Peter Morris, Baseball Historian

My Other Research

Harvey Watkins

Some time ago, I wrote a biography of New York non-playing manager Harvey Watkins that was published on the SABR BioProject website.  It was actually part of a mini-series that I did on men who managed major league teams without any qualifications for doing so, which also included Lew Phelan and John Waltz.  As you'll see from the piece, Watkins's date and place of death were unknown at the time.  Because Watkins led such an interesting and varied life, I had vague hopes that by publishing his story somebody might come forward with a helpful clue.  But I never would have imagined what happened next.

Only a month or two after posting the profile of Harvey Watkins, I was contacted by a woman in Wales named Heather Smith who was doing research on Watkins's wife for unrelated reasons and had read my biography.  She had some new information about them and wondered if I would be interested.  Boy, was I ever!

She had already discovered that Watkins and his wife moved to London, England, in 1933 and lived there until the late 1940s.  She kept working on them and found that they died on the same day when their furnace malfunctioned.  She even sent me an obituary, death certificate and this photo of their tombstone:

It's like having a guardian angel!