Sports memorabilia maven Barry Halper is remembered for what he gave

by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Staff Writer

An estimated 700 people gathered at Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills on Dec. 19 for the funeral of New Vernon businessman Barry Halper, who helped transform sports memorabilia collecting from a schoolboy hobby to a multibillion-dollar industry. He died Dec. 18 at the age of 66.

Rabbi Laurence W. Groffman, spiritual leader of B’nai Jeshurun, where Halper and his wife, Sharon, were members, praised Halper as a “really kind, wonderful mensch.”

In a lifetime of collecting, Halper, formerly of Livingston, amassed more than 80,000 pieces of baseball paraphernalia, ranging from such commonplace items as balls, bats, trophies, and uniforms to unique acquisitions like a wax-figure of Babe Ruth from Madame Tussauds and Ty Cobb’s false teeth. The New York Times characterized Halper as “a one-man Smithsonian.”

For his friends and family, however, he was simply, in Groffman’s words, “a wonderful man.”

“He would never turn down a request from our temple brotherhood to do lectures,” the rabbi said. “I remember he did a great presentation once showing his collection of vintage boxing films. The thing about it was not only that he had this great material, but the depth of his knowledge about it was incredible. He was always generous with his time.

“The sports memorabilia wasn’t for trading purposes,” said Groffman. “This was really a passion for him.”

In a sense, Halper never grew up, continuing his hobby long after most kids found other interests. Born in Newark, he began his collection by hanging around Ruppert Stadium, home of the Bears, at the time a minor-league affiliate of the New York Yankees. After graduating from the University of Miami, where he pitched for the school baseball team, Halper went into the family paper supply business founded by his grandfather. The Elizabeth-based company closed around 1992, which allowed him to devote more time to his collecting.

In 1998, Major League Baseball purchased about 20 percent of Halper’s collection and donated it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, which established a gallery that bears Halper’s name. Most of the remainder of the collection was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1999 and fetched nearly $22 million.

To his kids — Steven, Jason, and Marni — having a house filled with mementos of the national pastime was the norm.

“Ever since I was little, I always remember the basement being full of collectibles and people coming over to see them,” Jason Halper, an attorney from Randolph, told NJ Jewish News. “Now that I’m a little bit older, I can appreciate how much effort went into it.”

Halper said that as his father received more media attention for his collection, people with memorabilia began to seek him out. “A lot of them would be family members of former ballplayers who just had this stuff lying around the house and didn’t know what to do with it.”

Halper agreed with the assessment that his father was a key personality in establishing the enormously lucrative field of sports collecting. “I think he was definitely one of the pioneers of the industry,” Jason Halper said. “Don’t forget, when he started as a little boy in the 1950s, there was no [collecting] hobby. But he also gave collecting a lot of credibility because of the type of person that he was and [for being] as honest as he was.”

Besides baseball and family, Halper said his father’s passion was philanthropy, particularly with the Burn Unit at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston. “When he did interviews for people, they would oftentimes offer him money for his time. And he would say ‘Instead of paying me, donate it to the Burn Unit….’

“I would just want people to know that he was just a great man, a very generous man,” Jason said. “Somebody said at his funeral that his greatest joy in life was giving to people who he knew could give him nothing in return. He was just that type of person — that’s what made him happy.”

Former Yankee Yogi Berra, a resident of Montclair, called Halper “the Babe Ruth of collecting.”

“He was a wonderful guy, a very good friend for a long time,” the Hall of Fame catcher said in a statement. “Baseball and his family, those were always the greatest things to him.”

Always one for a self-deprecating remark, Berra mused that Halper “had more of my stuff than I had. Barry loved telling stories, and he really loved the Yankees. He was always real generous to charities and helped out” the Yogi Berra Museum and Education Center in Montclair.

His love for the Yankees went beyond that of the average fan; Halper purchased a one percent share in the Bronx ball club in the late 1970s.

Jason Halper spoke of two of his father’s favored pieces, both belonging to Lou Gehrig: the last glove he wore as a professional and the uniform worn on his day of tribute, during which the ailing Yankee great delivered his famous speech in which he declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

Judging by the outpouring by family, friends, and the sporting world, Barry Halper was a pretty lucky man, too.

Ron Kaplan can be reached at RKaplan@njjewishnews.com.

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