On September 16, 1934, John Baylor of Washington, D.C., was told he had just become the father of a baby boy. Mr. Baylor glanced at his watch to note the time he heard the news. His watch was an Elgin. And that was how Elgin Baylor, one of basketball’s greatest stars, got his name.
From The Giant Book of More Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Baylor#NBA_coach_and_executive
This has very little to do with Sprots but is a fascinating little piece of historical trivia. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the son of Martin Luther King, Sr. Sr. was born Michael King, as was his son. Sr. was the leader of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, as his son would then do. Georgia new Senator Rahpael Warnock leads the church now. Despite being a Baptist Sr. attended a World Lutheran Convention and was so moved by the experience that he changed his name to Martin Luther King, and name of his namesake, who was a young boy at the time.
This is not remarkable except that it was held in 1935, in Nazi Germany. I learned this from a fascinating book called “Travellers in the Third Reich.” (Two l’s in Travellers; it’s British.) It’s a social history of non-Germans, primarily Brits but quite a few Americans, who traveled in Germany from 1933 to the outbreak of the war in 1939. It’s pieced together mostly from letters and diaries. They all knew they were in a different place than their homelands but their accounts were not particularly negative, far from it. There are lots of comments about how clean and orderly the place was (I bet), how cheap it was (Hitler kept the exchange rate low to accumulate as much foreign currency as he could), and how cheerful efficient, and helpful the Germans were. This sort of surprised the Brits but the Germans let bygones be bygones. French visitors, few that there were, were treated like dirt, apparently.
Black American visitors, few that there were, all remarked on how the country seemed to be free of the racial hatred that plagued them back home. Well, against Black people, probably, but partly that’s because the visitors were people like King Sr. or the athletes who attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, or performers who stuck to appearances in things like Shakespeare plays or classical music performances, not any of that decadent Jazz or swing stuff.
I can’t recommend the book highly enough. The edition I read (it was only loaned to me, sadly) had two full sections of color plates of gorgeous travel posters from the period and other ephemera.
Now, back to Sprotstalk.