Many of the historic images on Sports Press Northwest are provided by resident Northwest sports history aficionado, David Eskenazi.
A Seattle native, David has amassed an extensive archive of Seattle, Northwest, and West Coast historic sports photographs, artifacts and ephemera. We draw from this archive to illustrate stories in The Vault, and our weekly Rotation feature, The Wayback Machine. Youll see many unique and evocative representations of our sporting past, many of which have never been seen publicly. You are in for a treat!
David enjoys sharing his collection and zeal for Northwest sports history. His historical showcase activities have included displays at numerous museums, historical societies, and community events, including an annual Northwest baseball history display at Mariners FanFest, and working on baseball-themed fund raising events for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Since the early 1990s, The Seattle Mariners have enlisted David to help recognize and illustrate Seattle and the Northwests 120-year baseball legacy. This collaboration has produced historical displays at Safeco Field, including seven 35-foot long historical storyboards surrounding the Safeco Field main concourse, Fred Hutchinson seat end stanchions, and classic early photographs on the suite level, all created for the opening of Safeco Field in 1999. From its opening in 2007 to the present day, David has provided thematic ideas, design elements, images, and scores of original historic Northwest baseball artifacts for the Baseball Museum of the Pacific Northwest at Safeco Field.
David also contributed visual materials, historical consultation and on-screen interviews for documentaries on The Seattle Rainiers, The Spokane Indians, and the Seattle Pilots, and provided images and other inputs for a multitude of books, magazines, web-sites and other media focusing on Seattle, Northwest and West Coast sports history.
Recent books he contributed to extensively include SABRs Rain Check: Baseball in the Pacific Northwest, and Dan Raleys Pitchers of Beer: The Seattle Rainiers Story.
David has a keen ongoing interest in sharing stories, expanding and enhancing his collection, and broadening his knowledge and archive of Northwest sports history and memorabilia.
If you have questions, memories to share, stories to suggest, or would like to talk to him about selling or trading Seattle and Northwest sports artifacts, please contact him at (206) 441-1900, or at seattlesportshistory@gmail.com
By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
He never hoisted the 12th Man flag nor threw out a ceremonial first pitch. He is not in any Hall of Fame or Ring of Honor. But no individual did more to shape modern professional sports in the Pacific Northwest than Herman Sarkowsky, whose DNA is buried in the histories of four of the region’s franchises, as well as its largest race track.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Although “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” was written in 1908 (by New Yorkers Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer), it took decades to evolve into baseball’s biggest hit. The song’s first rendition at a major league game occurred in 1934 in St. Louis, where a jug band led by Cardinals third baseman Pepper Martin played it before the start of the World Series. It didn’t become a seventh-inning stretch tradition until the 1970s when broadcaster Harry Caray made it so at Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Seattle Post-Intelligencer sports columnist Royal Brougham created the Man of the Year (now Sports Star ) award in 1936 to recognize the city’s most accomplished athlete or coach from the previous 12 months. Brougham saluted the first winners at a downtown luncheon he dubbed his “little clambake,” and the affair proved so popular it morphed into an evening banquet carried on live, local television.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
It’s been five years since Don Coryell’s name first appeared on the Pro Football Hall of Fame ballot, and the Washington state native is again a semifinalist (finalists will be announced next week). To the great consternation of the legion of Hall of Famers who have long championed his cause, Coryell’s induction is way past due and an oversight, in their collective mind, that defies logic.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
No football player in the early part of the 20th century captured the public’s imagination more than Illinois halfback Red Grange, whom Chicago American sports writer Warren Brown christened “The Galloping Ghost.” So great – and hyped -- was Grange that even the best players of the era, including several hatched beneath Notre Dame’s Golden Dome (George Gipp and the Four Horseman) paled by comparison.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Sometime in the fall of 1903, Alfred Strauss filed a written complaint with the University of Washington’s Board of Control, a student oversight committee, arguing that it should compensate him “for the loss of several teeth.” According to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Strauss, a halfback on the football team, contended that since he had lost the choppers while “fighting for his college,” the university ought to pay his dental expenses.
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The Washington-UCLA football series, which resumes for the 72nd time Saturday at Montlake, dates to Dec. 3, 1932, when the Huskies posted the first of four consecutive shutouts, a 19-0 victory in Los Angeles. The Bruins' first victory in the rivalry was in 1938, also in Los Angeles, and in 1939 brought a unique -- for the era -- collection of athletes to Seattle to face a UW team coached by Jimmy Phelan.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
It’s a rare occurrence when a graduate of the University of Washington football program succeeds in the National Football League to a greater degree than he did as a Husky. Most notably, tackle Arnie Weinmeister had a World War II-interrupted career of no particular distinction at UW from 1942, ’46-47 and then proceeded to All-Pro recognition and a Hall of Fame salute following six seasons with the New York Giants.
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O’Dea High, the only all-boys school in the state of Washington, is on First Hill overlooking downtown Seattle. St. James Cathedral is across the street, Seattle University is three blocks away. The school’s central location allows for a student body drawn from the entire metropolitan area, including more than 450 from 89 zip codes.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Although a favorite with sports writers and fans during his salad days with the Spokane Indians and Seattle Rainiers, Levi McCormack’s sudden death Sept. 4, 1974 received barely a blurb in Pacific Northwest newspapers – four paragraphs in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, three in The Seattle Times. The Spokesman-Review carried a slightly more extensive account of McCormack’s passing at 61, but nothing that added much detail or color to his life, which had plenty.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Not long after Eddie Feigner experienced an emotional reunion with a mother who abandoned him at birth, he began pitching recreational softball in Walla Walla, WA. ,for Kilburg’s Grocery of the Green Pea League. The year: 1946. One day – Feigner never could recall the date -- his team obliterated a club from Pendleton, OR., 33-0, after which players from both squads repaired to a watering hole, where the Pendleton manager, seething at the day’s humiliation, tossed a snide remark in Feigner’s direction.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
When Louis Victor Piniella became manager of the Mariners Nov. 9, 1992, he joined a franchise burdened with more losing seasons from inception (14) than any in any league in modern American pro sports history. So dire were circumstances in Seattle that the Mariners might have evacuated had not Pinella, who did so reluctantly, taken on the task of plugging and reversing the drain swirl.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
This is going to sound like blasphemy, especially after the Seahawks strutted off with an ESPY award last week for Best Team in America for 2013. But the most compelling victory by a team in state history was not Seattle’s 43-8 clobbering of Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, or the SuperSonics’ triumph over the Washington Bullets in 1979 for the city’s only NBA Championship.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
In its afternoon edition of May 15, 1955, The Seattle Times printed a headline on the first page of its sports section that blared, “Colleges Drool As Tacoma Ace Adds Track Laurels.” Sans byline, the story reported without equivocation, “Luther (Hit and Run) Carr, Lincoln High’s greatest athlete, is the biggest sensation in Tacoma since the collapse of the Narrows Bridge.”
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Seattle's Lincoln High School dates to 1907, when it opened with 900 students, who came from the fast-growing University, Latona, Ravenna, Green Lake, Fremont, Queen Anne and Wallingford neighborhoods. Until 1981, when the school closed due to declining enrollment, Lincoln ranked among the most important educational/athletic institutions in the Seattle area, a segue into the exercise at hand.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Jack Wayne Lohrke did not have a distinguished major league career. He spent seven seasons in the National League between 1947-53, mostly as a utility third baseman, shortstop and second baseman with the New York Giants and Philadelphia Phillies. But Lohrke, a Los Angeles native, was fortunate to have had a career at all, after escaping death at least six times during World War II.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
As head of Howard S. Wright Construction Co., founded by his father, Howard S. Wright Sr., and uncle, George Schuchart Sr., in Port Townsend in 1885, Howard S. Wright Jr. made an astonishing impact on Seattle’s landscape. During a career that spanned the 1960s through the 1980s, Wright was involved in the construction of the Space Needle, 76-story Columbia Center, 50-story Seafirst Building, Washington Mutual Tower and Sheraton Hotel & Towers.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
It is impossible to say exactly why Spencer Haywood hasn’t sailed into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame long before now. The Springfield, MA., gallery has a non-transparent selection process, one of the most secretive in American sports, in which neither the voters nor the vote totals are revealed. Haywood’s exclusion could be the result of many factors, but house politics are likely a contributing factor.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Before 1984, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament never inspired office pools and side wagers or compelled network television to splurge billions of dollars for the privilege of providing wall-to-wall coverage. Before 1984, “Selection Sunday” didn't exist. Nobody talked about the Sweet Sixteen and the Elite Eight, much less seeds and bracketology.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Born out of a lawsuit stemming from the loss of the Seattle Pilots, the Mariners had a long slog to respectability. In their first six seasons (1977-83), they lost 90 or more games four times, including 100-plus twice. Given the local novelty of major league baseball then, fans never expected much out of the early Mariners, a good thing because they didn’t get a whole lot more than misadventures.
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