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captains of industry, military figures, statesmen, lawyers and judges, artists and musicians.
    The Hall of Fame for Great Americans no longer adds members or draws many visitors. It’s still open for business, though, on the grounds of what is now the Bronx Community College in New York. (The campus once belonged to NYU.) It commands a high bluff overlooking the Harlem River, and its main feature is a 630-foot open-air colonnade designed by the great American architect Stanford White. Bronze busts of the immortals are placed in niches along a walkway. Some of the likenesses were produced by Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln was among the hall’s first class of inductees, along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, U. S. Grant, Benjamin Franklin, Robert E. Lee, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a cast of now-forgotten jurists and ministers of the gospel. In 1910, the hall inducted Cooperstown’s favorite son, James Fenimore Cooper.
    “By happy chance,” Frick writes in his autobiography, “I had visited the National Hall of Fame at New York University a few days before [his meeting with Cleland]. I was much impressed and had the notion that a Baseball Hall of Fame would be great for the game.”
    By 1935, Clark and Frick had a plan for a Cooperstown baseball multiplex—Doubleday Field, where construction, which had been going on in a desultory fashion since 1919, was now being completed by the WPA; a museum; and a hall of fame. Now all they needed were artifacts to put in the museum, a game to play on the field, and some players to enshrine in the hall.
    Stephen Clark had a solution for the first problem, and it only cost him five bucks. Abner Graves’s old home in nearby Fly Creek was being prepared for demo lition and, in the process, an old trunk was found in the attic. It contained a small, weather-beaten ball stuffed with cloth. Walter Littell, editor of the local Otsego Farmer, decided that this must be a ball that had belonged to Graves. Perhaps it had been used by Doubleday himself. In fact, it might be the very first baseball.
    Stephen Clark, one of America’s great art collectors, understood the value of such a relic. He paid the farmer who owned the ball five dollars, put the ball on display in the Cooperstown Village Building, and sent out word that the new museum would be glad to accept donations to its collection.
    The timing was perfect. Baseball was due to celebrate its centennial in 1939, just a few years hence. Frick went to the commissioner of baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and proposed that the birthday be celebrated in Cooperstown with an all-star game on Doubleday Field.
    Judge Landis was an imperious and vain man whose main qualification for the job of commissioner of baseball was cosmetic; he looked like an actor playing a figure of judicial rectitude. He didn’t much care for ideas that originated with subordinates, but this one was too good to turn down. Clark would take care of building the museum. Washington, courtesy of the WPA, was providing the stadium. The Hall of Fame was a publicity bonanza for baseball, and it wouldn’t cost him or his bosses, the team owners, a cent. It had been generally accepted that the centennial festivities would take place in Washington, D.C. But Cooperstown would make an even better venue for the commissioner; no elected officials would be able to crowd him off center stage. And so he gave the entire enterprise his blessing, which is when things really took off.
    Stephen Clark appointed himself chairman, president, and CEO of the Hall of Fame, in which capacities he served until his death in 1960. This was an act of civic responsibility on his part. Clark was in his early fifties and art, not baseball, was his passion. Actually, passion might be the wrong word. Even his admiring biographer, Nicholas Fox Weber, concedes that Clark was seen by the world as a prim, cold, taciturn fellow. At the Museum of Modern