Babe Ruth Archive
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GUEST:
Well, I have a Babe Ruth ball, a picture of Babe Ruth from a hunting camp that he used to attend in Havelock, North Carolina, and an autographed picture of him to his good friend Ellis Simon, who was our family friend.
APPRAISER:
And when did the items pass to you?
GUEST:
Probably 1983, when Ellis passed away and he left us in his will.
APPRAISER:
Now of course, Ellis Simon, with his hunting lodge and the fishing on the lake, a lot of ballplayers came and attended his resort.
GUEST:
Right, exactly, and Ted Williams was there too, and we have some of that memory.
APPRAISER:
Ted Williams was a big hunter and fisherman too.
GUEST:
Yep.
APPRAISER:
And so tell me about the baseball.
GUEST:
Well, it's signed by several All Stars, or Hall of Famers, 12 signatures in all. And we presume these would have been players that came and attended, or visited, the hunting lodge. I'm not sure about that. I know that one of the players was a player in my hometown, where he's from, Kinston, North Carolina. And he acquired this ball and therefore passed it on.
APPRAISER:
Right, and so we have 12 signatures total on the ball, including of course Babe Ruth, as we can see, and Dizzy Dean, Dazzy Vance, Lefty Grove, Frank Frisch, Joe Medwick, and Pepper Martin, among others. And then the book, tell me about the book.
GUEST:
It was given to Ellis by Babe, autographed in the front.
APPRAISER:
It is a first edition, and then we open it up and here we have, "To Ellis Simon, from Babe Ruth," a beautiful fountain pen signature there on this signed first edition. Then of course the hunting photo we have there with Babe and all the game there. And then let's talk about the large photo here. So it's personalized to Ellis, which is okay. It's nice to see that this is personalized. In the personalization, he writes, "To my friend Ellis Simon," and then it said, "In fond memory of Camp Bryan, collards, and Craven County corn." So tell me about Craven County
corn.
GUEST:
I think that was just his way of saying, "Good whiskey."
APPRAISER:
So here, the Babe still has a sense of humor about that, even though here, dated May 20, 1948, he passed away less than three months after he signed this photo. Another thing that's interesting about the photo is this was taken on the set of the Lou Gehrig biopic, The Pride of the Yankees. So this was taken during shooting of the movie. It's a great group with excellent provenance, and we'll start with the book here, a signed first edition. Has a little bit of wear, and we don't have a dust jacket, so the value on this we would put at auction of $5,000. Next, we have the baseball. That one, we would put an estimate at auction of $15,000 to $20,000.
GUEST:
Wow, nice.
APPRAISER:
The hunting scene photo, of course that's not in Babe's hand-- that's actually noted on the top that it was Babe Ruth at Camp Bryan, Havelock, North Carolina-- but in somebody else's hand. But still an interesting photo, especially with the relation to the hunting camp. That one, we put a value of about $300.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
And lastly, the beautiful, large, signed Babe Ruth photo here. We'd put a value of that at auction of $15,000 to $20,000.
GUEST:
Wow. Great. Thank you.
Appraisal Details
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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