Barry Halper' s doorbell plays the opening notes of " Take Me Out To The Ball Game." There is no more appropriate doorbell in America.
Halper, 55, possesses the greatest collection of Babe Ruth memorabilia. The thousands of Ruth-related items are the centerpiece of his bewildering array of baseball memorabilia, which also may be paramount.
Much of it is displayed inside his exclusive home in northern New Jersey. He requested that The Sun not reveal the location, but he granted tours to a reporter and photographer. Mike Gibbons, executive director of the Babe Ruth Museum, also has been there.
" He' s got it all, doesn' t he?" Gibbons says. " I would say it rivals the Hall of Fame."
Don Flanagan, who evaluates collections for Christie' s auction house in New York, says it' s greater than that. Flanagan is cataloging the collection for Halper, because Halper hopes to create a museum.
" I think it' s the finest and most comprehensive collection of anything -- of any one thing -- in the country, if not the world," Flanagan says.
Halper, a part-owner of the New York Yankees, has more than 3,000 autographed baseballs, more than 1 million baseball cards (including complete sets of every series from 1869 to 1975), more than 500 major-league bats and 964 jerseys of major-league players (502 autographed) on an automated dry-cleaning rack in a hidden room.
He has the shotgun Ty Cobb' s mother used to kill Cobb' s father, the oldest known baseball (from 1859), Lou Gehrig' s last glove, Joe DiMaggio' s autographed 1933 jersey from the San Francisco Seals, autographs of every player in the Hall of Fame and the only known autographed jerseys of Gehrig and Cobb (Gehrig' s 1936 New York Yankees jersey, Cobb' s 1928 Philadelphia Athletics jersey).
And then there' s his remarkable Ruth collection of more than 5,000 items. At least 1,000 are autographed, including 250 baseballs.
He has the earliest known photograph of Ruth playing baseball (in 1911 at Baltimore' s St. Mary' s Industrial School for Boys), every known Ruth baseball card, a 1929 Bambino pinball machine, Ruth' s monogrammed silk bathrobe and matching pajamas, autographed golf scorecard, duffel bag, two baseball gloves, five baseball caps, eight bats (six autographed), the bat Ruth leaned on the day his No. 3 was retired, Ruth' s contracts, advertisements, telegrams, spittoon and nine Ruth jerseys, including one autographed (1922 Yankees).
Halper even has the correspondence leading to the sale of Ruth dTC from Boston to New York, as well as the agreement of Ruth accepting the terms and the canceled checks the Yankees paid to the Red Sox.
And that' s just the start.
" It' s too much, isn' t it?" Halper says, almost apologetically. " I know your head' s spinning."
A man of medium build, Halper is gracious, even modest, conducting a tour. The part that' s displayed -- about half of the total -- fills eight rooms and hallways. The house has an elaborate security system, but Halper treats the collection as a labor of love and not merely an investment, inviting you to hold items worth much more than your annual salary.
Although his collection is worth millions, he won' t discuss values and doesn' t seem overly concerned with prices. He doesn' t even like to discuss numbers.
" You know that saying, ' The one with the most toys wins' ?" he says. " I hate that saying.
" This isn' t a contest trying to get the most of anything. It' s just the love I have for baseball, the passion. It' s something that grabbed hold of my arm and said: ' I' m baseball. Come with me.' "
A native of New Jersey, Halper began at 8 collecting autographs, bats, gloves, jerseys and souvenirs at Ruppert Stadium, home of a Yankees farm team, the Newark Bears.
But the passion was born, appropriately enough, with Babe Ruth, who he says is baseball' s greatest player -- although his favorite is DiMaggio.
Halper' s father took him to Yankee Stadium in June 1948, the day the Yankees retired Ruth' s number. Before the game, Halper, 9, stood outside the players' entrance when Ruth' s car pulled up.
Halper slipped under a barricade and scurried toward the star.
" Mr. Ruth, will you sign my book, please?" Halper asked.
" Sure, sonny," replied Ruth, who signed and patted the boy on his head.
By the time the boy was in high school, he had 75 big-league jerseys from players who had passed through Newark. But the Ruth autograph was the springboard that bounced Halper' s hobby into the obsession zone.
A right-handed pitcher with a knee-buckling curveball, Halper played at the University of Miami in the late 1950s. His coach was Maryland native Jimmie Foxx, who hit 534 home runs. That total was second only to Ruth' s 714 when Foxx retired in 1945.
Halper asked Foxx to sign the same sheet that Ruth had signed a decade earlier. Foxx suggested he also get the signature of Mel Ott, a friend visiting. Ott hit 511 homers.
" Then you' ll have all three guys who hit 500 home runs," Foxx said.
Halper then did something that probably no other collector would think of doing: ask each player after they had reached that milestone to sign the sheet. The result is one of many unique items in the Halper collection: the signatures of the 14 members of the 500-home run club on the same piece of paper.
That prized -- and priceless -- memento is typical of the creativity and verve with which Halper has assembled his collection.
After college, Halper returned to New Jersey and joined his father' s business. They were wholesale distributors of paper goods. The business grew from three to 50 trucks.
That success enabled Halper to indulge his passion further. He also bought a share of the Yankees in 1978. And in the 1980s he founded a sports coin and card manufacturing firm that evolved into the Score baseball card company.
By the time sports memorabilia became big business, Halper had so many collectibles that he could aggressively trade for more desirable items. He would fly anywhere to make a deal. His Yankees ties led to fertile associations. He befriended players and their families.
Ruth' s widow gave him numerous items, including Ruth' s signed jersey. Halper traded an 1865 check signed by Abraham Lincoln -- obtained in an earlier deal -- for a bat with a pristine Ruth autograph.
Nearly as impressive as the items in Halper' s collection are the people who have come to marvel at it: more than 100 major-league players and managers, including Hank Aaron, Yogi Berra, DiMaggio, Whitey Ford, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Pete Rose, Frank Robinson and Ted Williams.
Halper' s wife, Sharon, has cooked dinner for many of them. But when she got married, she says, she had no idea her husband collected anything.
" Then things started appearing on the walls," she says, laughing. " I never minded. I always had faith he knew what he was doing."
Halper suffered a heart attack and underwent open-heart surgery a year ago. That prompted him to consider removing the collection from his house.
" Heaven forbid I should have died," he says. " My wife would
have had one big headache."
So he searches for a partner to help set up a museum -- a place where baseball fans can view a beer bottle from Ruth' s father' s saloon in Baltimore, Ruth's famous camel-hair coat and matching polo cap, a lock of his hair, Cobb's false teeth and a baseball autographed by the Chicago White Sox (Black Sox), including Shoeless Joe Jackson.
" If you had all the money in the world, and you sent somebody out to try to duplicate this collection, you couldn't come close," says Flanagan, the Christie' s consultant. " There are thousands of one-of-a-kind items here. They just don't exist anywhere else."