Hometown Remembers Jimmie Foxx

 Jimmie Foxx statue in Sudlersville, Maryland

Double X was ignored by his hometown for years, but now is proudly remembered:

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: That's because after Foxx's peak in the '30s, he bottomed out. He lost a lot of money, began to drink, had health problems, got divorced. He retired from baseball in 1945 and drifted from job to job, including one season as manager of the Fort Wayne Daisies of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Remember Tom Hanks in the movie "A League of Their Own"?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: That character, Jimmy Dugan, was partly based on Jimmie Foxx. Over the years, Foxx would visit Sudlersville, but by the '60s folks there didn't want anything to do with him. Once he couldn't even get a check cashed.
None of that deterred Foxx's number one fan, Gil Dunn. Dunn started a display of Foxx memorabilia in his drugstore on nearby Kent Island. He wrote letters to Foxx about it. Even spoke to him on the phone.
Mr. DUNN: One day I look up in the drugstore, there's the person named Jimmie Foxx standing there.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Foxx had driven up from Florida with a trunk full of bats, uniforms, MVP plaques. He said no one else seemed interested and gave it all to Dunn for free. It was in keeping with Foxx's reputation as a man with a big heart.
Mr. DUNN: He was very kind to me. He was a very kind person.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Foxx died in 1967, but it wasn't until decades later that people here in Sudlersville began to remember what good Foxx had done for the town.

I didn't realize that the Jimmy Dugan character was based on Jimmie Foxx.  You learn something new every day.  Anyway, it wasn't just his hometown which forgot about him.  Ask about any baseball fan you meet about Jimmy Foxx or Hank Greenberg, and they aren't going to be able to tell you much.  But, man, those guys could crush a baseball.  I would guess that their primes being in the Depression may have had something to do with it (Greenberg's career was also interrupted by WWII).