After seventeen years, I decided to self-publish a revised and expanded edition of Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines, my 2009 work about brothers Alfred and George Lawson, the most eccentric siblings who ever careened their way through American society. Since 2009, as more primary source material became digitized, I had collected new nuggets of information about the Lawsons. Could their story get even crazier? Oh, yes:
- Alfred W. Lawson spent years of his youth in a Michigan reform school
- Alfred was forced into a shotgun marriage when he was nineteen. A baby born five months after the vows was the result: Alfred W. Lawson, Jr. However, the infant was born with spina bifida, and only survived a few weeks. By the time his son died, AWL had already left town, to resume his semi-pro baseball career.
- Alfred was treated to a rude welcome when his one-man baseball tour around the world reached Australia.
- Brother Collin Lawson, with chronic, life-long health issues from a Spanish-American War training camp in Georgia, nonetheless was profiled a couple of times by newspapers. His unique talent: driving ambulances at breakneck speeds.
- Volunteer George W. Lawson, in his fifties, not only saw action in World War I, but returned home with some thrilling stories.
- George, during his years as a performing hypnotist, pulled in audiences (and reporters) with a publicity trick he staged in many cities: hypnotizing an assistant in a coffin, nailing it shut, and displaying it for days in a storefront window.
- George’s 1921 Continental League, which pitted all-black teams against all-white teams, actually did start its season.
- Long before Alfred started the Direct Credits Society and Des Moines University of Lawsonomy, George surrounded himself with his own followers, and attempted to start a colony in the Canadian wilderness.
- The fate of Alfred Lawson’s Superairliner is revealed.
McFarland Publishing, who put out the original edition, declared it out of print in 2015, and graciously allowed publication of a revised edition.
Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Baseball-Fiends-Flying-Machines-Alfred/dp/B0GSMWTH8J/