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Pirates fan builds impressive Pittsburgh collection around Willie Stargell, Forbes Field memorabilia
Mike Rozanc ponders the question for a moment. What are the absolute favorite things in his collection?
The first answer is easy—the jersey and pants Willie Stargell wore during the 1973 season. They’re displayed on a mannequin, right next to the brightly colored LeRoy Nieman print that was used as the cover to the program for Stargell’s retirement ceremony.
Stargell is Rozanc’s all-time favorite player, followed by Roberto Clemente and then Kent Tekulve. Not surprising for a kid who moved to Pittsburgh when he was 8 in 1977 and immediately fell in love with Stargell’s colorful Pirates crew. And when they won the “We Are Family” World Series a couple years later? Hooked for life. Most of his jaw-dropping collection of memorabilia is Pittsburgh-themed, with an emphasis on those Pirates.
He looks around. Picking just a few things from his sea of treasures is nearly impossible, but his eyes light up as his gaze passes the bright red turnstile sitting in a place of honor in the middle of the room. It’s an original H.V. Bright Turn Stile (No. 4571, Patent No. 1868022) from the opening of Forbes Field back in 1909, complete with a foot pedal that still works. At some point along the way, this one was given a fresh coat of paint. Close your eyes, and you imagine the ticket-takers ripping tickets and stepping on the pedal to let baseball fans in, one at a time. It’s glorious.
This is the second time I’ve visited Rozanc’s basement/museum/shrine in suburban St. Louis, and I had a feeling he would pick this gem. What I didn’t know is his personal story behind this piece of history. This turnstile, appropriately, represented a turning point—for the better—in his life.
He’d been in discussions about purchasing the turnstile, and one day in February 2012, the deal was struck. Rozanc lived in St. Louis and the seller lived in West Virginia, so Louisville, Ky. made a logical halfway meeting point. Time was a factor, though, and to make the logistics work, the meet-up needed to happen that weekend.
Short notice and long drives were nothing new for someone with a collection like his. Opportunity matters. This time, though, he had a companion for the trip. He’d met Amee Minton a few months earlier, right after Thanksgiving, and their still-new relationship was going well. On a mid-week date, she asked about his weekend plans. He mentioned the road trip and she said, “Sounds like fun!” It caught him off-guard, just a little.
“I said, ‘Um, you know I’m leaving at like 5:30 am, right? Just driving there, then coming right back,’” Mike recalls. “She was like, ‘Yeah!’ I think she just wanted to see if she could spend that much time with me.”
He laughs. So does Amee, thinking back on the trip.
“I was excited! As a girl, you just want to spend more time together. Ooh, a captive audience in the car. I didn’t really think through how long 10 hours really was,” she said. “I just thought, he’s funny and he’s entertaining, and a conversation is going to evolve on a road trip like that. I was seeing it as an opportunity to ask those awkward-ish questions and move beyond dinner conversations.”
They survived the trip. Thrived, even, despite a wrong turn somewhere around the racetrack in Louisville. And when they got back to St. Louis, Amee met Mike’s family for the first time, because Mike had to call his brother, Dave, to help unload the turnstile. Dave even used the story in his best man’s speech when Mike and Amee were married a few years later.
Amee had grown up in Pittsburgh, too, but her dad was originally from St. Louis, and they had always bonded over the Cardinals. No matter what was going on in life, they could talk about their shared love of baseball. Her dad had just passed away in September, and then their Cardinals made that magical run to the World Series title in October. Amee made sure she went to at least one home game every round of the postseason, and she was there for the clinching victory in Game 7.
“When Jason Motte came running out of the bullpen [in the ninth inning], I was standing there, crying,” Amee said. “I was like, ‘They're going to win the World Series and I can't call my dad!’ But knowing my dad was in heaven, it was just a magical time. And then, shortly after that, on Thanksgiving weekend, that's when I met Mike.”
And the fact that Amee had lived in Pittsburgh and most of Mike’s collection was Pittsburgh-centric? Not to say it felt like fate, but maybe it felt like fate.
The basement/museum/shrine in their house has an Amee section, too. Her mom was the head cheerleading coach at Notre Dame from 1993 to 2016, and so Mike and Amee’s collection includes a full Notre Dame cheerleading outfit, a full Leprechaun costume and even a couple of the gold megaphones used at Notre Dame Stadium, complete with the notes the cheerleaders used to write on the inside before football games.
AN ODE TO PITTSBURGH
That section is off to the left as you walk down the stairs, past the Stargell Fathead and sign with an arrow pointing the way to Three Rivers Stadium, where the Pirates played after Forbes Field closed in 1970. On the right, it’s an ode to Pittsburgh. The first things you see are all the Penguins jerseys, then a concourse sign from the old Civic Arena. On the floor is an on-deck circle from Three Rivers Stadium, and the thousands and thousands of spike marks and colors faded by years spent in the sun speak to its authenticity.
On the wall to the right is a bright blue sign for Duquesne Beer—“Have a Duke”—a sign that hung over the concourse entrance facing the field at Forbes Field. One of the many great things about Rozanc’s collection is the ability to cross-reference pretty much everything with another part of his collection. On a different wall is a photo of a game at Forbes, and you can clearly see those big blue signs over the entrances at field level. Rozanc hasn’t seen another sign quite like the one on his wall.
Along that same wall are stadium seats from what feels like every iconic baseball stadium in Major League history, including Wrigley Field, Tiger Stadium, Forbes Field (of course), Cleveland Municipal Stadium and Sportsmans Park. These seats tell another of Rozanc’s stories.
When Milwaukee’s County Stadium was torn down in 2000, the Rozanc brothers saw an opportunity and bought hundreds of the seats. Just like that, a business was started that led to a website (authenticstadiumseats.com) and several appearances behind a booth at the National Sports Collectors Convention. The brothers were even mentioned/interviewed a few times in the pages of SCD. Dave still runs the site, though he now only sells seat backs and seats, not the frames.
“We thought we’d buy those first 300 seats and be done with it, but it kept going,” Mike said. “We found some more and we’re like, ‘Well, let’s buy those!’ It just got to be a lot of work. And once the teams started selling them direct, it kind of cut us out. Which is fine. After a while, these things get heavy. They’re hard to ship. Things break.”
Opposite those seats sits another gem of Rozanc’s collection: An arched window frame—with the original glass—from the exterior of Forbes Field, dating back to the opening in 1909. The window, which is 10-feet-wide-by-5-feet-high at its tallest point, was in Forbes Field, then at the Allegheny Club in Three Rivers Stadium for several decades. Rozanc picked that up from an auction the same day he bought the row of nine seats from Forbes Field. Those wouldn’t fit in the basement of his old house, so he lopped off four, sold those, and the bench seats now sit right behind that bright red turnstile.
It’s a Forbes away from Forbes, right there in suburban St. Louis.
Everywhere you look in this hallowed ground, something else makes your jaw drop. Framed blueprints are everywhere, for stadium builds, for stadium additions and even original blueprints for the seats at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, home of the Browns. There’s an artist rendering for the original concept of Three Rivers Stadium.
Game-worn jerseys are everywhere, mostly from the Cleveland Browns—Rozanc lived there before his family moved to Pittsburgh—and Pirates. He has two complete uniforms worn during the Pirates’ 1960 World Series title, belonging to Tom Chaney and Rocky Nelson.
There’s one of those giant coats NFL players wore over their jerseys, an orange cloak of warmth with BROWNS across the back in white letters. You can practically see the icy breath and hear John Facenda describing the frozen action in your head.
Jim Leyland’s Pirates jacket is displayed; you can see the “10” written in Sharpie inside the collar and if you take a deep breath, probably get a whiff of cigarette smoke.
Paintings and prints are everywhere. The LeRoy Nieman print of the Stargell painting? It’s numbered 1/300 and was owned by former MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn before he passed, and Rozanc bought it at an auction.
There is original signage all over the place, including the “PITTS” that was on the scoreboard at Forbes Field. He has a sign commemorating the Pirates’ 1960 World Series title, one that hung on the streets outside the stadium, with this inscription …
“Oct. 13, 1960
7 games End of 9th
10-9 Yankees
Tommy brought it to me!”
It’s the little stuff like that Rozanc enjoys as much as anything. These pieces of his collection have been loved no matter who owned them at the time, and that hasn’t changed now that they’re displayed in Mike and Amee’s house.
— Ryan Fagan covered Major League Baseball for The Sporting News for the better part of two decades. He still buys 1987 Topps baseball cards way too often. You can reach him on X at @ryanfagan.
Ryan Fagan
