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Show " Was the Author of " (Thai Is, Unless Wrote It!) Recent Celebration of "Casey Night" in Baltimore Recalls the Dispute Over the Poem Made Famous by De Wolf Hopper, "Casey at the Bat"; There's Also Argument Over Who Wrote "The Face on the Barroom Floor" and Many Other Old Favorites. Western Newspaper Union. By ELMO SCOTT WATSON THEY celebrated "Casey Night" in Baltimore recently re-cently in honor of the man who is said to be the "original Casey" of the poem made famous by De Wolf Hopper. As a prologue to a night game between the Baltimore Bal-timore Orioles and the Jersey Jer-sey City Giants of the International Inter-national league, they had arranged ar-ranged to have the once "mighty Casey" strike out just as he did more than half a century ago. Up to the plate stepped seventy -six -year -old Dan ' Casey of Silver Springs, Md. Rogers Hornsby, coach of the Orioles and pitcher for this special occasion, wound up and shot the ball across the plate. Casey swung and missed by a foot! Again the wind-up, again the pitch and again Caey missed. "And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go and iqw the air is shattered ..." But, wait! There's something wrong here! There goes the ball streaking across the diamond, out into left field. It's a single! For once, the last line of the immortal poem isn't true. "Mighty Casey has NOT struck out!" Anyway, it was a good stunt, even if it didn't come off according accord-ing to schedule, for it served its purpose of being a sort of "curtain-raiser" to next year's celebration cele-bration of the centennial of America's Amer-ica's national game. Also, it revived re-vived a "double-header" discussion discus-sion that has raged for years, viz: Who was the "original Casey" of the poem "Casey at the Bat?" Who wrote that poem? There have been various claim ants to the title of "original Casey," but officials of the two major leagues and others in charge of the plans for the centennial cen-tennial seem to have decided that the Casey who didn't strike out in Baltimore the other night, is the man. And here is his version of the incident that has brought him baseball immortality: "I was a left-handed pitcher for the Phillies. I guess you'd call me the Hubbell of my time. We were playing the Giants in the old Philadelphia ball park on Au-. Au-. gust 21, 1887. Tim Keefe was pitching against me and he had a lot of stuff but I was no slow poke myself. It was the last of the ninth and New York was leading 4 to 3. Two men were" out and there were runners on second and third. A week before I'd busted up a game with a lucky homer and folks thought I could repeat . . ." But he didn't repeat. Instead he struck out and the baseball fans of Philadelphia forgot that they were citizens of the "City of Brotherly Love." Instead, they were just as enraged as any rabid fans of any "Mudville" in the .a United States would be when their IJn;, jlar heroes fail them. The D'Vys Version. As to the authorship of the poem, one of the persistent claimants to that honor was George W. D'Vys, who spent his last years in the Home for Aged and Infirm in Cambridge, Mass. His version of how he came to write the poem which, incidentally, incidental-ly, makes Mike Kelly, instead of Dan Casey, the hero of the piece, is this: "It was back in August, 1886, when I saw the great Mike Kelly play with Chicago against the Boston club. Kelly, the Babe Ruth of his day, had a chance to win the game with the bases full in the ninth, but he struck out before a huge and spellbound throng. The Boston fans were more grieved to see Kelly fan than they were happy to see their team win and I felt something of the same thing, too. "The next day, a Sunday. I was lying on the grass in Franklin Frank-lin Park, in Boston, thinking about the game and Kelly and the disappointment of the fans, and into my mind came the opening stanza. "That night I finished the poem. I sent it to the Sporting Times in New York, anonymously because -my father, a burly sea captain, looked upon poetry with horror." Other claimants to that honor include Joseph Quinlan Murphy, Will Valentine and, finally, the man to whom most authorities award credit for its authorship-Ernest authorship-Ernest L. Thayer, once a resident of Cambridge and now living in Santa Barbara, Calif. Thayer, a native of Worcester, Mass., was graduated in 1SS5 from Harvard where he was president of the Lampoon and ivy orator of his class. After leaving college he started on a tour of the world, pausing in San Francisco long enough to get a 1 ft? J i i . i Dan Casey, the "original Casey at the Bat," is shown recreating the historic scene when "mighty Casey struck out." Behind him is Bucky Crouse, catcher and manager of the Baltimore Orioles, and Umpire Roy Van Graflin. job as a reporter on the paper owned by his friend and fellow Harvard man, "Willie" Hearst. While thus employed he wrote a poem called "Casey at the Bat, a Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888" which appeared in Hearst's San Francisco Examiner Exam-iner June 3, 1888. Thayer Has Best Claim. Despite the fact that others have claimed the authorship of "Casey at the Bat," Thayer's right to it seems to be pretty well established. Albert G. Spaulding gives him credit for it in his account ac-count of the poem in "America's National Game," a history of baseball. Several years ago Thayer himself, in defending his claim, wrote to the New York Times as follows: "I note in the Times a dispatch from Cambridge, Mass., in which G. W. D'Vys is reported as claiming claim-ing the authorship of 'Casey at the Bat.' He says he sent the poem in 1886 to the New York Sporting Times, where it was published anonymously. The first number of the New York Sporting Times appeared in 1888 and the first, or a little later, number printed 'Casey at the Bat' as a clipping and duly credited it to the San Francisco Examiner, where it originally appeared ap-peared over my initials in June, 1888. "In the Christmas, 1908, issue of the Scrap Book an exhaustive examination of the question 'Who wrote Casey at the Bat?' appeared ap-peared over the signature of Harry Har-ry Thurston Peck, at that time professor of Latin at Columbia 71 Vff77x r 4 - & ( i I- x i I v- -v.. : I vN - h- - " -I , V , - j John Henry Titus reciting "The Face on the Barroom Floor." university. In the light of all the evidence, Professor Peck reached the conclusion that for this, perhaps per-haps the greatest of my sins, I was exclusively to blame." More difficult to establish "original "or-iginal authorship" is the case of another famous poem, known by two titles "The Face on the Bar Room Floor" and "The Face Upon the Floor." The rivals for recognition as the author of this classic are John Henry Titus, still living at the age of ninety-one, ninety-one, and Hugh Antoine D'Arcy, who died November 11, 1925. Titus, born in Jefferson, Ohio, began writing poetry at an early age and in 1872 produced a seven-canto seven-canto poem, called "The Ideal Soul." The fifth episode in it he called "The Face on the Barroom Floor." The first sta.iza was 'Twas a barmy autumn night and a goodly lot was there. That oversaw Joe's barroom as court upon the square; And as a song In wit and story ekes through the oaken door A vagabond stept slowly in askan upon the floor. According to Titus, the scene of this incident was a tavern in Jefferson, Jef-ferson, Ohio, and his use of the word "barroom" meant "courtroom," "court-room," since the tavern was once the site of county judicial sessions. ses-sions. A Different Locale. In the version of the poem written writ-ten by D'Arcy, which appeared in 1887 under the title of "The Face Upon the Floor," the locale is in New York city instead of the little lit-tle Ohio town. The circumstances under which it was written, according ac-cording to Porter J. White, a veteran vet-eran actor who died in 1934 and who claimed to be the first man to recite the poem in public, were these: One night in August, 1887, White was awakened in his room in McPike's hotel in New York city to find his neighbor from the next room, Hugh Antoine D'Arcy, character actor and theatrical manager, standing beside his bed. D'Arcy was clutching some pieces of paper and seemed greatly excited. ex-cited. The reason was an incident in-cident which he had just witnessed. wit-nessed. With some friends D'Arcy had wandered into Joe Smith's saloon at Fourth avenue and Fourteenth street. As they sat there talking a tramp walked in and begged for a drink. He drew a picture of a woman's face in chalk on the floor. As he put in the finishing touches the bouncer spotted him, and out he went. D'Arcy followed him, offered him a little money, learned that the vagabond had been a cultured man and an artist driven to drink by the loss of his sweetheart and the treachery of a friend. Concluding his account of the incident, D'Arcy thrust a manuscript manu-script into his friend's hand, and White, now thoroughly awake, began be-gan to read THE FACE UPON THE FLOOR Twas a balmy summer evening, and a goodly crowd was there, Which wellnigh filled Joe's barroom on the corner of the square: And as songs and witty stories came through the open door A vagabond crept slowly in and posed upon the floor When he finished reading the remaining 16 stanzas, White expressed ex-pressed his thorough approval of the poem and asked permission to recite it in public. Temperance Propaganda. In subsequent years Mr. White successfully recited the poem many times on the vaudeville and burlesque stages. Years later "The Face Upon the Floor" was renamed "The Face on the Barroom Bar-room Floor" by some self-appointed editor and was converted for use as temperance propaganda propagan-da much to D'Arcy's vexation, who intended the poem as a plea for kindness to derelicts. One interesting angle of the dispute over the authorship of this poem is the fact that both claimants at one time or another went into court to establish their rights to the honor of having written writ-ten it. "The Face Upon the Floor" was set to music and became a favorite of vaudeville and barber shop tenors, who, however, to D'Arcy's disgust gave it the title of "The Face on the Barroom Floor." In 1922 D'Arcy sued Frank Harding, veteran song publisher, pub-lisher, for not giving him credit for being author of the poem and a few years later Titus sued Harding to "recover his title from the desecration of the ballad." So far as is known, neither author ever sued the other, so the dispute dis-pute over the poem is still undecided. unde-cided. But since Titus is still living, liv-ing, at least he has the "last I word" in claiming authorship. Although "Casey at the Bat" was frequently reprinted in newspapers after its original appearance ap-pearance in 1888, the thing which started the poem on its road to immortality was its recitation by De Wolf Hopper, an actor. In the summer of 1838 Hopper was appearing in an operetta, "Prince Methuselah," at Wallack's theater thea-ter on Broadway. One night the players on the Chicago White Stockings baseball team were guests of the theater and the management of Wallack's gave Hopper a copy of the poem, clipped from the San Francisco Examiner, to read between the acts in honor of the ballplayer guests. Hopper's serio-comic rendition of the poem brought a storm of applause and from that time on he was repeatedly called upon to recite it. He once said "Where or what I may be playing, I must, before the evening is out, come before the curtain ind pitch to Casey." It has been estimated that Hopper Hop-per recited the poem no less than 10,000 times in the theater. Add to that his recitations of it over the radio in recent years and the number of times his phonograph records of the poem have been played and it is easy to understand under-stand why it is listed among the "best-known poems in the English Eng-lish language." Another dispute over authorship of a popular poem which was taken tak-en to the courts was the case of "Solitude," better known by its DE WOLF HOPPER opening lines "Laugh and the World Laughs With You, Weep and You Weep Alone." It was claimed by both Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Col. John J. Joyce. Mrs. Wilcox asserted that she wrote it in February, 1883, in the home of Judge A. B. Braley in Madison, Wis., where she was visiting, and read it to the judge and his wife before it appeared in the New York Sun on February 21 over her maiden name of Wheeler. In May, 1883, it was included in-cluded in her book "Poems of Passion." Rival Claims. Two years later Joyce heard the poem "Solitude" recited and when some one asked who wrote it, the colonel declared that he had written it in the Gait house in Louisville, Ky.,. back in 1861. When Mrs. Wilcox heard of this, she immediately denied his claim. Joyce continued to assert that the poem was his but ignored her challenge to prove it. His book "A Checkered Life," written in 1883, contained 23 poems but "Solitude" was not among them. In a later edition of the book he inserted the poem but retained the copyright date of 1883. He also published the poem as a song, whereupon Mrs. Wilcox Wil-cox began suit against the John Church company, music dealers of Cincinnati, for alleged violation viola-tion of the copyright law. The suit never came to trial. According to Mrs. Wilcox, she dropped it upon the advice of friends. Joyce pointed to the fact that the suit was dismissed for want of prosecution and that the costs were assessed against Mrs. Wilcox as acknowledgment of his authorship. Later Mrs. Wilcox offered of-fered to give to any charitable institution, which Joyce might name, the sum of $5,000 in his name if he would produce "an unmutilated copy of any periodical period-ical or paper containing the poem under discussion prior to February, Febru-ary, 1883." Although Joyce never accepted the challenge, to the day of his death he continued to assert that he was the original author of "Solitude." Mrs. Wilcox was equally positive that the honor belonged to her and "popular belief" be-lief" seems to confirm her claim. |