Not Rosie O'Donnell.
Despite being a big baseball fan, I had never until recently heard the name Dorothy Jane Mills. Mills, along with her late husband, Dr. Harold Seymour, are two of the key figures in the study of the game’s history. The pair wrote a trio of the most important baseball books ever published, which helped nurture generations of researchers and statisticians.
For decades, Mills got the short shrift and her husband got all the credit because he was too sexist to let her have a co-writer’s byline and Mills, the ever-dutiful wife who was raised in an era when women didn’t make waves, only recently asserted her place in the writing and research process.
In a March article in the New York Times, Alan Schwarz profiled the woman that history almost forgot. An excerpt:
“Dorothy Zander grew up in Cleveland during the 1930s and ’40s wanting to become a writer, and while an English major at Fenn College–now Cleveland State University–worked for The Cleveland News as a copy boy. (‘Not a copy girl, a copy boy,’ she repeated curtly.) She volunteered to help her American history professor, Harold Seymour, type his lectures; she found they needed more than typing, and told him so.
They fell in love and married, and she became his primary research assistant for his Cornell doctoral dissertation on baseball history — reading through old newspapers at The Sporting News offices in St. Louis and scrolling through microfilm at the New York Public Library.
She cared nothing for baseball, only the scholarship–and the growing stature of her husband, 17 years her senior.
‘He loved baseball,’ Mills recalled in a telephone interview. ‘He was a bat boy for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1920s and he was the star of the neighborhood.
‘I’m still not a fan of baseball. People can’t understand that. I think it’s a good idea to remain above that. You write a lot more objectively about a subject you’re not in love with.’”
