A Different Kind of Deep Time: The 1909 Norton (Kansas) Town Team

This post is about my discovery of a tiny slice of life in this country, dating back to the early 20th century.  This isn't a story about paleontology or even natural history.  Rather, it's about the attraction of exploring and making some sense of a world that seems familiar but which is also distinct in many ways from mine today.  Though not a matter of deep time, it feels a bit like it.  The attraction of this research is quite analogous to what I experience when engaging with paleontology or natural history.  (This is my thin justification for uploading this post.)

My wife's aunt was, by profession, a neuroanatomist, and, by avocation, a genealogist.  Upon her death, she left a wealth of material about her extended family.  I don't know what happened to most of it, but some came to my wife and me.  Any collection of "things" likely undergoes marked diminution in size as it is passes from the original collector (who probably considered all of it treasure) to others, less involved and less dedicated.  That is, if the collection isn't simply trashed at its first transition from the collector.  (See my post titled Why Did Dad Collect All This Crap?, April 28, 2016.)

I was being ruthless in doing triage on the contents of a box of photographs of family and friends, until I uncovered a professional photograph of a baseball team.  Though I tried to resist, the allure of the image and the label pasted below it was too much for me.  It was all so markedly and wonderfully different from the rest of the pictures I'd been sorting; it called out for exploration.

How could I not be taken by this photograph of these young players, their manager, and a bat boy.  All are unsmiling as they stare into the camera, well, all save Oran Morehead (#15), a pitcher, seated at the far end of the first row, who is captured looking at something or someone off to his right.  The picture was taken on September 8, 1909, by photographer C.E. Reed.  (The Norton County News, September 9, 1909.)  There are at least a couple of errors in the picture's label.  The second entry in the column on the left should be #2 not #5.  The manager is the actual #5, but his name was spelled Hobart not Hobert.

A note about research sources:  I was aided immeasurably by the Kansas Historical Society which, on its website, provides digital access to a broad collection Kansas newspapers.

A question I addressed and answered early was this:  Why did my wife's aunt have this picture among her genealogically related materials?  The answer rests on the shoulders of the young man seated in the first row, second from the viewer's left:  L. Graves, #10 in the photograph, 2nd baseman.  One branch of my wife's extended family has a connection with the Graves family of which the 2nd baseman was a part.  His full name was Lyman Archibald Graves (1890-1927) and he was 18 years old at the time he posed for the group shot.  Lyman Graves and my wife are 2nd cousins 2 times removed.  (I utilized the very useful cousin chart provided by Jessica Grimaud on the FamilySearch Blog, July 23, 2019.)

My wife's aunt would be disappointed in me.  I used her very complete treatise on her extended family to determine the genealogical relationship of Lyman Graves to my wife; after that, though, I paid little attention to the Graves family.  It was what this image depicts that prompted me to spend several engrossing weeks of research.  Yes, the photograph shows a baseball team that played for the town of Norton, Kansas, but, in reality, it offers a glimpse of a widespread social and cultural phenomenon of the early 20th century, one completely new to me:  town team baseball or, as it was also known, townball.

Myriad small towns across the country fielded amateur teams that played each other during the summer months.  (Town team baseball is still very much alive in some areas of the country.)  To set the stage for this particular team, I would note that Norton was, and is, a small town located in the northwestern portion of the state, up near the border with Nebraska.  Its population in 1910 was 1,787.  Based on my research, I believe Norton played in 1909 against teams from 13 other towns - 10 in Kansas and 3 in Nebraska.  In general, Norton with about two thousand inhabitants had a larger population than nearly all of the other locations involved.  Muddying this picture is the fact that two of Norton's games were at home against the "K.C. Red Sox," a team that may have come from Kansas City, Kansas, and that played games around the state.  With a population of over 80,000 in 1910, Kansas was a decided outlier among these localities.  Excluding Kansas City, Norton had a larger population than all of the other jurisdictions involved but one, Concordia, Kansas, population 4,415.  The smallest of the towns was Selden, Kansas, population 297.  The average size of the towns involved (excluding Kansas City) was 1,236; the median size was 975:  these were all small towns.  (Data on the Kansas towns' population size was taken from a table available on the University of Kansas' website, titled Population of Cities in Kansas 1900-2020 - Decennial Censuses.)

In his insightful documentary Town Teams:  Bigger than Baseball (2016), focused on town teams in Kansas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mark Honer cites a study of Kansas newspapers from 1911 to 1920 that found more than 300 town teams playing baseball in the state.  He posits that these teams and the games they played had an impact well beyond the ball field.  He makes the case that the towns fielding these teams did so for much more than friendly sporting competition:  the games had economic, cultural, and social importance.  Those who assembled these teams did so, in part, to bring their particular community together.  These games were among the organized social events of small towns and their surrounding areas.  At a time without the ubiquitous visual media available to us today (television and the rest), organized social cultural events that prompted people to gather together physically, such as fairs, Chautauqua assemblies, lectures, plays, and, of course, sporting events, were the life blood of many small towns.  Honer contends, quite rightly in my mind, that towns established and supported teams in order to boost civic pride and to tell the broader world that here was a municipality worthy of economic investment and a good place to live.  (Some papers referred to this specific team as the "Norton Boosters.")  In general, small towns across the country were engaged in a struggle to survive and town team baseball was one of the steps many took to stand out from, and out pace, other area towns.

The games were major events for the towns.  Norton's games were often played on the weekends, but a majority (22 of its games) fell on weekdays.  (As described below, my data on the team's games are missing two games, at least.)  If Fridays are excluded from the weekday count, 17 of the games were played between Monday and Thursday.  Obviously, all were played during daylight hours.  Reportedly, in many towns that fielded a team, businesses would close on game days.  Norton was probably no exception.  I found attendance reported for only three games; it ranged from 150 to 400 patrons.  That last was for a game played on a Sunday (July 11, 1909) at Norton against the Selden team.  Though fans might come not only from town, but also from outlying areas, those 400 people represented a striking 22 percent of the Norton town population.

Historian David Vaught has summarized the central role of baseball for small, rural towns.

From the 1880s through the 1950s, the small-town team became an institution in rural American every bit as much as the little red schoolhouse and the old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration.  Diamonds dotted the countryside right alongside grain elevators, water towers, courthouses squares, and churches.  Every small town in rural American that considered itself a progressive, modern place had its own baseball team.  (Abner Doubleday, Marc Bloch, and the Cultural Significance of Baseball in  Rural America, Agricultural History, Vol. 85, No 1, Winter 2022, p.10-11.)

Town teams were composed of players often, but not always, drawn from the local male population.   Sometimes skilled players were recruited from outside the local area in an effort to field a winning team. Overall, these ball players were considered to be, and were referred to as, amateurs.  If the definition of that label is undergoing dramatic change today, it was certainly stretched almost to the breaking point in the first decades of the 20th century with regard to town team baseball.  These town team players were often financially compensated for their services.   Paul R. Albert, in his book Plainville Baseball:  History of Plainville, Kansas Town Team Baseball (2021), states that the Plainville team eschewed paying its players which many local town teams did.  Yet, he also observes that "men with baseball talent may have been recruited to open [business] positions in town," and that the town was not above hiring pitchers for important games.  (p. 4)

Suggestive of the financial rewards coming to the players, I found that the occupations reported for three of the Norton players in the 1910 decennial census were baseball related:  Ralph Shimeall and Lyman Graves were employed as "ball player," while Oran Morehead's occupation was "umpire baseball."  (I have found very few of the Norton players in that decennial census, probably due, in part, to my inexpert searching.)  The Beaver City Tribune reporting on a loss of its town team to Norton said it was "outclassed by the salaried players of our Kansas neighbor."  (The Norton Courier, May 20, 1909.)

The following description, written in March of 1909, of the assembling of Norton's 1909 team captures some of the most salient aspects at the time of town teams, in general, and of this Kansas town team, in particular.

Manager Hobart, of the Norton Baseball team[,] has signed two men for the coming year for sure and has strings out for three more that are 'cracker jacks.'  In fact it has been suggested to the Telegram editor by some of the sports of the game that we had better not publish the line up of the team or we would not be able to get any games with the other towns in this section.  So far, the manager has four men in [sic] pitching staff, Elliot, Morehead, Shimeall and a new man who just came to town a few days ago that is endorsed by Ed Port [his surname was actually Poort], professional player who makes his headquarters in Norton.  All these boys are good utility men and can play anywhere on the diamond.  Ed Port is a catcher and will probably sign the agreement in a few days.  Johnnie Dempewolf will wear a Norton uniform around the third station if he is offered a reasonable compensation and as the fans here like him that will probably happen.  (The Norton Weekly Telegram, March 3, 1909.)

The author of this article also observed, "Almena is reported to be in the game with a salary team this year as the business men of that town say they will pay $710 per month to a bunch that will skunk the county seat aggregation every game they play."  These teams were presumably not in any organized leagues.  Further, it appears that parts of Norton's schedule of games were established as the season progressed; who played and when could be rather ad hoc.

The Norton town team, as noted on the photograph, had a record of 33 wins and 9 losses through, I believe, September 4, 1909.  My basic data on those 42 games using the newspapers published in Norton in 1909 is incomplete.  I am missing two of the games, presumably Norton victories since I can account for the nine losses.  The actual final 1909 record compiled by the club remains unclear.   The Norton Weekly Telegraph on September 15, reported that the team had a record of 43-9 going into a double header on September 11 against Kensington; Norton reportedly lost both games.  I seriously doubt that total of 43 victories which is well beyond what I have been able to record.

Box scores are available for each of the 40 games I've tallied.  They provide information on opponents, where the games were played, scoring by inning, total hits, runs, and errors, and batteries (pitchers and catchers).  Umpires were often identified (as noted below, probably with good reason).  Sometimes the strikeouts and walks are provided for each participating pitcher.  Once in awhile the duration of the game is noted; even rarer, is the inclusion of figures on attendance.

Frequently, a sentence or two describing a highlight of the game would be included with the box score.  Those brief blurbs about the games offer a wealth of insight into the nature of the contests, the emotions involved, not only on the part of the players, but the crowd in attendance, and the partisanship of the Norton newspapers when covering its team.  A recurrent complaint was about the bias or ineptitude of the umpires.

Among the most dramatic or amusing are the following:

The score is omitted because we are unable to distinguish between the umpire and his pets.  (The Champion, June 10, 1909.)

Monday's game was much more tame owing to a row among the Smith Center players that caused several of their stars to leave hostilities.  (The Champion, July 8, 1909.)

This game should have been 2 to 0, but a rank decision on the part of the umpire, gave Kensington a score.  (The Norton County News, July 29, 1909.)

With the regular line-up in the field, Norton had an easy time winning this game, even if we did have to beat nine men - and the umpire.  (The Norton County News, August 12, 1909.)

The Norton team certainly received the worst treatment Saturday at Selden that they have ever been up against.  There was a bunch of hoodlums that crowded the players off the bench and used the vilest language possible.  (The Norton County News, August 12, 1909.)

A most remarkable thing happened in one of the latter innings, when an Oberlin base runner trying to make home plate ran afoul of the Norton catcher and both went down.  The runner straightened out as though dead - unconscious - and while in this condition several of the Oberlin players ran up, grabbed him and dragged him onto the base, resuscitating him afterwards and claiming a tally.  Before this runner had been dragged onto the home plate another runner taking advantage of conditions made home plate and a tally was claimed for it.  If the first runner was perpetrating a ruse, it didn't work.  Neither did the bluster of the other runner whose imagination carried him to a state of wildness.  The game was finished in red hot work [sic].  (The Norton Courier, September 9, 1909.)

More than a century ago, town team baseball helped to define and energize life in small town America.  Turns out, the young men on the Norton team did more than play ball.

Roger Rosenblatt on the Nature of Aging

 As a writer, Roger Rosenblatt has masterfully fulfilled multiple roles, that of reporter, novelist, memoirist, and, I would add, poet.  His books and essays are remarkable for their grace, insight, and wit.  As he's grown older, he has been reporting back from the land of the aged, mostly recently in an essay in The New York Times titled How to be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me) (April 13, 2025).  The essay's ten observations, rules, pieces of advice - whatever - may or may not make you happy at 85 (or any age), but they certainly better the odds.

I must admit that I parted company with him on one, his fourth:   "Get a dog."  For all of their virtues (and there are many), dogs will no longer be a part of my immediate family.  Though I'm not yet 85, I have entered the "no stoop, no bend," zone where those actions are to be avoided as much as possible.  Impossible with a dog.

One message (there, that's the right word) that resonated particularly with me is his sixth.  It is, I think, both simple and profound, and the basis for one of Rosenblatt's bedrock beliefs and very relevant to aging.  It reads in its entirety:

Everyone's in pain.

If you didn't know that before, you know it now.  People you meet casually, those you've known all your life, the ones you'll never see - everyone's in pain.  If you need an excuse for being kind, start with that.

It's in that sentence at the end that a fundamental truth lies.  Yes, be kind, an action rooted in empathy, and let that lead you to - here's the bedrock strata -

love.  That's the core message in much of what I've read of Rosenblatt's work and it's clearly spoken in this essay.

There's another bit of counsel for my later years that I have taken from Rosenblatt, one that does not appear in this essay nor, I believe, in any of his other missives explicitly from the aging frontlines, such as Rules for Aging:  Resist Normal Impulses, Live Longer, and Attain Perfection (2001), written when he was 60 years old, or in the occasional essay such as What They Don't Tell You About Getting Old, The New York Times (September 30, 2023) written at 83.  But it is reflected in his wonderful memoir Cold Moon:  On Life, Love, and Responsibility (2020) (published when he was 80).  It is this:  be open to the natural world.

Cold Moon, a brief book, is an extended prose poem, drawing the reader into a stream of consciousness as Rosenblatt looks back on aspects of his life.  It mimics the improvisation, and call and response of jazz, and, at times, the poetry of Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot, and the prose of James Joyce.  Sounds heady, but it's quite accessible.  The music of his writing carried me.  Rosenblatt often engages in wordplay in an effort to capture the paradoxes, inconsistencies, persistent threads, conflicts, irresolutions, pain, and humor of life.

A central element in Cold Moon's tapestry of memory is the 1946 movie Stairway to Heaven, titled in England A Matter of Life and Death.  David Niven stars as an English bomber pilot returning to England from a bombing run in a plane that is on fire and plummeting to sea.  He's alone with the body of his radioman, his crew having bailed out.  With no functioning parachute, he's decided to jump to his death rather than perish in a fiery impact at sea.  Before he does, he makes radio contact with the operator at a British airbase, a young American servicewoman, to report his situation.  The movie hinges on that accidental connection and the love that ensues.  Miraculously, Niven survives his jump and equally miraculously finds the servicewoman.  But his survival is a mistake that the powers in heaven seek to remedy, only to be thwarted by love, manifested through tears and the willingness to sacrifice one's self for a loved one.  It's a fantastical story told simply though lushly (it turns the Wizard of Oz trope on its head:  heaven is shown in black and white while earth is in glorious color).  The movie posits that love conquers death, and also, for good measure, nationalism and prejudice.

Rosenblatt recounts how, at age five, he was kept from swimming at the beach because of an ear infection and, instead, went to a local movie theater with his mother every day for a week.  The theater showed only one movie daily over that particular week - Stairway to Heaven.  The young boy clearly absorbed its message.

References to the movie and its central theme recur throughout Cold Moon.  Stated most succinctly early in the book when he writes:  "I believe in life.  I believe in love.  I believe we are responsible for each other."

In this book, Rosenblatt frequently turns to the natural world for analogies to illustrate and explore life, his and others.  Early on, he writes:

When we lament that we’ve lost our connection to nature, to the natural world, what does that mean, exactly?  What are we missing?  It has to do with the nature of nature, I think, which is stoic and steady.  While I yearn and jump about, the sea out there is just out there.  It goes about its business, its sea business, unaware of and uninterested in the frantic little boats that ride it.  Why do we lament that we’ve lost our connection to the sea?  Because the sea, for all its rock and roll and danger, knows itself, accepts itself, and that’s its value.  Nature fills the background of our lives with a self-reliant peace.  What are we missing?  Peace.

Rosenblatt proposes that there is a peace to be gained by acknowledging nature as "the background of our lives" and recognizing that it endures while our time, individually and, indeed, collectively, is limited.  It's a lesson learned from age.  That said, I would add that missing in this equation is the violence and upheaval that is also part of nature.  The track of deep time is punctuated by cataclysmic episodes.  This is not to dismiss the value or truth of his observation.  Yes, there is solace and, perhaps, peace to be gained by a connection to nature, just not always.

His specific references to the natural world in Cold Moon are many.  Two, in particular, have stayed with me.  He describes the life cycle of the Kemp's ridley sea turtles in which just a few of these small turtles, beset on all sides by mortal dangers, manage to beat the odds to be born, to survive a long and arduous trek through the ocean, and to complete the circle returning to their home beach, thereby keeping the species alive.  Rosenblatt writes, "In turtles and people, certain instincts are lifesavers."

He recounts the symbiotic relationship between a particular beetle and the mimosa tree in which the beetle cuts a slit into a branch of the tree to lay its eggs, a process which ultimately kills tissue in the branch causing it to fall, releasing the newly hatched beetles to look for other trees.  It's a process that prunes the tree promoting its health.  "Tree and beetle cannot get along without each other. . . .  They are responsible for each other."

Of course, the very title of the book signals a deep relationship to the natural world.  On December 20, 2019, at midnight, Rosenblatt observes a full moon rising over the ocean and beach:

This is the Cold Moon, also identified as the Long Night’s Moon, the last before the winter solstice.  My weathered mind flicks to my own winter solstice, the coming of my wintertime

There are rewards to be earned by pausing over, contemplating, and exploring Rosenblatt's references.  So it is with the name Cold Moon.  In keeping with the spirit of the work, there's a universality at play here.  This particular full moon at the end of the year carries different names drawn from different cultures.  It's not just the Cold Moon or the Long Night's Moon, but also the Frost Moon and the Winter Moon.  In early Europe, it was known as the Moon Before Yule and the Oak Moon.  This moon is also an integral part of the Hindu festivals of Datta Jayanti and Karthika Deepam.  (Gordon Johnston, The Next Full Moon is the Cold Moon, Skywatching, NASA, December 9, 2024.)

Explicit messages in the book for old age?  He offers a few.  Contemplating his face, he muses, with a touch of sarcasm:

Old age is the only purely realistic stage of life.  The stage when one is glad to inhabit the Gobi desert and quietly celebrate the cracks.  Every crack a Gobi rushing river in the driest terrain.  The cool example of old age.  Who would condescend to pardon such stunning, breathtaking beauty?

He also offers this moving paradox:

We will never again be what we were.  I am that sentiment.  We will be what we were, always.  I am that sentiment, too.

Some Bits and Bobs of the Taxonomic History of Weltonia ancistrodon

 In which I unravel a bit of the taxonomic foundation for this particular species of cow sharks and get sidetracked by some of the bits and bobs I came across in the process.  I'm easily diverted, particularly since it's the people featured in any taxonomic story that I usually find most interesting.

Among the strangest of shark teeth are those of cow sharks (members of the Hexanchidae family).  Here are a couple fossil teeth of the cow shark Notorynchus primigenius that I found along the Calvert Cliffs.  These likely date from mid-Miocene Epoch, or perhaps roughly 16 to 14 million years ago.

These are all from the lower jaw of the fish with the largest cusp at the anterior end of each tooth.  The larger of the two is 20 mm in length.

The extant species in this family of sharks are distinguished from other sharks principally by the number of pairs of gill slits its members have (either six or seven - other sharks have five pairs) and an array of other attributes often characterized as primitive.  It is assumed that the extinct species with such teeth shared those various morphological attributes.  Perhaps most important for the fossil collector, the species in this family sport distinctive teeth, easily distinguished from all others.  This observation applies principally to teeth from the bottom jaw which, as seen above, are rectangular in shape with a row of several curved cusps headed, for the most part, by a prominent initial one (there may be cusplets in front of it).  Complicating things somewhat is the fact that teeth of any one individual cow shark can vary by its sex and age, and by the precise location in the shark's jaw from which the tooth came.  As a result, precisely ascribing an isolated cow shark tooth to a particular species can be difficult.  (See Bretton W. Kent, Fossil Sharks of the Chesapeake Bay Region, 1994, p. 17.)

As unusual as I find these teeth, those of one species of cow shark - Weltonia ancistrodon (Arambourg, 1952) - are, I think, the most striking of the lot.  The tooth from this species shown below (which may be partially repaired) dates, according to the dealer from whom I purchased it, to the Eocene Epoch (56.0 to 33.9 million years ago) and was found at Khouribga, Morocco.  It is 13 mm in length.

Obviously, the most startling feature of this tooth is the exaggerated first cusp that extends high over the other cusps on the tooth and curves back at its tip.  Remove that and the rest of the tooth bears the typical features of other cow shark teeth.

How did it come to have this scientific name?

Camille Arambourg (1885-1969) was the first to describe this species based on teeth he collected at Khouribga, Morocco.  Arambourg's journey into paleontology was fortuitous.  He trained in agricultural engineering, but, as a young man, while helping his father dig an irrigation system on the family farm in Algeria, he uncovered a trove Miocene fish fossils.  That sparked a life-long interest in the fossils of Africa and a distinguished academic career in geology and paleontology, which culminated in his appointment as professor of paleontology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris (Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle).  (See entry for Camille Louis Joseph Arambourg at Encyclopedia.com, and Djillali Hadjouis, Camille Arambourg (1885-1969), Historiographie de Préhistoriens et de Protohistoriens Français du XX° Siècle, 2018.)

In Les Vertebres Fossiles des Gisements de Phophates (Maroc-Algerie-Tunisie) (Notes Mem. Serv. Mines Cart Geol. Maroc., 1952), Arambourg described teeth from various cow shark species.  Among the cow shark teeth, one kind was distinctive.  He asserted, "no other fossil form . . . combines similar characteristics.  In order to distinguish it, I therefore propose to name this new fossil:  N. ancistrodon."  (p. 44)  He placed it in the genus Notidanus.  The new species name, he noted, is a combination of Greek roots for "hook" and "tooth."

He also observed that this particular taxon was particularly abundant in strata from the Thanetian and Ypresian Ages.  These straddle the divide between  the Paleocene and Eocene Epochs and are dated 59.2 to 56.0 million years ago and 56.0 to 48.1 million years ago, respectively.  

It's not surprising that Arambourg came to use this species name given that prominent first cusp.  In fact, the word Ancistrodon had already been used taxonomically over the years as the genus name for an array of poisonous snakes:  copperheads, moccasins, and vipers.  Very appropriate for animals with fangs.  (According to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System, this genus name for snakes is no longer valid.  I would note that the scientific name that I believe is now applied to the shark species to which the tooth shown above belongs does not appear at all in the ITIS.)

In 1979, paleontologist David John Ward reconsidered the taxonomy of this species, giving it a new genus name:  Weltonia.  (Addition to the Fish Fauna of the English Palaeogene.  3. A Review of the Hexanchid Sharks with a Description of Four New Species, Tertiary Research, Volume 2, Number 3, 1979.)  Ward selected as the lectotype for this new species, the tooth that Arambourg had shown as figure 65 on plate 1 in his 1952 publication.  (A lectotype is the representative or type specimen for a species when the holotype was not selected by the original author.)  Here is the image of the lectotype tooth from the 1952 publication.  (I believe I have not violated any copyright laws by reproducing a small portion of the original publication and am doing so for educational, noncommercial purposes.)

Ward's professional life has contained the same sort of career change that marked Arambourg's.  He trained and practiced for several years as a veterinary surgeon, but his interest in fossils apparently took over, and he retired as a surgeon to pursue paleontology.  As far as I can tell, he doesn't have an academic degree in the field, though he is the author of many paleontology papers, including the one cited here, and is, at present, a scientific associate at The Natural History Museum, London.

In his description of W. ancistrodon, Ward took Arambourg to task.  First, he stated that Arambourg asserted incorrectly that the teeth with the prominent first cusp were from the shark's upper jaw.  They are, in fact, from the lower.  Further, the teeth Arambourg identified as coming from the species' lower jaw were actually from another cow shark genus altogether.

I am puzzled a bit by Ward's notation about where the teeth Arambourg described were held.  He wrote, "Depository:  (presumably) the Arambourg Collection, Paris Museum."  Presumably suggests that these teeth were, at least then, missing.  Indeed, I could not find them listed in the database of the fish holdings of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle where Arambourg was paleontology chair and whose fish fossil collection he was instrumental in building.  So, it would seem that the identification of this new species rests presently on images reproduced in a 1952 publication, not the actual teeth (wherever they might be).

I am amused by Ward's brief explanation of the origin of the genus name he newly applied to W. ancistrodon.  Actually it's how he explained the origins of several new names he applied in this article that I found most amusing.  For W. ancistrodon, Ward wrote that the genus is "named after the American palaeochondrichthyologist Dr. Bruce Welton."  Full stop.  Nothing more about Dr. Welton.  In contrast, he observed of using Mr. D. Kemp's name for Notorynchus kempi that it was "in recognition of [his] field assistance."  A tad bit more expansive here than he was with the explanation of Weltonia, but not much.

Things become more interesting with Ward's explanation of two other new names.  For Hexanchus collinsonae, a new species in the established genus Hexanchus, Ward said that it was "named after the English palaeobotanist Dr. M. Collison in recognition of field assistance and stimulating conversation."  Hmmm.  For Hexanchus hookeri, another new species in this genus, Wards noted it is "named after the English palaeomammalogist Mr. J. Hooker in recognition of field assistance and lively discussions."

So, apparently, Ward didn't find Welton to be much of a conversationalist, certainly not stimulating or lively, a failing also true, it would seem, for Mr. Kemp.  This looks like a slight to me, whether intended or not.  Though, of course, any sting of the apparent slight to Welton is minimized because his name was given to a genus, a level higher than species in the taxonomic order of things.  Poor Mr. Kemp.