What's In Ted's Wallet?

Thomas Edison was a long-time baseball fan. In his younger years, he once proclaimed, he could have named the players on the roster of every major league team, and even later he followed the press accounts of each day's games. It was an interest he seems to have passed on to his youngest son, Theodore, known to many as Ted.

In the summer of 1909, Ted, age eleven, began to collect baseball cards which he kept in a ratty old wallet. These were not just any baseball cards. Over the following months, Ted Edison collected sixty-one cards, featuring fifty-eight players, from the now much-prized T206 series published and distributed in packs of cigarettes from the American Tobacco Company. His collection included nine players who would, beginning some thirty years later, appear on plaques in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Ty Cobb. Christy Mathewson. Walter Johnson. Frank Chance. He had them all, and more.

When Ted passed away in the 1990s, his family donated many of his personal effects, his personal papers, his archive of Edison Company corporate papers, and more to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. Included in the donation was a well-worn old wallet dating to 1909, complete with Ted's collection of T206 cards. He had held onto those cards for more than eight decades.

The authors came across the cards while doing archival research on Edison and baseball. This book is their effort to share with readers both the cards themselves and the story surrounding them.