RIP Barry Halper
I remember seeing a piece on Barry Halper’s memorabilia collection back in the late 1980’s in some sports magazine and being utterly amazed, and at this point, his collection was significantly smaller than it ended up being. A few years ago, I went to the Baseball Hall Of Fame, and at the time, unbeknownst to me before I walked into the building, they had the portion of his collection that he’d either donated or loaned to them set up in its own exhibit. Totally blew me away. It wasn’t just the items he had there, though they were astounding in their own right in many cases (so much that I’m not even sure where to start naming them; if you read the article above, it names some of them…). It was the care with which they were arranged in the exhibit, to replicate the pictures I’d seen a decade and change before, in that way that totally resembled a room filled with things a guy really loved. That had to be his doing rather than the Hall of Fame’s, because the Cooperstown folks can be very hit and miss with their displays (the current layout of the Hall leaves a lot to be desired, frankly, but I think it’s because they have a lot of items travelling with their “Baseball As America” exhibit), and because it just looked like it was all arranged with love rather than mere reverence. Any of you who collect things and display them will know what I’m talking about here. From the perspective of an individual collector who’s seen a lot of private collections, I’ve never seen anything before or since that equalled the work Barry Halper did, and I probably never will again unless more of his collection ends up in Cooperstown. This man loved baseball and its history more than just about anyone I can think of, and the effort and care he put into his own “Hall Of Fame” was nothing short of staggering.
However, more importantly than the “Oh my god, this man owns Babe Ruth’s camel hair coat!”-ness of it all (I’m pretty sure that was what jumped out at me the most from the Halper exhibit, thinking about it), from what I’ve read about him over the years, he was also a genuinely nice, very modest guy (and modesty can be in really short supply among collectors, as I’m sure many of you know), and I’m sure he’ll be greatly missed. My heart goes out to his loved ones.