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Frank's Place: Connie Mack and . . . the Three Stooges?

I realize the admission could cost me membership in the Philadelphia Chapter of the Aging Baby Boomers Society, but I never thought the Three Stooges were funny.

I realize the admission could cost me membership in the Philadelphia Chapter of the Aging Baby Boomers Society, but I never thought the Three Stooges were funny.

For me, the appeal of the slapstick was overshadowed by the unpleasantness of the slapped faces, not to mention all the eye-gouging, ear-twisting, and hair-pulling that convulsed so many others who watched the Stooges nightly on Sally Starr's Popeye Theater.

So it was as disappointing as it was surprising when a Facebook friend recently posted a black-and-white photo I'd never seen, a publicity shot in which those same Stooges were playing stickball with, of all people, Connie Mack.

As anyone who's ever seen a photo of the legendary Philadelphia A's owner-manager can easily surmise, Mack was the anti-Stooge, a dignified, churchgoing, Victorian gentleman whose reputation and behavior were as rigidly upright as the high starched collars he favored.

His slumming with the Stooges appears to have taken place on a sun-splashed rear lot at a struggling movie studio. Sado-masochistic Moe Howard is readying a pitch to brother Curly while the third Stooge, Philadelphia-born Larry Fine, is already signaling a strike. And Mack is holding down the catcher position he played a half-century earlier, though utilizing his fedora this time instead of a mitt.

What possibly could have joined this paragon of probity with an anarchical trio of bad haircuts? Why would the saintly "Mr. Mack" cavort with vaudeville-trained vulgarians? It was a trivial but tantalizing mystery to pursue on a languorous, late-summer afternoon.

A social-media comrade immediately thought he knew the answer, directing me to a link for one of the countless forgettable Stooge flicks, Swing Parade of 1946. With a title that suggested baseball and a cast that included a "Connie Mack," it seemed logical.

But a little investigatory work on the film-data site IMDB determined that "Swing" referred not to America's pastime but to what was then its most popular form of music. And the featured Mack was not the baseball Hall of Famer at all but a little-known actress-dancer with two films to her credit.

The curious photo turned up elsewhere, in the midst of the third and final installment of Norman Macht's prodigious Mack biography. Its caption provides little additional detail beyond noting that the shot was taken "during a trip to California."

Mack and his wife did vacation in California the winter of 1944-45, but it's more likely the photo dates back to 1940 to 1943, when, for some strange reason, the notoriously underfinanced A's owner took his team all the way across the country for spring training, to the California orange-growing community of Anaheim.

His players apparently loved the exotic locale, especially the weather and the proximity to Hollywood's movie studios and the actresses they employed. Mack, 78 in 1940, seemed just as enthusiastic about California, where his team trained on a palm-tree-surrounded field in La Palma Park, stayed at the Pickwick and Angelina hotels, and dined most often at the local Elks Club.

"[He] ate up all the attention," Macht wrote, "hobnobbing with movie stars, many of whom were avid and knowledgeable fans: Joe E. Brown, the Three Stooges, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers."

The citizens of Anaheim, 1,500 miles from a big-league baseball town, were fascinated by the lanky celebrity in their midst. In one of his February 1940 reports from there, the Inquirer's James Isaminger pointed out just how popular Mack was.

"[A's officials] have had to protect Mack from milling crowds after the games," Isaminger wrote, "and convoy him by force to his automobile."

More evidence that the photo was taken in the early 1940s came in the memoir My Brother Larry: The Stooge in the Middle. In that 1984 book, author Morris Feinberg included a second photo of Mack and the Stooges, this time accompanied by Rudy Vallee and Ann Miller. According to the caption, that shot was taken during the filming of Time Out for Rhythm, a 1941 movie starring Vallee, Miller, and the Stooges.

So Mack was at least 78 when he posed with the Stooges. By then, sadly, his carefully cultivated veneer of dignity was beginning to crumble.

About the same time as the photo was taken, Mack was introduced before a fight at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Sportswriter Red Smith described his bounding around the ring, hands clasped over his head, playing to the crowd's cheers.

During a visit to the ranch of actor Leo Carrillo, Mack donned a ten-gallon cowboy hat and posed for photos that appeared in newspapers nationwide.

Then, in the spring of 1948, as part of a hare-brained promotion for an exhibition game, the 85-year-old Mack and 78-year-old Senators owner Clark Griffith engaged in a foot race.

What pushed him to such uncharacteristic silliness? Was it a sign of the dementia that afflicted him in his final years? Was he simply trying to be an accommodating baseball ambassador? Or was he, as Macht suggests, "a ham at heart," someone not nearly as dignified as his greatest admirers believed?

Whatever, I couldn't help but think of Mack and the Stooges recently when I saw the great Bill Lyon throwing a first-ball pitch to the Phillie Phanatic.

Maybe not since Mack has anyone in Philadelphia sports been as widely respected as Lyon, the former Inquirer columnist who is battling early onset Alzheimer's. Yet, reminiscent of Mack with the Stooges, there he was posing with a furry-green fiction.

There was, however, one notable distinction:

The Phanatic is funny.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz