Public History Project: Topics from the Spink Family Papers

by Caroline Smith, Lana Tutterow, Kennedy Lancaster

On June 5th, 1959, Spink corresponded with Ed Dawson of the Seamless rubber company. Spink was in talks to put out an ad for his magazine The Sporting News. Further in the letters, Edwin Dawson of the Seamless rubber company talked about what his business was doing with the manufacture of bathing caps many swimmers used during that time period. Two other figures are involved in this letter who are known as Marvin Shutt and Sam Monetta. In a letter in which Dawson discusses these two figures, he references Jimmy Hoffa and then Senator Kennedy. “Marvin, of course, is very jealous of the list of members and the number that he was in the N.S.G.A. certainly don’t believe it is anything like the discrepancy in the figures that Hoffa gives as members of the Teamsters Union and those which Senator Kennedy publicizes.” Dawson went on about how successful he was at getting ad spaces in Sports Illustrated and he printed the names of 120 different department stores.

The correspondence between Charles O. Finely Jr. From Oakland Athletics as shown in the provided documents demonstrates the relationship between the Sporting News/Spink and other major league companies within baseball. Here the correspondence that is being used refers to the advertising practices that are used in the sporting news and the sales of various sporting teams. In these documents there was a problem with the amount of money that was being used for advertisements. Spink had first been assuring the Oakland Athletics team that they were not spending $1050 on advertising but in a later correspondence he had to roll back on that statement and say that they were actually going to be charging more, as the Sporting News had already been doing so for some time without him realizing. He sent the next correspondence discussing the change in the prices from the old $750 to the new $1050. What can be taken away from this experience may be that the overall business was likely run specially from Spink, and he was the one having the conversations between the various major league companies, but he had a lesser hand on the correspondence and management of financials.

In the collections there are many references to the selling of advertisements in sports news publications through friendly correspondence amongst casual and familiar conversation. Business deals which took place throughout the correspondence found in the collection are never purely business. While the motivation behind the communication at the end of the day may have been a business deal, the individuals communicated seemed genuinely involved and also interested in the daily ongoings of one another's lives and their families' well-being. Between letters regarding business matters and the selling of advertisements including notices of travel and intentions to meet together as friends, congratulations on the accomplishments of one’s children, and frequent celebration of holidays, birthdays, and more. The industry side of these relationships surely flourished further from the network of relationships which were present and that is made clear through the sheer quantity of the correspondence business focused and not.

A folder in the Sporting News Archives includes information on Sporting News employees' payroll and tax information. This includes an envelope with W4 forms from employees working for the Sporting News in 1943. W4 forms inform the employer the amount of federal tax to withhold from an employee's paycheck. These particular forms include information on marital status, whether or not the employee is the head of the family, and the number of dependents the employer is providing for. These forms were kept in the archives with other information on the employee's wages, such as payroll documents keeping track of hours and pay of various employees.