An overdue book comes home to Warren after 50 years. What's the late fee?

by Neal Rubin

We can be almost certain Chuck Hildebrandt delivered the Detroit Free Press that morning, and it's a dead solid fact that after school on Dec. 4, 1974, he checked a book out of the Warren Public Library.

What's unclear is why he kept "Baseball's Zaniest Stars" for 50 years. But at least he did the right thing the day before Thanksgiving and tried to give it back ...

And was rejected.

"Zero interest," he said. The book has returned to his home in Chicago, shelved between an ode to Tiger Stadium called "A Place for Summer" and a biography of sportscaster Red Barber.

Hildebrandt, 63 and retired, spent the past half-century advancing from young library scofflaw to founder of a digital marketing company. With that professional background, he had been picturing one of those periodic can-you-believe-it stories that probably starts in a local newspaper, jumps to nearby TV and winds up on "The Today Show," spreading good cheer and good publicity for the library from coast to coast.

He was even willing to admit that he discovered the book five or six years ago, and decided to hold onto it until the 50th anniversary of the checkout date for maximum impact.

No, thanks. All he'll probably get is this column, and muted admiration from library director Oksana Urban.

"Some people never come back to face the music," she said. "But there was really no music to face, because he and the book were erased from our system."

That's not unreasonable. Technologies change, inactive accounts are purged. And if you're being literal amid all the literature, what's the library supposed to do with an ancient copy of "Baseball's Zaniest Stars"?

At least it didn't charge him an overdue fee, which at the Warren Library's current assessment of 25 cents per day would have been $4,563.75.

It's still intriguing to ask Hildebrandt how he managed to keep the book for 18,255 illicit days — and why it was that an eighth-grader at St. Anne Catholic Grade School had an interest in zany ballplayers.

Passion by the numbers

Hildebrandt came to baseball through a love for numbers, paired with the regional frenzy over the 1968 Tigers.

With the team on its way to winning the World Series, the second-grader started looking at box scores in the newspaper, and "Omigod, there were numbers everywhere!"

He was caught — hook, line, and sinker from Mickey Lolich on the outside corner.

As a player, Hildebrandt is a left-hand-hitting outfielder who at one point in his supposedly adult life was playing in five slow-pitch softball leagues. In a grudging concession to age, he has recently moved from center field to left, and is only active in one league, populated largely with people in their 20s and 30s.

As a fan, he's a former Chicago Cubs season ticketholder with a talent for catching foul balls: at least 10 of them rest on a home-plate-shaped rack on his wall, next to some other commemorative horsehides.

As a devotee of numbers and history, he is a member in exalted standing of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, where he has twice won the award for the best oral research presentation at the annual convention.

His first victory was for a 2015 presentation on "'Little League Home Runs' in MLB History." Though the parameters have since been tweaked, a Little League home run was defined as a routine batted ball on which two or more errors result in the fortunate batter circling the bases, likely accompanied by hoots and laughter from the crowd.

They are zany plays that harken back to his longest-tenured book, not that he connected the dots at the time.

Red-faced and red-handed

"Baseball's Zaniest Stars" was written by Howard Liss, a former shipping clerk from Brooklyn who made a tidy living in his era with things like "The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories."

"Zaniest" recounted the adventures of such players as turn-of-the-20th-century pitcher Rube Waddell, who would sometimes leave the mound to chase fire trucks, and his contemporary, infielder Germany Schaefer, who at least once stole second base and then reversed himself and stole first.

Hildebrandt checked it out from the since-closed Walt Whitman Branch of the library on Schoenherr Road. He probably received overdue notices, he conceded, but the book remained in his possession as he graduated from Bishop Foley High School and Michigan State University and ventured forth into the world.

He moved to Milwaukee, to Columbus, Ohio, to Baltimore and to multiple homes in Chicago, "and each time, it was bunches of books in a box. When you have a few dozen cartons and you're moving, you're not examining."

Then one day he noticed a Dewey Decimal System sticker on a spine, and uh-oh.

"I was so embarrassed," he said, and he vowed to make things right — in November 2024, when he and his wife were visiting his brother in Eastpointe.

"Shame on you," said library director Urban, but she was kidding. All is forgiven, which is why "we let him keep it as a memory."

Covering her bases, she dropped a note to the city communications department a few weeks ago, just in case it wants to pursue the story.

That seems unlikely at this point, but Hildebrandt stands ready to do his promotional part — and zanier things have happened.

This article originally appeared in the Detroit Free Press.