Rajah of Renfrew latest release from U of A Press

When Brant Ducey began rummaging through a trunk full of his father's papers and baseball memorabilia seven years ago, he had no idea his personal quest would one day shed light on Edmonton's history.

"It started almost like a family memoir," says Ducey. "Once it expanded beyond [my father's] career into a history of semi-pro and professional baseball in Edmonton, it began to look more and more like a book."

The final product, he says, is "a regional history. It's about the role baseball played in Edmonton in the earlier decades of this century, and the social influence of baseball in the community and how it brought people together at a time when there wasn't much else to do, particularly on a Sunday afternoon during the depression years and the war years."

While far from academic in style or content, U of A Press decided to take on The Rajah of Renfrew because it makes an important contribution to the history of the Canadian West. "It's certainly a book that goes well beyond sports and is kind of a social history all of its own," says Glenn Rollans, U of A Press director.

Light in tone and full of anecdotes, Ducey's book traces the history of Edmonton baseball through the personalities and work of the two men who laid down the foundations for the sport in this city. The first was W.F "Deacon" White, an American who was so fascinated by life in the north he tacked the name "Eskimos" onto his baseball team around 1910 (and later onto football and hockey clubs as well). The second was John Ducey, who came to be known as "Edmonton's Mr. Baseball" in the 1940s and '50s. Whatever the decade, however, it seems baseball has always had a central role in the life of this city.

"Baseball in Edmonton has always been popular," says Ducey. "[The city] was a hotbed of baseball in the 1920s." With the first games dating back to the 1890s, there were some 50 church leagues by the time John was playing as a kid in the early '20s. The ball-park was simply the place where everyone congregated on a Sunday afternoon after church. A visit to the ballpark was also "one way people coped with some turbulent periods of our history.it gave them a common reason to rally civic pride," writes Ducey.

As baseball continued to grow in popularity, becoming semi-professional in the '20s, John's love for the game became unstoppable. In his youth he was a talented fielder but a "notoriously bad hitter," according to his son. Once John realized he wouldn't make it as a player, he decided to become an umpire so he could stay in the game.

"When I was growing up, he was trying to scratch out a living as both an umpire and as the lessee of Renfrew Park," says Ducey. John was also involved in hockey administration for Eddie Shore in the U.S. and ran a couple of ice-skating rinks before finally becoming a full-time baseball promoter in 1946.

In those days, says Ducey, a lot of talented, flashy players passed through Edmonton, either on their way up to the major leagues or down from the majors. One little-known and aging pitcher, Leon Day, was signed by John Ducey to a "limited service" contract, which meant he'd played less than three years in organized baseball. Day played 44 unspectacular games for the Eskimos in 1953, before he moved on.

What no one in Edmonton knew at the time, however, at least until he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., was Day was a major star in the Negro Major Leagues of the '30s and '40s, and one of the league's greatest players. On occasion he'd even beat the great legend Satchel Paige. But such was the nature of the game in those days that black players attracted little of the attention they deserved.

The Rajah of Renfrew is replete with such stories. Ducey says he hopes his book will fill a hungry "niche for Canadian treatments of baseball . it's a little different from most history books on the subject because it deals with personalities woven through it."