[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by lugerholsterrepair

Leather dressings have many purposes...
Then there is the purpose for which you want the dressing..to shine? Prevent cracking? Soften?

Jerry, I have a question, somewhat on-topic...What would you put on a 60+ year old baseball glove to soften it???

Pic below...

There's also a story,,,But you can skip that if you want...

It's 1962, I'm in Little League baseball, the cheap league (hat & T-shirt only)...It's a hot Summer day, my team has an afternoon game at Jayne Park, about two miles from my house...I ride my bike. I get to the park, there's three diamonds, all working. The two teams ahead of us on our diamond are still playing, so I hang my brand new Wilson/Al Kaline glove on my bike handlebar and wander off to the other two diamonds to see if any of the kids in my neighborhood are playing.

My mother bought me the glove especially for Little League; my friends told me to rub Vaseline in the pocket to soften it up, but it's still real stiff, I can barely flex it.

I see the teams lining up to shake hands on our diamond, so I run over to my bike and grab my glove and dash over to the...Wait...This isn't my Al Kaline...It's a Sears Roebuck/Ted Williams 1662...I run back over to my bike; yep, it was on my bike all right...I run around frantically looking for a bike or player with my new Wilson, but the manager is yelling for a 2nd baseman, so I run over to the diamond with the Sears/Williams glove, broken hearted...

But it's a well-used glove, and nicely broken in...Loosely strung, soft, and kind of floppy, it flops open & closed with no effort...It's actually comfortable, unlike my new Wilson, which has disappeared...I play out the game, a couple hits come my way, I field them with rising confidence...By the end of the game, I'm happy that someone has swapped gloves with me...But wondering what I'm going to tell my mother...(Needless worry; she never noticed).

I hung around after the game, hoping to find the owner looking for it...No one showed up...There was/is initials on the strap, but nobody I asked had those initials...Kind of a strange story, but true...

This Sears/Williams glove went to college with me, in the trunk of my Austin-Healey 100-6 and got battery acid burns on it (the Healey had the battery in the trunk). I played two years intra-mural softball with it 67-68, 68-69; we won the championship the second year (only 10 teams). Carried in my car for about another 10 years at the PO where me & a fellow worker played catch at lunch. Lately it's been sitting in my bookcase for another 15 years.

Not as floppy as it was when I got it, the rawhide thongs broke and I re-strung it a couple years back. I'll probably never play a game with it again, but I'd like to keep it for Summer picnics when a pick-up game might get started...

It's had Vaseline, Neatsfoot Oil, and probably whatever else we rubbed in our gloves when we were little and knew it all...And it looks awful small now, where it was a big glove back in '62...