Sports History at Your Fingertips : Paul Ziffren Resource Center Opens Today With a Wide and Varied Collection of Athletic Artifacts

Question: Name the organization the following people or groups contacted for solutions to their problems:

--A West Berlin writer, assembling a book about the world’s largest stadiums, looking for photographs of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

--Great Britain’s Thames television network, searching for film footage of the track sprints of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics for an Olympic documentary.

--The Organizing Committee of the 1992 Olympic Winter Games at Albertville, France, looking for an organizational chart from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

--A fifth-grade student in Pennsylvania searching for information on competition skateboarding for a school paper.

Answer: The Paul Ziffren Sports Resource Center at the Amateur Athletic Foundation headquarters in Los Angeles. The facility is named after Paul Ziffren, chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and the first chairman of the Amateur Athletic Foundation.

“The amazing thing about all these calls and letters we’re getting from all over the world is that we’re not even open yet,” library director Wayne Wilson said the other day.

But that was then. The sports library that Wilson says will soon be recognized as America’s most complete and most diverse sports archive opens to the public today at 10 a.m.

The 10,000-square foot facility is located on the grounds of the Amateur Athletic Foundation, 2141 West Adams Blvd. On the property is an old mansion, built in 1909 by Eugene Britt. The library is in the back yard.

The Amateur Athletic Foundation used interest earned off its share of profits from the 1984 Olympics, which was $94 million, to finance youth sports projects and facilities throughout Southern Califronia. It used $3.1 million to construct the library, which houses a range of tantalizing treasures.

A partial treasure list:

--The complete collection of all papers and letters of Avery Brundage, dating from 1908 to 1975. Brundage was president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972. The collection is on 149 reels of microfilm, and is virtually a history of the modern Olympic Games.

--Six battered, decaying scrapbooks that were kept by Battling Nelson, a lightweight boxer at the turn of the century. They, too, will be microfilmed, at a cost of several thousand dollars.

--Nearly every edition of Ring magazine, once known as “Boxing’s Bible,” in bound volumes, dating to the first year, 1925.

--Bound volumes of L.A. Times sports sections, from 1930 to the present.

--Access to 200,000 sports magazine articles, theses and books, indexed by an electronic clipping service. Need to see Time magazine’s coverage of the 1936 Olympics? Push a button and you’ve got it.

--About 40,000 black and white sports photographs, some dating to the early 20th Century, color-indexed by sport. Need a photo of, say, Jim Jeffries, heavyweight boxing champion from 1899-1904? The Ziffren library has about a dozen.

For sports diversity, from archery to zebra racing, the Ziffren library is No. 1, said Wilson, 38, who has a doctorate in sports studies from the University of Massachusetts. He was library director at Chapman College in Orange before moving to the Ziffren post.

“We may never have the baseball research collection that the Baseball Hall of Fame library has, nor the football collection that the NFL Hall of Fame has, but I really think our diversity and our emphasis on our video collection will be known around the world,” he said.

“Among sports libraries I’m aware of in the U.S., I think the breadth of our collection and the quality of our cataloguing is superior. Some libraries--I’m thinking of the New York public library and the Notre Dame library--may have more books, but our strength is our diversity.

“And I don’t want this to be a static collection. I want it to be an expanding collection. I wouldn’t be surprised if our shelves are full within three years.”

Wilson won’t say how large his acquisition budget is, but said it was “adequate for a library that aspires to be world class.”

Both scholars and browsers are welcome, Wilson said. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Wilson and library associate Shirley Ito ask only that visitors call first, (213) 730-9696.

The Ziffren library will strongly emphasize acquisition of sports videos.

“We’ll be transferring thousands of old 16-millimeter movie films to videotape for years to come, and we’re going to acquire a lot of new sports instruction videos,” Wilson said.

Wilson said that the late Jimmy Jacobs, co-manager of heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, donated 28 reels of historic boxing movie footage to the library before he died last March. Jacobs owned the world’s largest collection of boxing films.

All such video material is available for public viewing, Wilson said.

And in the spirit of ‘84, the sign is out again for Olympic volunteerism. Some tasks at the Ziffren library require long hours of work, and volunteers are needed for certain jobs, Wilson said.

One project waiting for a volunteer: Compiling an index for the library’s Ring magazine collection. The magazine itself has never compiled one.

The Ziffren library has a separate reading area for sports periodicals from around the world. It spends $4,000 a year on about 150 sports magazine and journal subscriptions. The number will go up to 250, Wilson said.

Wilson worries that the library, with only two full-time employees, will become a telephone information center.

“We got a call from the Pasadena Police Dept. not long ago,” he said.

“An officer told us he had two German wheelchair basketball players in the station, neither of whom spoke English, who had somehow arrived there for a basketball game and didn’t know where to go. We didn’t know either, of course, but we put them in touch with someone who did.”

He was a short, pleasant, red-faced little man who for most of his life might have been Los Angeles’ No. 1 sports fan.

When he died last year at 84, Bill Schroeder left behind a warehouse full of sports books and memorabilia, enough to fill a museum--which he did, several times.

Much of the material in the Ziffren library--books, photo files and films--was collected by Schroeder, who kept it in a succession of locations throughout Los Angeles for most of his life. Much of Schroeder’s library-related sports material is in the new library, but most of the memorabilia remains in warehouses.

The Amateur Athletic Foundation is considering turning the vast memorabilia collection into a mobile sports museum.

A few items are in the library, on display, such as the autographed game ball from John Wooden’s last basketball team, the 1975 UCLA national championship team.

“Bill just collected the stuff throughout his life,” said Buddy Dyer, who worked with Schroeder for 39 years.

“For example, the Battling Nelson scrapbooks--some guy just walked in one day in the late 1950s, showed them to Bill and wanted $1,000 for them. We didn’t have that kind of money, so the guy gave them to Bill while he looked for a buyer, but he never found one.”

Schroeder, in 1936, found a sponsor for his collection of sports memorabilia and research material. Paul H. Helms, owner of Helms Bakeries, set up Schroeder in offices of the W. M. Garland Building, 117 West Ninth St., in downtown Los Angeles. In 1948, a new site was erected by Helms for the foundation, at 8760 Venice Blvd. In 1970, the Helms Bakeries company ceased to operate, and Schroeder had to search for a new sponsor. Result: For three years, his operation was known as the United Savings Helms Athletic Foundation.

In 1973, United Savings & Loan Assn. merged with Citizens Savings & Loan, and the name of Schroeder’s banner was changed again, to Citizens Savings Athletic Foundation. And Schroeder moved again, to 9800 Sepulveda Blvd.

In 1981, the Schroeder collection became the First Interstate Bank Athletic Foundation when Peter Ueberroth negotiated a deal that sent the collection to the Britt mansion, which is now the mortgage-free Amateur Athletic Foundation headquarters.

When the Olympics and Ueberroth arrived on the scene, Schroeder knew his years of constantly changing addresses and name-changing were over.

Said Dyer: “It’s just a shame he didn’t live to see this building.”