Clark Griffith dedicating the Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn plaque at Bloomington (IL) Cemetery, May 1, 1941.
Griffith told a reporter for The Associated Press:
“It’s been 20 years since I’ve been back where I spent part of my boyhood. I lived in Normal (the town separated by only a street from Bloomington from my seventeenth to twenty-first year and it was Ol’ Hoss who taught me the first rules of pitching.”
Griffith said of Radbourn:
“He was a husky, durable fellow, but to watch him was to be impressed by his keen pitching brain rather than by his strength. I pitched against him in several town games and was always amazed with the way he worked on tough hitters seldom giving them the kind of pitch they liked.”
The plaque, which like Radbourn’s grave and Hall of Fame plaque, spells his name with an “e” at the end. The one dedicated by Griffith was apparently replaced–either because the original was damaged or stolen–by a nearly identical version. When Griffith died in 1955, The Bloomington Pantagraph said the original plaque was still place–however, several articles in the paper after the Bloomington City Cemetery and the Evergreen Cemetery were combined in 1963 said the plaque was “put there by Pontiac Correctional Center inmates” sometime after 1955. None of the 1941 stories mentioned the origin of the plaque.
The plaque
The current grave site photographed before the dedication of the new wood carving made from the trunk of a dead 150 year-old tree adjacent to Radbourn’s grave.
Baseball History Daily 
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