News, his cameramen were sent out to take some new photographs of the St. Louis Cardinals, who had just won the National League pennant.

At the ballpark, the players all cooperated, posing for the pictures enthusiastically--all but Walker Cooper, the club’s stubborn catcher, whose nickname was Muley.

When Cooper said no, Spink told a staff artist to draw the south end of a horse going north. Then he sent word to the Cardinals that the drawing would be used over Cooper’s name unless Cooper posed.

Cooper posed.

“Nobody pushes Taylor Spink around,” an aide commented at the time.

That proved to be generally true for nearly half a century.

The Sporting News, which is based in St. Louis and called TSN by those who read it and write for it, turned 100 in March. And Spink ruled TSN imperiously for 48 years, a period when he was regarded as baseball’s most effective, most eccentric, and clearly most influential journalist.

He is remembered as a gravel-voiced workaholic who spent most of his 74 years on the phone. Born in 1888, he directed TSN as editor, publisher and proprietor from 1914 until he died in 1962. And, first to last, he ran it as if he were the city editor. His beat was America.

There was the day in 1953, for instance, when Spink’s Washington correspondent called to inform him that President Eisenhower had decided to pass up the opening game of the baseball season.

“Ike is going to play golf,” the correspondent said.

“Golf!” Spink shouted. “On opening day? Go on over to the White House and straighten him out.”

Just to be sure, Spink dictated a sharp, instructive telegram to Eisenhower, and sent it off within the hour.

Eisenhower was at the ballgame for the first pitch.

Spink’s world was baseball, the only activity TSN covered until recent times, when it became a multiple-sports weekly.

His zest for baseball was legendary even in Spink’s family, which remembers that a widely traveled Chrysler executive came to dinner one night and talked amusingly of many things from politics to the opera.

“What did you think of him, Papa?” Spink’s daughter-in-law, Edith, asked afterward.

“Boy, was he dull,” Spink said. “He didn’t even know who Stan Musial was.”

To baseball fans, The Sporting News was seldom dull. Spink improved a paper that had come to him as an inheritance from his father, Charles, who began adult life as a farmer in Spink County, South Dakota.

Charles’ brother--Taylor’s Uncle Al--began as a sportswriter in St. Louis, founding TSN in 1886. Al asked Charles, a good businessman, to join the paper later that year and lured him off the farm with a stupendous offer for the 1880s: $50 a week.

Meeting Charles at the St. Louis railroad station, Al embraced him warmly, and at the same time used one hand to lift his watch.

This he pawned for $10.

Then, according to TSN Corporate Editor Lowell Reidenbaugh, “Al treated Charles to the best meal in town.”

The Spink family owned TSN for 91 years until Taylor’s son, C.C. Johnson Spink, sold it to Times Mirror in 1977.

“The decision (to sell) was made on my 60th birthday,” Johnson said. “I had to think about the future of the organization because I have no children. I’m the last of the line.”

All the way, it has been a colorful line:

--One of Taylor Spink’s cousins, Johnson said, “could trace her ancestry back to a horse thief in Canada.”

--He said South Dakota’s Spink County was named for a great-great grandfather.

--Johnson’s wife, Edith, is the mayor of the town they live in, Ladue, Mo., reportedly one of the six wealthiest suburbs in America.

--Johnson himself was the editor who saved The Sporting News, converting it to an all-sports periodical in the 1960s.

“If Taylor had lived 10 more years, TSN would have folded,” said Reidenbaugh, the paper’s long-time managing editor, who today approves of the many changes that have been made by present editor Tom Barnidge and publisher Richard Waters.

--Taylor’s father Charles, who was of Scottish descent, was the family’s first millionaire. He turned TSN profits into a personal fortune before World War I and kept it by leaning on TSN employees in lean times.

Thus, Charles’ editors and printers occasionally got some of their wages in the form of unpaid advertising bills.

To make a nice living, all they had to do was go and collect.

--Charles’ nephew, Ernest, was a junior editor who during one particularly lean month took some of his salary in trade with a clothier who couldn’t pay the full advertising rate.

Drenched in a sudden rainstorm that shrank his new pants, Ernest said: “To keep them down, I weighted them with slugs of type.”

--Founder Al Spink was a dilettante with three interests--horses, the theater and TSN, in that order--and the fascinations of the first two were to cost him the third.

Between editions one week in 1899, Al wrote a three-act play, “The Derby Winner,” starring six live horses galloping on a treadmill on a theater stage.

When the play bombed, Al could only pay the bills by selling his share of TSN to Taylor’s father.

And that’s how TSN came into the possession of Charles, Taylor and then Johnson. It made multimillionaires of all three.

Taylor--born John George Taylor Spink--got his love of horses from Al. Throughout his TSN career, Taylor bet on the races almost every day, betting with St. Louis bookies, often betting heavily, and not always losing.

Vi DeLorme, his personal secretary for 38 years, said:

“A man who bets the horses as much and as often as Mr. Spink did is bound to win some of the time.”

On one occasion, after he had made a killing at a California track, Taylor endorsed a bookie’s $2,000 check over to Johnson as a reward for his son’s aggressive advertising salesmanship that month.

Johnson promptly went out and bought a new car, endorsing the check over to the automobile agency.

“Then I forgot about it,” Johnson said. “Until the IRS came down on me. Waving the check in my face, they told me that I was a big-time gambler. I had the devil’s own time proving that the biggest bet I’ve ever made was one buck.”

His gambling took some of Taylor Spink’s money but not much of his time. He gave The Sporting News 10 or 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and advised his employees to do the same.

“In this business, you’ve got to work long hours until you’re 40,” he often said.

“What happens when I’m 40?” one applicant asked.

“By then you’ll be used to it,” Spink said.

During office hours, standing behind his desk, roaring into the telephone, Spink was a short, round man, rumpled, jowly, with dark bags under the eyes. He has been called a “pint-sized, souped-up bulldozer.”

The trigger every day, every year, was his boundless energy.

“He never ran down,” Reidenbaugh said.

To those who knew him best, Spink came through as a tenacious, terrible-tempered perfectionist who could, however, be generous, understanding, and even normal at times.

He wasn’t, of course, the first eccentric to edit TSN. An early century predecessor, the short-story satirist Ring Lardner, put on his hat one noon and went out to lunch. He hasn’t been back since.

Spink began his 53-year association with The Sporting News in 1909 when his father reluctantly hired him as an office boy after he had dropped out of high school.

Telling Reidenbaugh about it later, Spink said his father angrily asked him: “What have you got against school?”

Blaming things on his teachers, Spink replied mildly: “They insisted that words be spelled only one way.”

Later, he confided that he also hated algebra.

At TSN, Spink had the power to spell anything any way he wished. What’s more, like all conspicuously successful editors of any era, he was a man ahead of his times.

During a period when most American newspapers were both incomplete and stodgy, Spink’s emphasis was on comprehensive coverage and a fresh design with multi-column makeup and breezy, alliterative headlines.

He got the thoroughness he wanted by lining up, as TSN correspondents, a large group of sportswriters from the best sports sections in every U.S. city. Some wrote for him on their free time and some on company time, as they still do.

Spink never thought of a sports department as a toy department--as some critics have, with the implication that the rest of the paper is gravely important.

To Spink, baseball news and features were at least as worthwhile as the average of whatever else is in a typical American daily paper.

Or as a TSN circulation specialist, Donald B. Barrows, once said:

“It’s very important to people to have something to take very seriously that isn’t serious.”

Spink, who never strayed from that vision of sports, is most vividly remembered for the number of long-distance calls he placed day and night, for 50 years, to Sporting News correspondents.

Everyone who wrote for TSN in Spink’s lifetime was frequently contacted and occasionally bombarded by the little round man from St. Louis.

He liked to talk about a New York trip he made. The driver of his taxi was listed as Tommy Holmes, which was also the name of a New York writer of that time who often contributed to TSN. Spink had never met him.

“You the baseball writer?” he asked the driver.

“No, I’m not,” the man replied irritably. “But some s.o.b. in St. Louis thinks I am--and keeps calling me at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

Spink was as persuasive as he was persistent.

In the days of the Brooklyn Dodgers when New York writer Harold Parrott joined the club as an executive, he turned down a Spink story assignment on the grounds of conflict of interest.

So Spink sent a check for $100 to Parrott’s son, then called again.

“I told you I couldn’t write it,” the New York man said.

“What,” Spink screamed, “and take a hundred bucks out of your kid’s pocket?”

The Parrott manuscript arrived a few days later.

The most storied aspect of Spink’s city-editor approach was his ability to track down correspondents when he wanted them--whether they were on vacation or on other assignments for their hometown papers.

One summer when he was feuding with every baseball writer in Los Angeles, Spink decided to hire an L.A. football writer as his Dodger correspondent.

The Rams in those days trained at Redlands, and when Spink called at noon, Redlands time, the writer was missing. He had taken off in his car for a gas station downtown, where a phone rang suddenly in an outside phone booth.

Told that the call was for him, the writer picked up the receiver, listened a moment and asked: “How did you find me here?”

Spink’s chuckle was like a growl. “How many gas stations are there in Redlands?” he said.

The answer, at that time, was 12.

On other occasions, when a phone rang busy for five or six minutes, Spink often reacted high-handedly, using the phone company as an extension of The Sporting News.

His daughter-in-law, Mayor Edith, remembers:

“One night when my mother was in the hospital, I was talking to a friend when the operator cut in and said, ‘I’m sorry, this is an emergency.’ I thought, ‘Oh, dear, it’s mother.’ But it was just Taylor wanting Johnson to make six telephone calls for him.”

During office hours, Taylor treated Johnson as one of the staff--that is, harshly and profanely.

“Once we had a new writer I hadn’t met yet,” his son recalls. “And that day, as usual, Papa was on the warpath. He kept yelling at his secretary: ‘That bastard Johnson has done it again.’ Tell that s.o.b. Johnson to get his rear end in here.’ ”

Unfamiliar with Spink’s tirades, the new employee was alarmed. As Johnson tells it:

“He ran down the hall, where he bumped into me and said, ‘I don’t know who Johnson is, but for God’s sake, tell him to start looking for another job.’ ”

Actually, tired of his father’s abuse, Johnson did quit TSN--twice. He came back both times. As a boy, he had also considered running away.

“That was when I was at Culver Military Academy and went AWOL,” Johnson said. “Notre Dame was playing Southern Cal, and I had to see the game.”

Found out and threatened with expulsion, Johnson, shaking nervously, called Taylor.

“He surprised me,” Johnson said. “He couldn’t have been sweeter or more supportive. He asked me if I wanted him to come and be with me or if I wanted to handle it myself. He said he’d back me 100% either way. I knew then, when I was 16 years old, that he’d always be there if I needed him.”

He was always there, too, when his editors needed him.

During a bizarre mistaken-identity crisis one year, Spink generously paid the bills when managing editor Reidenbaugh and his family were called home to Pennsylvania by what Reidenbaugh thought was the death of his father.

A year or two later, long after the Pennsylvania episode, Spink went on a typical tear. During a trivial baseball argument, he was enraged when Reidenbaugh sided with a younger editor against the boss.

Calling Reidenbaugh an ungrateful wretch, Spink cried: “To think I paid your whole family’s way home to that phony funeral!”

Reidenbaugh was aghast. “Hold on, Mr. Spink,” he said softly. “When I got back from Pennsylvania that time, you’ll remember, I offered you a check for payment in full.”

“I’ll take it right now!” Spink yelled.

But he never did.