Playing with the Best Book Signing

On September 20, 2024, the Historical Society will hold a book signing and wine and cheese reception with President Lenny Wagner, author of Playing With The Best: One Man’s Journey through the Golden Age of Sports at Smith-Cadbury Mansion, 12 High Street, Moorestown. Please join us!

Before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, there were only nineteen men, throughout history, who played in the Major Leagues of Baseball and in the National Football League, in the same season. Only one man from that group, Moorestown’s Walter French, can lay claim to having played for a World Series winner and an NFL Championship team. In 1925, he starred for the Pottsville (PA) Maroons in their win over the Chicago Cardinals, in what was believed to be the NFL championship game, only to see the title stripped by a league office decision, a controversial move still being argued about today. Then in 1929, he was on the Philadelphia Athletics when they beat the Chicago Cubs in five games to win the  World Series.

Walter French was born in Moorestown in 1899 and was a direct descendent of one of the town’s original founders, Thomas French. He is now the subject of a new book written by Lenny Wagner, President of the Historical Society of Moorestown, called Playing with the Best: One Man’s Journey through the Golden Age of Sports. It is being released on September 15th by Brookline Books, an imprint of Casemate Publishing. “He played with and against the biggest stars the decade of the 1920s had to offer, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, and twenty-seven other ballplayers who would eventually wind up in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In football, he went up against the likes of Notre Dame’s George Gipp, the ‘Four Horsemen,’ Curly Lambeau, George Halas, Ira ‘Buck’ Rogers and many more. The top sports writers of his day, from Grantland Rice to Ed Sullivan, made regular mention of him in their columns” Wagner said.

Lenny Wagner

Other well-known figures from the period such as Paul Robeson, Knute Rockne, Connie Mack, and General Douglas MacArthur all make appearances in Wagner’s book. Dave Townsend, Curator of the South Jersey Baseball Hall of Fame has called the book a “very impressive and informative work” and Joe Gorski, President of the South Jersey Hot Stovers BaseballClub described it as “one of the best researched works on an early twentieth century sports figure that I have ever read”.

The French family lived at 232 West Main Street, the current location of Chase Bank. His father, Walter S. French was a successful contractor. His firm’s logo, a masonry trowel, can still be found embedded in some of the town’s older sidewalks. After attending Moorestown High School for three years, Walter French transferred to the Pennington School where he starred in football, baseball, basketball and track. From Pennington he went to Rutgers where he teamed with Paul Robeson, the first in a long line of iconic American figures that he would play with, for and against, for the next twenty years.

Congratulations, Lenny!

For more information and to purchase the book go to Playing With The Best.