1938 Original AP Wire Photo and Baltimore Sun Election Coverage - Walter Johnson Enters Politics from His Germantown Farm
On August 24, 1938, Walter Johnson visited Washington D.C. and signed baseballs for a crowd of kids - the kind of scene that had followed the Big Train his entire career. What made that particular day different was what the Associated Press caption on the back announced: Johnson, now a Germantown, Maryland farmer, had just filed for election as Montgomery County Commissioner on the Republican ticket. The photo, transmitted by wire on August 25, 1938 and certified directly from the Baltimore Sun's historic archive, captures him at the exact moment his second act in public life began. He is smiling, surrounded by children, signing baseballs -- completely at ease, because this was always who he was. One of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936, Johnson had retired to his Germantown farm and almost immediately turned toward public service.
The Baltimore Sun from November 10, 1938 tells the rest of the story. Under the headline "Walter Johnson Victor In Montgomery County," the paper confirms he won the Commissioner's race, launching a political career that would take him all the way to a congressional run in 1940, where he lost to Democrat William D. Byron by 60,037 to 52,258 votes -- a margin of just six percent. After that loss he was re-elected County Commissioner in 1942 and served until his death from a brain tumor in 1946. The farm he retired to in Germantown -- the exact ground where he lived out his post-baseball life as a farmer and elected official -- is today the site of Seneca Valley High School. I know this piece of land well. I went to Seneca Valley. The hallways, the fields, the parking lot where buses pull in every morning -- all of it was once Walter Johnson's farm. For most collectors, this is a piece of baseball and political history. For me it is also a piece of the ground I walked every day for four years, long before I knew whose land it had been. That connection is why this set will never leave my collection.
The strange, one-of-a-kind political campaign that almost landed Walter Johnson in Congress
