Long-lost film features flag | 1924 World Series
This year’s World Series will sport many flags – American flags and red-white-and-blue bunting, of course, but also the pennants and banners of baseball teams. Just in time for the fall classic, a lost film has surfaced from 90 years ago, and it shows a prominent Old Glory.
The silent movie is the only known film of the seventh, and final, game of the 1924 World Series between the Washington Senators and New York Giants. The newsreel was found a few months ago in the rafters of a garage in Massachusetts.
Experts in film preservation assumed that the scenes had turned to dust over nine decades. Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Image Section of the Library of Congress, explained that “nitrate film is flammable [and] creates its own oxygen when it burns….Once it starts to deteriorate, the degradation proceeds rather rapidly and…we weren’t optimistic about [the] condition” of the movie.
Everyone was happily surprised to discover that the newsreel looks as it did when it was first shown in theaters. Among other scenes, Mashon reported, the film presents images of the Senators’ “thrilling extra innings victory over the New York Giants. We baseball geeks…know the game for the heroic efforts of Senators ace Walter ‘Big Train’ Johnson, who pitched the last four [of 12] innings on short rest.” The victory marked the only time a Washington team has won the Series.
On hand for the last game of that baseball season was a familiar face: President Calvin Coolidge. The Associated Press noted that “the President has given some consideration to politics this week” (1924 being an election year), but his schedule “was shifted again to permit his attendance…at the deciding game of the World Series.”
News cameramen with still and film equipment crowded around the presidential seats. As one newspaper described it, they “built a pyramid of cameras in front of the flag-draped box set aside for the President” in order to get his image. In the recovered newsreel, Coolidge is shown seated behind a large, 48-star flag as he and his wife, Grace, settle in to watch the action on the field. She once said baseball “is my very life.”
It’s a rare glimpse of a presidential moment at a rare game, saved on a rare film that survived nearly a century.
(To view the newsreel, go to http://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2014/10/film-of-the-washington-senators-winning-the-1924-world-series-found/)