Milestones

DIED. Robert W. Henderson, 96, librarian and sports historian who worked at the New York Public Library from its opening in 1911 until 1953, the last ten years as chief of its vast main reading room; in Hartford, Conn. The author of monographs and a book on the history of ball games, Ball, Bat and Bishop (1947), he was an early and authoritative debunker of the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839, contending that the origins of the U.S. national sport go back many centuries and that the game had been played in recognizable form since the 18th century. The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball dropped Doubleday and embraced Henderson's views in 1951.