EDDIE GRANT MEMORIAL PLAQUE
One of baseball‘s
great enduring mysteries has been
solved with the Baseball Reliquary‘s
acquisition of the Eddie Grant
Memorial plaque. A Harvard graduate,
Edward L. Grant was a light-hitting
infielder for the Philadelphia
Phillies, Cincinnati Reds, and New
York Giants from 1907 to 1915. He
often annoyed his less educated
teammates by refusing to yell the
traditional, "I
got it,"
when a fly ball was hit to his
vicinity, insisting rather on
voicing the more grammatically
correct, "I
have it."
In 1917, Grant enlisted
in the U.S. Army and became captain
of an infantry battalion attached to
the 77th Division. He was
the first major league ballplayer
killed in action during The Great
War when he was hit by machine gun
fire on October 5, 1918 in the
Argonne Forest near Verdun, France,
a mere forty days prior to the
cessation of hostilities.
In 1921, the New York
Giants dedicated a memorial to Grant‘s
honor in the Polo Grounds. A
five-foot-high stone monument with
an inscribed bronze plaque was
erected in deep center field in
front of the clubhouse building.
Interestingly, although 470 feet
from home plate, the monument was in
fair territory, so balls hitting it
or rolling behind it remained in
play. |
The plaque reads (slightly
reformatted for legibility):
IN MEMORY OF
CAPT. EDWARD LESLIE GRANT
307TH INFANTRY
– 77TH
DIVISION
A.E.F.
SOLDIER –
SCHOLAR –
ATHLETE
KILLED IN ACTION
ARGONNE FOREST
OCTOBER 5, 1918
PHILADELPHIA NATIONALS
1907-1908-1909-1910
CINCINNATI REDS
1911-1912-1913
NEW
YORK GIANTS
1913-1914-1915
ERECTED BY
FRIENDS IN BASEBALL,
JOURNALISM AND THE SERVICE
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From the memorial’s
dedication in 1921 until the Giants
abandoned New York and the Polo
Grounds in 1957, a solemn
wreath-laying ceremony was held at
the Grant monument every year,
usually between games of the then
customary Memorial Day doubleheader.
At the conclusion of the
final game played at the Polo
Grounds on September 29, 1957,
souvenir hunters mobbed the field
and the New York Times
reported that three teenagers were
seen prying the bronze plaque off
the monument. Rumors that the police
ultimately recovered the plaque were
never verified, and its whereabouts
remained a mystery for over forty
years.
In late July 1999, the
Eddie Grant Memorial plaque was
discovered in the attic of a Ho-Ho-Kus,
New Jersey home formerly owned by
Lena and Gaetano Bucca. The new home
owners, Brian and Deborah Lamb, had
discovered the plaque carefully
wrapped in a blanket and hidden
under a trap door in the attic.
Brian Lamb contacted Baseball
Reliquary Board member, Wendy
Brougalman, a former business
associate, with news of the
discovery.
At this point, Albert Kilchesty, the
Reliquary’s Archivist and Historian,
became instrumental in negotiating
the plaque’s acquisition, and in
attempting to solve some of the
mysteries of the large item’s
disappearance. In his field notes of
August 1999, Kilchesty writes, "The
Lambs purchased the home from the
Bucca family after the death of Lena
Bucca in 1998. Gaetano Bucca, a
former New York City police officer,
died in 1974. Several calls to the
NYPD Department of Records revealed
that Gaetano Bucca, who retired from
the force in January 1958 and
subsequently moved with his family
to New Jersey, served in the city’s
32nd precinct, an area of
jurisdiction encompassing the
Coogan’s Bluff/Polo Grounds
vicinity.
"Additional police
records note that subsequent to
receiving a gunshot wound during a
routine investigation of a domestic
disturbance in 1955, Mr. Bucca was
assigned to light foot patrols in
and around the Polo Grounds.
‘Light
Foot Patrol’ duty at that time meant
just that, a foot receiving light
duty near the environs of a bar
stool. The Eddie Grant Memorial
plaque disappeared after the final
New York Giants game on September
29, 1957. It is assumed that the
affable Mr. Bucca, with the aid of a
few well-lubricated colleagues, had
arranged to take the plaque with the
intention of delivering it for
safekeeping to the Eddie Grant
American Legion Post 1225 in the
Bronx. The plaque never made it
there. How and why it ended up in
Mr. Bucca’s attic is totally
baffling. Benjamin Bucca, Lena and
Gaetano’s only surviving son and a
well-respected probate attorney, had
no knowledge at all of the 100-pound
plaque situated just above his head
in his former bedroom.
‘You know,
I never felt comfortable in that
bedroom. Now I know why! That thing
could’ve fallen on my head in the
middle of the night and flattened
me. My Pop was always a bit of a
mystery, but this . . . This is . .
. What the hell was he thinking
about?’"
—
Albert Kilchesty and Terry Cannon,
1999 |
POSTSCRIPT
Since the above article appeared,
the Baseball Reliquary has received
dozens of responses, some amazing,
some troubling. Someone even accused
us of manufacturing a copy of the
plaque, as if anyone in their right
mind would fabricate a 100-pound
piece of metal. One writer
suggested, reasonably, that we may
have stumbled upon a prototype for
the original plaque, since the
original as depicted in photographs
has a distinctly different
appearance than the Reliquary
plaque. The Reliquary‘s
position on the Eddie Grant plaque
all along has been: it‘s
The Eddie Grant Plaque. We‘ve
read our Lajoie, Boudreau, and
Bordagaray along with our Deleuze,
Baudrillard, Derrida, and all the
other top French players, and we‘ve
come to the inescapable conclusion
that the Baseball Reliquary‘s
Eddie Grant Memorial Plaque is as
real as reality could ever allow
it to be.
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