Bound in Dodger blue and including thousands of pages of archived information, the single largest private collection of Dodgers memorabilia is now located in Whittier College’s Baseball Institute.
Thanks to a donation from Richard Santillan, professor at Cal Poly Pomona, the new collection will add more history to the Institute’s vast treasures. A die-hard Dodgers fan, Santillan was one of the founding members of the Latino Baseball History Project, based at California State University, San Bernardino.
The collection includes yearbooks, media guides, scorecards, newspaper and magazine clippings, trading cards, and an actual ticket from the first Dodger game in Los Angles, played in the LA Memorial Coliseum. Viewers of the collection will take a walk through baseball history as they peruse the pages of the binders and read through the material.
With the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, interest in the exhibit may increase. Anyone interested in learning more about the history of the team can visit the Institute, open to the public on Fridays from 1 to 5 p.m., to explore the pages of the new collection, which includes archives dating back to 1958.
Whittier College is home of the Institute for Baseball Studies, the first humanities-based research center of its kind associated with a college or university in the United States. The Institute is a partnership between the Pasadena-based Baseball Reliquary and the College. The institute is located on the third floor of Mendenhall Building.
