Cut Glass Baseball Bat [Postcard]

Format is 6 inches by 4.25 inches. Front is a color photograph of a cut glass baseball bat displayed against a field of black. The back of the post card has the standard right side for the recipient's address and a stamp. It has not been addressed. The left side has a note on the baseball bat and space for a message. A short line of text identifying The Corning Museum of Glass divides the two sides. The piece is blown lead glass that was then cut with a cutting wheel to create the design. The notation reads: This cut glass baseball bat was created in White Mills, Pennsylvania, by C. Dorflinger & Sons in 1913. It was presented to "Honest" Eddie Murphy of the Philadelphia Athletics, winners of the World Series in 1913. Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Edward Murphy. John Edward Murphy (October 2, 1891 - February 21, 1969), nicknamed "Honest Eddie", was an American professional baseball right fielder. He played in Major League Baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics, Chicago White Sox and Pittsburgh Pirates. He appeared in three World Series. His first two were with the Athletics in 1913 and 1914 World Series. Murphy appeared in the 1919 World Series as a member of the Chicago White Sox, a series best known for the Black Sox Scandal. During the 1913 season, he became a "regular" in the outfield and participated in the A's World Series contest against the New York Giants. In 1915, the Chicago White Sox purchased his contract. Murphy played the remainder of the 1915 and next six seasons for the White Sox. Acknowledged as one of the master American glassmakers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Christian Dorflinger is still remembered in his adopted northeastern Pennsylvania home. He was one of those extraordinary Victorians who dedicated a long life to the perfecting of the craft that he learned as a 10-year-old apprentice in his native Alsace. His legacy of fine cut and engraved glassware can now be better appreciated by admirers of early American glass at the Dorflinger Glass Museum, which opened just west of Hawley, Pa., in May 1989. The museum is housed in a new wing of the early 19th-century hilltop farmhouse that Christian Dorflinger bought from his New York friend Capt. Aaron Flower in 1863 when the glassmaker was 35. Here in semiretirement he hoped to recover his health, undermined by the strain of building his first successful glass business in Brooklyn. So restorative did his pastoral retreat prove that in 1865 he started a new glass factory down in the valley at White Mills and moved his wife, Elizabeth, and his children - eventually three surviving sons and four daughters - from Brooklyn to the farm. Joined by sons and finally grandsons, the business as C. Dorflinger & Sons grew and flourished till his death at age 87. Even before Christian Dorflinger's death in 1915, the company was threatened by newer, cheaper methods of manufacture and by changing tastes. The family tried to carry on the business, but by 1921 the additional impact of Prohibition and the decreased demand for wine glasses, decanters and so on, and cheaper European labor finally forced them to close. The high place of Dorflinger among American manufacturers of fine glassware of the time was stressed by Jane Shadel Spillman, curator of American glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. ''Because Dorflinger had few peers in the quality of its crystal and the brilliance of its cutting and engraving, the company was chosen to provide complete services for the White House, as well as for a number of the era's better-known industrialists and bankers,'' she said. Dorflinger glass is displayed in Corning's permanent collection, as well as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of American History, of the Smithsonian in Washington, among other places. Given the Dorflinger's works' importance, Ms. Spillman said, ''it was high time to have a museum devoted to its glass.'' The Co.…