HARFORD HISTORY

The Baltimore Sun

On July 12, 1941, The New Yorker magazine ran the first of a two-part profile on Larry MacPhail, then president of the Brooklyn Dodgers major league baseball team.

Leland Stanford "Larry" MacPhail was a renowned baseball club owner and executive of the Cincinnati Reds, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. He led all three clubs out of the doldrums to great success.

MacPhail is credited with many innovations to the sport, including night games, season tickets and radio broadcasts of games. He also paved the way for racial integration of the game. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974.

The 1941 article said MacPhail was "planning to give up baseball and retire to a soothing life in the country." That August, MacPhail bought tumble-down Glenangus in Harford County.

He added adjacent tracts until he had a spread of about 1,000 acres that took in the present-day Glenwood, Country Club Park and Glenangus subdivisions, as well as the Maryland Golf and Country Club.

The property, known locally as Livezey Farm, needed fixing up, and he proceeded to turn it into a showplace where he raised thoroughbreds.

Later in life, MacPhail fell into debt. He was forced to sell the farm in 1975, and he died in October of that year.

[Source: Harford County Historical Bulletin, No. 59, Winter 1994; research: Harford County Public Library]

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