Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 100, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 April 1913 — PRINCESS IS A “FAN” [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PRINCESS IS A “FAN”

Marie of Sweden Roots for Husband’s Team. Becond Son of King and His Wife Introduced Great American Game of Baseball as a Summer Sport in the North.

Stockholm. —Prince Wilhelm of Sweden and his charming wife. Princess Marie, a daughter of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrewich, uncle of the czar, have become baseball "fans,” with the intention of interesting the officers of the capital and their wives in the sport. For many years the prince has been rated a keen football player, making his fellow countrymen realize that the spring and autumn months should be utilized with games, as well as the Winter days, when sking, snowshoeIng and skating are the pastimes. Buts with the advent of the last Olympic games in the capital came the great American game of baseball. Daily the prince and his wife could be seen in the midst of an interested group of nobility watching the American athletes play. As the prince watched Thorpe and his colleagues pitching and batting the ball he would grow greatly excit-

ed, picking up the American "fan” phrases and urging on the men. The princess, too, would follow the intricacies of the game, now and then questioning her royal husband on the meaning of certain plays. So when Prince Wilhelm started a baseball club his wife at once began to Interest her friends. Every day at the practice of her husband’s team, whlcn was one of the four organized in the capital, the princess, dressed in a manner that has won her the title of the “most smartly gowned woman" of Norway, Bweden and Denmark, would be in the bleachers learning the fine points of the game. The entire coqntry then grew Interested in baseball, since it had, as it were, received royal sanction, and soon Maltno. that qnalnt and cburchly town, was ringing with the enthusiasm of the new sport and a team was at once formed. Upsala, too, ventured into tbls recently learned game, and

the rivalry of the two towns became most Intense. With the sanction of the prince, a league has been formed and baseball Is bound to become as popular in Sweden as it has in America. The princess delights especially in having with her at all the games the wives and daughters of the American minister and the attaches of the legation in Strandvagen. Her pretty English is becoming charmingly studded with phrases such as one bears at every game of baseball in America, and her knowledge of the game 18 very neatly as great as that of Prince Wilhelm. ■*

Princess Marie of Sweden.