New National Pastime Research Findings

Plus — a mini documentary

New National Pastime Research Findings

I realized a few weeks ago that I’ve never written a brief summary of the history of National Pastime.

Instead of writing an essay, I decided to make a short video summary. You can view it here:

Now, there are a few things I discovered while doing research for this video that I didn’t know before. Below are a few assorted notes that may be of interest to other tabletop baseball researchers in the future.

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An Orphan?

I haven’t found any evidence that Clifford Van Beek was actually an orphan.

This comes from an old 1978 Strat-O-Matic Review article about him:

Not only is there no evidence of this — but there is also evidence to the contrary.

We actually know the names of Cliff’s parents — and I’m going to call him “Cliff” from now on, since that’s what most newspaper articles about him called him.

Check out his obituary:

His father was Rudolph Van Beek, and his mother was named Vesta.

Now, believe it or not, his father was far from anonymous. I found this in a 1905 edition of The Green Bay Press-Gazette:

From The Green Bay Press-Gazette, November 17, 1905, page 11

We know this is the correct Rudolph Van Beek. I also found this:

From The Green Bay Press-Gazette, June 27, 1907, page 7

That kind of runs contrary to the orphanage story, doesn’t it?

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The Greatest Green Bay Packer Fan?

I stumbled across this front page article from The Green Bay Press-Gazette in 1979:

From The Green Bay Press-Gazette, November 27, 1979, page 1

Van Beek claims to have attended every Green Bay Packers home game from 1919 to 1979.

I’m not sure if this counts the numerous games the Packers played in Milwaukee over the years. However, when combined with the orphanage story and the story about his printer allegedly going bankrupt, I think this one is questionable at best.

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The Grocery Store

It turns out that Cliff’s grandfather was the original grocer in the family.

J. L. Van Beek ran a grocery store going back to the late 19th century. I found a few interesting old advertisements:

From 1895

From 1910

From 1915; see lower right

There are dozens of more examples at least, in case somebody with a bit more time on their hands wants to wade through the newspaper archives.

It’s clear that Cliff grew up with his grandparents in Green Bay.

In fact, Cliff got into a car accident back in 1926, not long after his famous patent was granted:

From The Post Crescent, August 30, 1926

That 203 South Quincy Street address was occupied by the Van Beeks through the 20s and 30s, and is mentioned in the articles about The Major Games Company losing its court battle:

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Forever In APBA’s Shadow

I was excited when I discovered this 1984 article from The Green Bay Post-Gazette:

To my knowledge, this is the only article about National Pastime to have ever appeared in a major media outlet. Unfortunately, this was published 2 years after Cliff passed away.

But the real painful part of this story is the story that ran right on top of it:

This world can be cruel.