ENGLEWOOD, N.j.—In the event of a personal injury, the players had all the bases covered.
This week back in 1911, Northern Valley doctors took on the area’s lawyers in a baseball game at the Englewood Field Club. It was a fund-raiser for Englewood Hospital, which had been founded 21 years earlier with just 12 beds. Since then, separate men’s and women’s wards, each with 12 beds, had been added, along with an eight-bed children’s ward. The first decade of the 1900s also brought nine nurses’ rooms, a dispensary, operating room, dining room, kitchen, maternity ward, and laundry.
The doctors vs. lawyers ballgame took place Oct. 11, 1911. It was quite a sight, with the doctors wearing their operating gowns and “antiseptic turbans” (surgeon caps), author Adaline Wheelock Sterling wrote in her 1922 history of the city.
Dr. John J. Haring was a physician who lived in Tenafly at the turn of the 20th century. After moving to town in 1870, he traveled the Northern Valley area on horseback to make sick calls. A true country doctor, Haring was known to trade farm goods for medical care.
Wheelock described, “Dr. Haring, who practiced medicine before baseball had entered the mind of man, made a gazelle-like homerun amid wild applause.”
He was 77 years old at the time.
City counsel Raymond P. Wortendyke, age 65, a Knickerbocker Road resident and former president of the Bergen County Bar Association, for his part “did a marathon, surprising those who knew him only in his dignified legal capacity.”
The game ended in a 7–7 tie. In addition to providing ample entertainment for the people of Englewood and surrounding towns, the game netted $210 to benefit the hospital. That sum is equivalent to about $5,600 today, taking inflation into account.
The Field Club and Englewood Hospital teamed up again in 1918, when the Spanish Flu pandemic struck. The Field Club was transformed into an emergency ward for people suffering from the deadly virus. Workers at the Field Club volunteered full-time to assist the overburdened hospital staff in tending to patients.
