Alta Cohen

Albert Cohen, nicknamed "Alta," (December 25, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York – March 11, 2003, in Maplewood, New Jersey), was a professional baseball player.

In the minor leagues, he was an All Star with the Triple A Toledo Mud Hens.

In 1931 he batted .316–5–47 for the Hartford Senators, and led the league in walks (87).

Cohen made a strange major league debut in the second game of the 1931 season. The Dodgers were playing at Boston. As Jack Kavanagh and Norman Macht told it in their book, “Uncle Robbie,” “The Robins (Dodgers) were still batting and before the inning was over, Robinson had used Boone as a pinch-hitter for the pitcher. When the inning ended, Boone headed for right field and was announced as Herman’s replacement. However, the score was close again. Robbie didn’t like having Boone defending the vast spaces of Braves Field. He looked down the bench and spotted Cohen. ‘Take over for Boone,’ he ordered and the youngster raced to right field. This made Cohen a replacement for Boone, who had batted for the pitcher, not Herman. When the Robins came to bat, though, the eager rookie stepped to the plate in Herman’s cleanup spot. He singled and the Braves failed to appeal the fact he had batted out of order. Brooklyn’s rally kept going and Cohen’s correct turn, ninth in the order, came around. Cohen stepped to the plate again and lined his second hit in the inning. Among the beat writers covering the game was a journalist who became one of America’s favorite feature writers and book authors. After the game, Quentin Reynolds heard Alva Cohen naively wonder whether anything would be told in the papers about his feat, ‘I’d like my mother to know,’ he told Reynolds, a writer who was always looking for an angle. The reporter wrote his game account as a letter to Mrs. Cohen at her home in Newark. In the middle of the night, Reynolds was awakened by an irate editor at the New York World-Telegram. ‘Where’s your copy?’ he demanded. Reynolds insisted he had filed it hours earlier. He dressed and took a cab to the Western Union office, where he learned the news story had been delivered as an 800-word collect telegram to Mrs. Cohen. He never asked who paid for the wire.”

The next day, Cohen was farmed out to Hartford. Cohen was leading the Eastern League in hitting in 1932 with a .409 average in 59 games when the league folded in mid-season.

He became a pitcher and had two good years with Toledo (American Association) in 1936–37 with a 29–19 record.

He played outfield in the majors from 1931–33 with the Brooklyn Robins/Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds.

Cohen’s father gave him the name Alta (Yiddish for “old”) as the traditional Jewish trick to fool the angel of death during the 1918 flu epidemic. In the majors, Alta’s teammates called him “Schoolboy.”

Cohen founded the Altco Products Co. in 1940, with offices throughout the state, and served as president for 44 years years before retiring in 1984. He was a member of the board of directors of the Newark Beth Israel Medical Center and the Daughters of Israel Geriatric Center in West Orange, and a member of the Green Brook Country Club in North Caldwell. Also a philanthropist, he was honored in the 1980s by Hebrew University, in New York City.

He lived in Verona and South Orange before moving to Maplewood, New Jersey, where he died in his home.