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Did you know that Alexander Joy Cartwright was the real inventor of baseball and that he liked Hawaii too! Alex, or Alick as he was called, was a draftsman from a notable seafaring family, who was living in New York in the 1840's. He was also a member of The New York Knickerbockers Baseball Club and he produced the first layout for a baseball field and a rule book to go with it. He actually kept a box score of the first game, which was played on the
Elysian Fields, a park across the Hudson River from Manhattan , in what is now Hoboken , New Jersey in 1845. Baseball was blessed by the energy and imagination of it's progenitor and also lucky that the false inventor of the game, Abner Doubleday, was from Cooperstown , New York . If the facts had been known, the baseball Hall of Fame might be in an industrial area of Hoboken instead of a pastoral upstate New York setting!
A few years after the first recorded baseball game, Alick got the wanderlust, but instead of hopping on a boat, he went overland to California to check out the “gold rush.” All along the way, he left diamonds in the dust across the Midwest . When he finally got to San Francisco , he was disillusioned with the “rush,” and also contracted dysentry. When a friend, Charles Robinson, told him there were great opportunities in Hawaii , he booked passage on the Peruvian brig, Pacifico. His voyage was not so peaceful. Indeed, he became deathly seasick, and when he set foot in Honolulu , he was not inclined to return to sea. Instead, he became a merchant, and pursued his interest in baseball, constructing the first diamond in Makiki Park . Both ventures prospered. Alick diversified into ship chandlering, banking, trusts, estates, insurance and real estate, forming Cartwright and Comapany Ltd., which is still operating in Honolulu . Baseball caught on as well and was played in Hawaii long before it was played in most of the continental United States . In 1939, Babe Ruth visited Honolulu and paid a visit to Nuuanu Cemetery , where he laid flower leis on Alick's grave. |
