Camillus Babe Ruth pocket knife

L

lwfrog

Joined
Nov 3, 2006
Messages
2
Hi, I am writing for my 80 year old mom. She has a single blade, bat shaped pocket knife with Babe Ruth's signature and a ball engraved on it. It looks like it may be made of bakelite. The colors are rainbow striped. Her dad got it in the 20's when he played on a miner league team in New York. It was made by Camillus Cutlery but every thing we find seems to be 2 bladed. Does anyone have any ideas on value? Thanks
 
Hi, welcome to BF. You might get some responses here, but you might also have some luck by posting your query in the Traditional forum or in the Bernard Levine forum. Both are under "General" at the top of your screen. Click there, and you'll see a list of subforums.

Sounds like a cool knife. Do you have a digital pic? That would help the folks here help you
 
Albert Baer (future owner of Imperial, Schrade, Ulster, Kingston, Camillus) was put in charge of sales for Kastor Bros in 1930, and he signed George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth to endorse an autographed baseball bat figural knife. So the knife would be 1930 or later. Camillus was a brand used by Kastor Bros., and eventually the company name was changed to Camillus.

I have no idea of how to date the knife according to the number of blades. I have an Imperial Knife catalog from 1959 which shows a HR-58 single pen blade bat figural knife with wood handle. I have seen several earlier ones with celluloid handles. I doubt that yours is bakelite, though many people think their knives are, it was seldom used for knives, though celluloid was. It would really help to see a picture of it though, along with the tang stamp. According to CAMCO, there were three variants made, a colorful cell handled double blade version (#5488 pattern) for a 1935 Quaker Oats promotion, a small 2 blade and a large 1 blade with woodgrain handles which originally sold for $1.00.

A letter from the Camillus archives was quoted here some time ago by Phil Gibbs:

Phil Gibbs said:
I found a letter in our archives from "The Babe" dated July 15th, 1930. It read:

"Show me a typical American boy and I'll show you a boy with a pocket knife in one hand and a baseball bat in the other.
Not only the boys, but their fathers and their grandfathers, like to whittle and it takes a good knife to do good whittling.
Now you can get a knife in the shape of a baseball bat and I'm mighty glad it carries my signature. It's a good knife and a good idea.
Yours truly,
Babe Ruth"
Thanks for asking the question. It was a fun search!
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Codger
 
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