Ty Cobb Papers

The Ty Cobb Papers are arranged into five series: personal and professional materials, photographs, writings by Cobb and writings by other authors. Each in turn was further subdivided into subseries.

Series 1, Personal Materials, contains items related to Cobb's education in public junior and senior high schools and at the University of Nevada. There are biographical sketches and an interview of Ty by his son Tyrus W. Cobb, and scrapbooks and clippings about Ty's father, William.

Ty and his father owned mining interests in Virginia City. Series 1 contains documentation about those mines, including legal papers, real estate materials, and reports of operations. The mines named include the Silver Star Mine, Comstock and Brunswick Lode, Baltimore-Maryland Mine, and the Sierra Nevada Gold and Silver Mining Company.

A few artifacts were donated with the manuscript collection and they include trophies and plaques awarded in recognition of his service to the community and profession, and for various golf tournaments. In addition, there is a home movie camera and the manual Corona typewriter Cobb used throughout most of his journalism career.

Series 2 includes professional honors and awards, correspondence, speeches, membership and press cards, and miscellaneous materials. The correspondence is of widely scattered dates and mainly relates to specific events or columns. The awards and honors subseries includes clippings, programs, and invitations to several events at which Cobb was honored for his contributions to Nevada athletics. Also included are his Distinguished Nevadan and Silver Quill Awards.

The collection included several dozen photographs, almost all of which were related to professional activities such as the awards dinners. These photographs have been transferred to the photographic archives of the Special Collections Department.

Series 4 represents Cobb's career in journalism from its earliest days to the last of his thousands of columns. The earliest piece of Cobb's work is the 1928 Junior Times Newsletter, the official paper of Troop 1, boy Scouts of Reno. Other early items are Cobb's article about Dan De Quille for a 1936 edition of The Rainbow, published at the Nevada State Prison; and a satirical edition of the University of Nevada's Sagebrush, entitled Sagelush (1936). A sampling of Cobb's sports articles, including many on the Squaw Valley Winter Olympic Games, 1960, are included in this series.

The bulk of the series consists of copies of Cobb's column for the Nevada State Journal. The "Cobbwebs" column began in 1965 and continued until 1997, when the last one was published posthumously. This collection contains many of those columns, although it lacks any columns for the first two years. "Cobbwebs" was initially published three times a week and gradually reduced to once a week. Cobb based "Cobbwebs" on his extensive memories of Virginia City and Reno. They often featured sports or sports figures as well.

Finally, this series includes first and last drafts of The Best of Cobbwebs which was based on the best columns. The first draft serves to illustrate the difficult task of editing the book down to manageable length.

The final series, Series 5, consists of writings of other authors and includes articles about Ty Cobb (the journalist) and on other miscellaneous topics related to Reno or sports subjects.