August 12, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, long after Roberto Clemente’s final game, Duane Rieder found himself returning to the images, stories, and memories that surrounded Clemente’s life and career. A photographer by trade, Rieder’s interest in Clemente became a quiet pursuit—scanning negatives, tracking down memorabilia, and sharing what he found with others. Over time, the project grew into a museum. Tucked away in a restored Pittsburgh firehouse, the Roberto Clemente Museum now houses game-used gear, rare photographs, and historic baseball cards. Here's Duane to tell the story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories. Roberto Clemente was
a Puerto Rican professional baseball right fielder who played eighteen
seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After his early death in
a plane crash, he was posthumously inducted into the National
Baseball Hall of Fame in nineteen seventy three, becoming both
(00:31):
the first Caribbean and the first Latin American player to
be enshrined. Dwayne Reader runs the Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
and not only has had the honor of commemorating a
childhood hero, but also serving that hero's widow. VERA, here's Dwayne.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I grew up a Pirate fanatic and just loved Roberto Clemente.
And I grew up looking at the Pittsburgh Press and
there was this little section in the middle called the
Rodo Section, and it had color. It had some color,
almost like newspapery, kind of little magazine in the center
of the paper. And I just remember this Rodo section.
(01:20):
They did it on Roberto Clemente once, and there's these
photos of him looking as cool as you could get,
and he's standing on a bridge that's over top of
a moat going around his house and in these fancy clothes,
he's got a leash and it's connected to a monkey.
He had a pet monkey that he brought back from
(01:40):
Nicaragua for his kids.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
That's like movie stuff, you know.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
As a kid, You're just like, Wow, that's the coolest thing.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
I've ever seen. He's got a pet monkey. And who
has a bridge to their house over a moat.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
We're living in an apartment in the country and can
barely pay rent, dirt dirt poor, and there's this guy
that's just the coolest.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It's burned in my brain.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
And then he dies on New Year's Eve of nineteen
seventy two, and he's gone like that, like sang no
more Clemente.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
So now roll the cameras to nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I'm walking across that bridge and I get to do
this calendar on Roberto Clemente with the Clemente family and
go to the Clemente house and I knock on the
door to the house and it's a baseball bat with
a twenty one on it, and I go knock, knock, knock,
and Verra opens the door and she's like, oh, lah,
Duayne's and I'm not a hugger, and she's a hugger,
(02:40):
and she hugs me and squeezes me, and I'm like,
I'm being hugged by an Angel's just unbelievable. And I
honestly felt this aura something going up to heaven. I
actually thought, oh my gosh, this is the coolest moment
of my life. So I get to go inside the
house and she's showing me around and showing us all
this stuff. And we sit down at a table and
(03:01):
I brought the six photos that we had already completed
back in our studio to get her approval. She had
to sign off on these photos. And these were things
that we were able to collect or borrow, like Clemente's
cleats or bats or balls, things like that. You know,
Roberto's gone, and so we have to do these still lifes.
And we were spending weeks on each photograph. The cover
photograph took three weeks. And if you tell, you know,
(03:24):
you tell kids today that are photographers, they want to
shoot a shot in three seconds, it goes into the computer. Bang,
they do some you know a little bit of photoshop and.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Boom, moving on. We set this shot up.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
We shot it with an eight x ten view camera
with the bellows with a black dark cloth, you know,
you put the dark cloth over so you can see
to focus. And we processed one sheet of eight x
ten inch film at a time in a processor that
took about forty minutes and overnight to dry. So we
really put our heart and soul into these first six shots.
(03:58):
Now I'm at the house and she loved them. She
loved the six photos, and she's pulling things out to
show me and say, hey, what do you want to
photograph next? And I'm sitting at this table in the
center of her house and I said, do you.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Have any rings? And she goes, oh, rings, Yes, I
have rings. I'll be right back. And it was the
coolest thing that ever happened.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
She went up to this wall there was like a
painted mural, probably twenty feet by ten foot high, and
she hits a little button and something slid to the
side and boom, she disappeared.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So she had like this secret door that's just like
opened up. She disappeared into it, came.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Back out with this wooden box with a brass plaque
on it. It was a quote from Danny murtav from
the seventy one World series about if you think that
we're there, down and out of this you know series,
You're crazy. And she opens a box and she goes, hereo,
these rings work. I look in the box and there's
the sixty World Series ring and the seventy one World
Series ring, each worth about three hundred and fifty thousand
(04:59):
a piece. And I'm the biggest jerk in the world
at this moment. I said, well, no, do you have
any other rings? And she looks at me, like what
And I was like, what, you know other rings like
all star rings, and don't we have some of the
other rings? And she goes, well, no, these are the
only two rings I have. And I'm like, well, what
(05:22):
about the sixty one All star ring? See, I knew
this story. He never wore either of those two rings.
That's why they were in that box. That's why they
were brand new. They were shiny, they had never even
been touched. He would wear the sixty one All Star
ring because that was his moment sixty We win the
sixty World Series. But that's Bill Mazeroski's mass hits the
Homer in the ninth inning to walk it off. Roberto
(05:46):
was great in that World Series, but he wasn't the MVP.
He wasn't the MVP of the league that year, even
though his numbers were the best and he should have been,
and he just felt slighted, and so he bowed never
to wear that ring. Sixty one he comes out and
he's a man on fire, and he's like, I'm going
to show everybody. You're not going to keep me down.
I'll show you. And he wins everything at sixty one.
(06:06):
He wins his first Silver Slugger Award, he wins his
first goal Glove, and he's the MVP of the All
Star Game, plays all ten innings and drives in the
winning run and just is like unbelievable in that All
Star Game. And he gets this ring with like a
blue stone in it. And I was born in nineteen
sixty one, and so I want that sixty one. I
(06:26):
want to do a photograph and theme it nineteen sixty one.
And so I tell her I want, you know, sixty
one All Star ring and she looks at me and
she goes, well, and their house is a big giant
windows face in the ocean, and she's nodding her head
towards the glass, and she goes, you know, he was
(06:46):
he was wearing it when he and I'm like, wait,
I don't understand what, and she goes, you know, he
was wearing it when the plane crashed.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And now I'm like, wow.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I'm the biggest jerk in the world. And I look
over and now she's crying, and then I'm crying. But
that's our moment. That's our moment right there that we
had together. I made her cry, but she then knew
that I had some passion or something in me to
kind of push for that ring. I just didn't know
that that made total sense. Of course, he was wearing
it when he died. That's the ring he war so,
(07:20):
you know, but you just don't think of those things.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
And so she.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Said, here, you can take these two rings back to Pittsburgh.
So we do, and we there's a whole photograph. One
of the pages has the seventy one all Star rings
sitting on that box so that you could read Murta's quote.
And that was the moment that I really, you know,
her and I kind of bonded. I spend the next
(07:45):
two days in the house photographing all these things. The
house was just filled to the ceiling with trophies he
won everything you could ever imagine. He loved to play pool,
and they had a pool table in the middle of
the house and you couldn't see one piece of the
green felt because it was completely filled with silver trophies,
silver bowls, and all these plaques, and it was literally
(08:06):
like six feet high, just filled with trophies.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
There was all the twelve gold gloves. We're all together.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I'm the first and only person to ever photograph all
twelve of them.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
I lined them all up.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
We went and got some new white bed sheets, and
we made like a little mini studio.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
So that was two incredible days.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
She barely knows me at that point, just as a
photographer from Pittsburgh working on this calendar. She lets me
leave the next day back to Pittsburgh with over a
million dollars worth of memorabilia, and so to have that
kind of trust, and then I guess the good part
of the story is she got all those things back,
where for the last twenty years of her life she
(08:45):
would loan a piece of memorabilia to someone and they'd
never bring it back. And then after we complete the
calendar and I go, you know, she gets everything back
that I brought over. I go back down in nineteen
ninety six to do a.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Story on Roberto. And that's when I start.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Asking some questions and I start telling her, Listen, you
have a lot of things that are missing. You shouldn't
trust anybody. Don't give them originals. I can help you
with your photographs. Don't get loan out any original photos.
I'll take back the photos here that are in your
house that have been getting wet and moldy, and I'll
start fixing those. You can have people call me and
you can get out of the middle, and then you
can quit give any originals up because people aren't giving
(09:23):
them back to you and they're just keeping them. And
so that's when we decided in nineteen ninety six to
start this archive of photos that then led to the museum.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
And we're listening to Dwayne read Or tell a heck
of a love story about his own affection and passion
for the life and legacy of Roberto Clemente. When we
come back more of Roberto Clemente's story, Dwayne Reader's story
here on our American Stories, and we're back with our
(10:10):
American Stories and this story of how Dwayne Reader, the
man who runs the Clemente Museum, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became
the personal archive of the Clemente family long before the
museum came to be back to Dwayne.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
So then I start helping the family with an archive
for ten years until the All Star Game happens in
two thousand and six here at P and C Park,
and Vera came over here after meeting with the pirates
and asked if I would host the Clemente family party.
But that day that she asked me, in June of six,
it was just my photography studio on the first floor.
(10:52):
In the archive room was up on the second floor.
I was like, Vera, there's nothing Clemena.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
On the first floor. That's what most of the party's
going to be.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
And I know your crowd is going to be a
little bit older. It's going to be all the Latin
players like Orlando Cepaida and Juan Marichelle and many Sianghian
and sees Oar Sedanio and all those guys are coming
to this party and they don't want to go up
and down the steps. And she goes, oh, it's okay,
We'll have the food and the wine and the dancing
on this floor. And I went, wait A minute, there's
(11:21):
going to be dancing. She's like, Oh, we're Puerto Rican,
we dance, and I'm like, all right, I'm in let's
do this. So I tell her then it's about the
beginning of June. The party's going to be on July ninth.
She flies back to Puerto Rico with her kids and
I transformed what's pretty much the museum today, all in
(11:43):
thirty days just for her party.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
But they get in early.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
They get in on the morning of the eighth and
they called me and said, Hey, is there a way
we could all come out there tonight and meet because
everybody's flying in and most people haven't been there, and
we'll come out, you know, and have a glass of
wine and just to walk around before the party.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
And I'm like, oh, yeah, that'd be awesome. I'd rather
get you guys in here where we can talk.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
So they show up and there's thirty of them, and
the three Clementes Vera and her two sons, Luise and
Roberto had been there before that they knew the empty space.
The other twenty seven have never been there, and some
of them have never been to Pittsburgh. So they come
walking in and on the beginning of the building. We
(12:25):
have a photograph of Roberto that was found in a
dumpster when the Pittsburgh Press was bought out by the
Pittsburgh Post Gazette. An image of Roberto jumping up in
the air in nineteen sixty and Fort Myers, Florida, and
he lines up with these clouds. The clouds make angel wings.
You can look it up. It's out there now to
the public. It's leaked out of here. The family wanted
me to keep it for the movie poster, but it's
(12:47):
been photographed by tens of thousands of people. They put
it out on the Internet. Some guys even sell it
on eBay, which they're not allowed. But I can't quit
my job and sit here in police eBay all day.
But there's this big photograph and it's eighty two inches
by eighty two inches, so it's big. And the thirty
clements they all come walking in, and I don't speak Spanish,
and I'm embarrassed by that, but I've never I'm just
(13:09):
so busy here and I've just never had the time
to just sit down and try to learn Spanish. And
so they all come in and it gets really noisy,
and they're all talking and rumbling, and I'm pretty close
with Luis. At that point, I said to Luise Clemente,
I said, Louis, are they what are they saying?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Are they? Are they mad?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
And he goes, oh, no, They're not mad. They just
want to know who are you? Are you Puerto Rican?
How did you do all this? And where did that
image come from? And it was like bees in a beehive, right,
they were just buzz And that was an awesome one
because the image is the greatest image, I'd say, the
greatest baseball photograph ever taken. But the magical moment was
(13:51):
I had just acquired a wedding album for Roberto and Vera,
and I knew for a fact that she didn't have
her own wedding album. This was an album that was
put together by Roberto's best friend, Phil Dorsey, who was
really into photography, and he was Roberto's best friend, and
so he spent a couple of days with Roberto leading
up to the wedding, and then the whole wedding day,
(14:12):
and then a day or two after he had taken
one hundred and fifty photographs that no one in Puerto
Rico had ever seen, and he had just passed away,
and his son broke into the house and stole a
bunch of boxes of Clemente stuff during the memorial service,
and Soul was putting all the stuff up on eBay
for sale. And I knew for a fact that she
(14:33):
didn't have her own wedding album because I was restoring
the two wedding photos that she had in her house
that got ruined by sunlight, and I was working on those,
and that's when she told me someone borrowed her wedding
album from her house and never brought it back. And
so I saw this on eBay, and I'm like, I
got to get this wedding album. And at the moment
in time, my wife didn't have her wedding album because
(14:55):
I was the photographer for my own wedding pretty much,
and so I had to make prince myself. And so
you know how the Collblers' kids they never have shoes, right,
So the photographer's wife didn't have her wedding photos. And
so I had an assistant at the time, and I said, David,
get into a dark room and start making my wedding.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I picked all the images I wanted to put in
a book.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
I said, you got to get these done because I'm
buying a wedding album off eBay for Roberto and Vera,
and I got to have mine done in case I
get caught by my wife.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
So David's in the dark room printing. I win the
bid on eBay.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
I had to pay thirty five hundred dollars to get
this wedding album, which now that would be cheap, but
this was back in the nineties. So the wedding album
comes and it's way way better than I ever thought,
just unbelievable photos. One cool thing is he played a
baseball game the day before the wedding for a team
in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and he wasn't on that team,
(15:48):
so he didn't have their uniform. He plays in a
full Pittsburgh Pirate uniform with this Ponce team, and there's
three or four five photos of Phil Dorsey with the players,
and there's Roberto and the lineup with the pie At
uniform on, and there's all these just incredible photographs. They
go out on a boat and they're fishing the day
before and they get some really cool shots.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
They go to the beach.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I have the only photograph in the world of Roberto
in a bathing suit and he's ripped. He was always
he was always in really good shape. He had a
scar on his arm, and he wore the long sleeved
wool undershirt that the pirates would give him. He wore
them all the time. He wore in every baseball game
he ever played in because he didn't want anybody.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
To see this scar. So there he is out on
the end of a dock.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
They're getting ready to go fishing, and he's sitting there
in his shorts and his wool undershirt. So I got
these really cool cool shots. So I have it all
set up in the back of the museum, in the
back of the firehouse with a light on. This book
technically a wedding album, and I say, Heavier, I have
a little something for you back here, and I walk
them all in there and there's this album and they
(16:51):
just go crazy. The tears just start flying out. They're
all talking Spanish and crying and looking and saying, oh,
there's but Pito and another. You know, a lot of
the people in the photos have passed away, and a
lot of these kids, these are their parents and they're
gone and they've never seen these photos, and it's just
this oh, man, it's just this wonderful moment where they
(17:14):
get to see all these photos that they'd never seen
before their family members, and it was just like that
was a win win win right there. The Angel Wings
was good, but the wedding album was the icing on
the cake. And the next day is going to be
the party and we've got it's a big success. And
Vera makes a comment. You know, at that point, I'm
Dwayne the archivist and I have an archive of photos,
(17:35):
but most people don't even know what archive means. So
Vera makes his comments. She goes, hey, Dwayne, you know,
it's like a museum here now, And I was like, Whoa,
that's something archive.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
It's cool and all, and I'm glad. You know, we're
so lucky.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
That we were able to acquire all these photos and
negatives and everything that we had. But no one knows
what an archive is, you know. But museum, that's something
you can sink your teeth into. So the very next
day we made up a flyer and we called it
Clemente Collection at that point because legally I wasn't allowed
to say that Clemente Museum because I didn't have that
in writing yet. With the family but we started going
(18:13):
around town with these flyers and dropping them off at
hotels with concierges and stuff like that, and started giving
tours that day, the day after the party. Haven't stopped since.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And a terrific job on the storytelling and production by
Robbie Davis and Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
Dwayne Reader for sharing his story with us and his
passion with us for the Clemente legacy and what a
story it is. Indeed, Dwayne's a fan and he wants
to get to know the family and preserve that legacy,
(18:49):
and he fights for it, and he pays out of
his own pocket for it and ultimately gains the trust
of this family. A white man from Pittsburgh, a Puerto
Rican family coming together around a shared passion and love.
Roberto Clemente and his legacy a classic American story. Here
on our American Stories
And we're back with our American stories. Roberto Clemente was
a Puerto Rican professional baseball right fielder who played eighteen
seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After his early death in
a plane crash, he was posthumously inducted into the National
Baseball Hall of Fame in nineteen seventy three, becoming both
(00:31):
the first Caribbean and the first Latin American player to
be enshrined. Dwayne Reader runs the Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
and not only has had the honor of commemorating a
childhood hero, but also serving that hero's widow. VERA, here's Dwayne.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I grew up a Pirate fanatic and just loved Roberto Clemente.
And I grew up looking at the Pittsburgh Press and
there was this little section in the middle called the
Rodo Section, and it had color. It had some color,
almost like newspapery, kind of little magazine in the center
of the paper. And I just remember this Rodo section.
(01:20):
They did it on Roberto Clemente once, and there's these
photos of him looking as cool as you could get,
and he's standing on a bridge that's over top of
a moat going around his house and in these fancy clothes,
he's got a leash and it's connected to a monkey.
He had a pet monkey that he brought back from
(01:40):
Nicaragua for his kids.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
That's like movie stuff, you know.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
As a kid, You're just like, Wow, that's the coolest thing.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
I've ever seen. He's got a pet monkey. And who
has a bridge to their house over a moat.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
We're living in an apartment in the country and can
barely pay rent, dirt dirt poor, and there's this guy
that's just the coolest.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It's burned in my brain.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
And then he dies on New Year's Eve of nineteen
seventy two, and he's gone like that, like sang no
more Clemente.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
So now roll the cameras to nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I'm walking across that bridge and I get to do
this calendar on Roberto Clemente with the Clemente family and
go to the Clemente house and I knock on the
door to the house and it's a baseball bat with
a twenty one on it, and I go knock, knock, knock,
and Verra opens the door and she's like, oh, lah,
Duayne's and I'm not a hugger, and she's a hugger,
(02:40):
and she hugs me and squeezes me, and I'm like,
I'm being hugged by an Angel's just unbelievable. And I
honestly felt this aura something going up to heaven. I
actually thought, oh my gosh, this is the coolest moment
of my life. So I get to go inside the
house and she's showing me around and showing us all
this stuff. And we sit down at a table and
(03:01):
I brought the six photos that we had already completed
back in our studio to get her approval. She had
to sign off on these photos. And these were things
that we were able to collect or borrow, like Clemente's
cleats or bats or balls, things like that. You know,
Roberto's gone, and so we have to do these still lifes.
And we were spending weeks on each photograph. The cover
photograph took three weeks. And if you tell, you know,
(03:24):
you tell kids today that are photographers, they want to
shoot a shot in three seconds, it goes into the computer. Bang,
they do some you know a little bit of photoshop and.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Boom, moving on. We set this shot up.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
We shot it with an eight x ten view camera
with the bellows with a black dark cloth, you know,
you put the dark cloth over so you can see
to focus. And we processed one sheet of eight x
ten inch film at a time in a processor that
took about forty minutes and overnight to dry. So we
really put our heart and soul into these first six shots.
(03:58):
Now I'm at the house and she loved them. She
loved the six photos, and she's pulling things out to
show me and say, hey, what do you want to
photograph next? And I'm sitting at this table in the
center of her house and I said, do you.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Have any rings? And she goes, oh, rings, Yes, I
have rings. I'll be right back. And it was the
coolest thing that ever happened.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
She went up to this wall there was like a
painted mural, probably twenty feet by ten foot high, and
she hits a little button and something slid to the
side and boom, she disappeared.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So she had like this secret door that's just like
opened up. She disappeared into it, came.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Back out with this wooden box with a brass plaque
on it. It was a quote from Danny murtav from
the seventy one World series about if you think that
we're there, down and out of this you know series,
You're crazy. And she opens a box and she goes, hereo,
these rings work. I look in the box and there's
the sixty World Series ring and the seventy one World
Series ring, each worth about three hundred and fifty thousand
(04:59):
a piece. And I'm the biggest jerk in the world
at this moment. I said, well, no, do you have
any other rings? And she looks at me, like what
And I was like, what, you know other rings like
all star rings, and don't we have some of the
other rings? And she goes, well, no, these are the
only two rings I have. And I'm like, well, what
(05:22):
about the sixty one All star ring? See, I knew
this story. He never wore either of those two rings.
That's why they were in that box. That's why they
were brand new. They were shiny, they had never even
been touched. He would wear the sixty one All Star
ring because that was his moment sixty We win the
sixty World Series. But that's Bill Mazeroski's mass hits the
Homer in the ninth inning to walk it off. Roberto
(05:46):
was great in that World Series, but he wasn't the MVP.
He wasn't the MVP of the league that year, even
though his numbers were the best and he should have been,
and he just felt slighted, and so he bowed never
to wear that ring. Sixty one he comes out and
he's a man on fire, and he's like, I'm going
to show everybody. You're not going to keep me down.
I'll show you. And he wins everything at sixty one.
(06:06):
He wins his first Silver Slugger Award, he wins his
first goal Glove, and he's the MVP of the All
Star Game, plays all ten innings and drives in the
winning run and just is like unbelievable in that All
Star Game. And he gets this ring with like a
blue stone in it. And I was born in nineteen
sixty one, and so I want that sixty one. I
(06:26):
want to do a photograph and theme it nineteen sixty one.
And so I tell her I want, you know, sixty
one All Star ring and she looks at me and
she goes, well, and their house is a big giant
windows face in the ocean, and she's nodding her head
towards the glass, and she goes, you know, he was
(06:46):
he was wearing it when he and I'm like, wait,
I don't understand what, and she goes, you know, he
was wearing it when the plane crashed.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And now I'm like, wow.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I'm the biggest jerk in the world. And I look
over and now she's crying, and then I'm crying. But
that's our moment. That's our moment right there that we
had together. I made her cry, but she then knew
that I had some passion or something in me to
kind of push for that ring. I just didn't know
that that made total sense. Of course, he was wearing
it when he died. That's the ring he war so,
(07:20):
you know, but you just don't think of those things.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
And so she.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Said, here, you can take these two rings back to Pittsburgh.
So we do, and we there's a whole photograph. One
of the pages has the seventy one all Star rings
sitting on that box so that you could read Murta's quote.
And that was the moment that I really, you know,
her and I kind of bonded. I spend the next
(07:45):
two days in the house photographing all these things. The
house was just filled to the ceiling with trophies he
won everything you could ever imagine. He loved to play pool,
and they had a pool table in the middle of
the house and you couldn't see one piece of the
green felt because it was completely filled with silver trophies,
silver bowls, and all these plaques, and it was literally
(08:06):
like six feet high, just filled with trophies.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
There was all the twelve gold gloves. We're all together.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I'm the first and only person to ever photograph all
twelve of them.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
I lined them all up.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
We went and got some new white bed sheets, and
we made like a little mini studio.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
So that was two incredible days.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
She barely knows me at that point, just as a
photographer from Pittsburgh working on this calendar. She lets me
leave the next day back to Pittsburgh with over a
million dollars worth of memorabilia, and so to have that
kind of trust, and then I guess the good part
of the story is she got all those things back,
where for the last twenty years of her life she
(08:45):
would loan a piece of memorabilia to someone and they'd
never bring it back. And then after we complete the
calendar and I go, you know, she gets everything back
that I brought over. I go back down in nineteen
ninety six to do a.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Story on Roberto. And that's when I start.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Asking some questions and I start telling her, Listen, you
have a lot of things that are missing. You shouldn't
trust anybody. Don't give them originals. I can help you
with your photographs. Don't get loan out any original photos.
I'll take back the photos here that are in your
house that have been getting wet and moldy, and I'll
start fixing those. You can have people call me and
you can get out of the middle, and then you
can quit give any originals up because people aren't giving
(09:23):
them back to you and they're just keeping them. And
so that's when we decided in nineteen ninety six to
start this archive of photos that then led to the museum.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
And we're listening to Dwayne read Or tell a heck
of a love story about his own affection and passion
for the life and legacy of Roberto Clemente. When we
come back more of Roberto Clemente's story, Dwayne Reader's story
here on our American Stories, and we're back with our
(10:10):
American Stories and this story of how Dwayne Reader, the
man who runs the Clemente Museum, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became
the personal archive of the Clemente family long before the
museum came to be back to Dwayne.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
So then I start helping the family with an archive
for ten years until the All Star Game happens in
two thousand and six here at P and C Park,
and Vera came over here after meeting with the pirates
and asked if I would host the Clemente family party.
But that day that she asked me, in June of six,
it was just my photography studio on the first floor.
(10:52):
In the archive room was up on the second floor.
I was like, Vera, there's nothing Clemena.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
On the first floor. That's what most of the party's
going to be.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
And I know your crowd is going to be a
little bit older. It's going to be all the Latin
players like Orlando Cepaida and Juan Marichelle and many Sianghian
and sees Oar Sedanio and all those guys are coming
to this party and they don't want to go up
and down the steps. And she goes, oh, it's okay,
We'll have the food and the wine and the dancing
on this floor. And I went, wait A minute, there's
(11:21):
going to be dancing. She's like, Oh, we're Puerto Rican,
we dance, and I'm like, all right, I'm in let's
do this. So I tell her then it's about the
beginning of June. The party's going to be on July ninth.
She flies back to Puerto Rico with her kids and
I transformed what's pretty much the museum today, all in
(11:43):
thirty days just for her party.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
But they get in early.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
They get in on the morning of the eighth and
they called me and said, Hey, is there a way
we could all come out there tonight and meet because
everybody's flying in and most people haven't been there, and
we'll come out, you know, and have a glass of
wine and just to walk around before the party.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
And I'm like, oh, yeah, that'd be awesome. I'd rather
get you guys in here where we can talk.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
So they show up and there's thirty of them, and
the three Clementes Vera and her two sons, Luise and
Roberto had been there before that they knew the empty space.
The other twenty seven have never been there, and some
of them have never been to Pittsburgh. So they come
walking in and on the beginning of the building. We
(12:25):
have a photograph of Roberto that was found in a
dumpster when the Pittsburgh Press was bought out by the
Pittsburgh Post Gazette. An image of Roberto jumping up in
the air in nineteen sixty and Fort Myers, Florida, and
he lines up with these clouds. The clouds make angel wings.
You can look it up. It's out there now to
the public. It's leaked out of here. The family wanted
me to keep it for the movie poster, but it's
(12:47):
been photographed by tens of thousands of people. They put
it out on the Internet. Some guys even sell it
on eBay, which they're not allowed. But I can't quit
my job and sit here in police eBay all day.
But there's this big photograph and it's eighty two inches
by eighty two inches, so it's big. And the thirty
clements they all come walking in, and I don't speak Spanish,
and I'm embarrassed by that, but I've never I'm just
(13:09):
so busy here and I've just never had the time
to just sit down and try to learn Spanish. And
so they all come in and it gets really noisy,
and they're all talking and rumbling, and I'm pretty close
with Luis. At that point, I said to Luise Clemente,
I said, Louis, are they what are they saying?
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Are they? Are they mad?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
And he goes, oh, no, They're not mad. They just
want to know who are you? Are you Puerto Rican?
How did you do all this? And where did that
image come from? And it was like bees in a beehive, right,
they were just buzz And that was an awesome one
because the image is the greatest image, I'd say, the
greatest baseball photograph ever taken. But the magical moment was
(13:51):
I had just acquired a wedding album for Roberto and Vera,
and I knew for a fact that she didn't have
her own wedding album. This was an album that was
put together by Roberto's best friend, Phil Dorsey, who was
really into photography, and he was Roberto's best friend, and
so he spent a couple of days with Roberto leading
up to the wedding, and then the whole wedding day,
(14:12):
and then a day or two after he had taken
one hundred and fifty photographs that no one in Puerto
Rico had ever seen, and he had just passed away,
and his son broke into the house and stole a
bunch of boxes of Clemente stuff during the memorial service,
and Soul was putting all the stuff up on eBay
for sale. And I knew for a fact that she
(14:33):
didn't have her own wedding album because I was restoring
the two wedding photos that she had in her house
that got ruined by sunlight, and I was working on those,
and that's when she told me someone borrowed her wedding
album from her house and never brought it back. And
so I saw this on eBay, and I'm like, I
got to get this wedding album. And at the moment
in time, my wife didn't have her wedding album because
(14:55):
I was the photographer for my own wedding pretty much,
and so I had to make prince myself. And so
you know how the Collblers' kids they never have shoes, right,
So the photographer's wife didn't have her wedding photos. And
so I had an assistant at the time, and I said, David,
get into a dark room and start making my wedding.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I picked all the images I wanted to put in
a book.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
I said, you got to get these done because I'm
buying a wedding album off eBay for Roberto and Vera,
and I got to have mine done in case I
get caught by my wife.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
So David's in the dark room printing. I win the
bid on eBay.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
I had to pay thirty five hundred dollars to get
this wedding album, which now that would be cheap, but
this was back in the nineties. So the wedding album
comes and it's way way better than I ever thought,
just unbelievable photos. One cool thing is he played a
baseball game the day before the wedding for a team
in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and he wasn't on that team,
(15:48):
so he didn't have their uniform. He plays in a
full Pittsburgh Pirate uniform with this Ponce team, and there's
three or four five photos of Phil Dorsey with the players,
and there's Roberto and the lineup with the pie At
uniform on, and there's all these just incredible photographs. They
go out on a boat and they're fishing the day
before and they get some really cool shots.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
They go to the beach.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I have the only photograph in the world of Roberto
in a bathing suit and he's ripped. He was always
he was always in really good shape. He had a
scar on his arm, and he wore the long sleeved
wool undershirt that the pirates would give him. He wore
them all the time. He wore in every baseball game
he ever played in because he didn't want anybody.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
To see this scar. So there he is out on
the end of a dock.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
They're getting ready to go fishing, and he's sitting there
in his shorts and his wool undershirt. So I got
these really cool cool shots. So I have it all
set up in the back of the museum, in the
back of the firehouse with a light on. This book
technically a wedding album, and I say, Heavier, I have
a little something for you back here, and I walk
them all in there and there's this album and they
(16:51):
just go crazy. The tears just start flying out. They're
all talking Spanish and crying and looking and saying, oh,
there's but Pito and another. You know, a lot of
the people in the photos have passed away, and a
lot of these kids, these are their parents and they're
gone and they've never seen these photos, and it's just
this oh, man, it's just this wonderful moment where they
(17:14):
get to see all these photos that they'd never seen
before their family members, and it was just like that
was a win win win right there. The Angel Wings
was good, but the wedding album was the icing on
the cake. And the next day is going to be
the party and we've got it's a big success. And
Vera makes a comment. You know, at that point, I'm
Dwayne the archivist and I have an archive of photos,
(17:35):
but most people don't even know what archive means. So
Vera makes his comments. She goes, hey, Dwayne, you know,
it's like a museum here now, And I was like, Whoa,
that's something archive.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
It's cool and all, and I'm glad. You know, we're
so lucky.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
That we were able to acquire all these photos and
negatives and everything that we had. But no one knows
what an archive is, you know. But museum, that's something
you can sink your teeth into. So the very next
day we made up a flyer and we called it
Clemente Collection at that point because legally I wasn't allowed
to say that Clemente Museum because I didn't have that
in writing yet. With the family but we started going
(18:13):
around town with these flyers and dropping them off at
hotels with concierges and stuff like that, and started giving
tours that day, the day after the party. Haven't stopped since.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And a terrific job on the storytelling and production by
Robbie Davis and Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
Dwayne Reader for sharing his story with us and his
passion with us for the Clemente legacy and what a
story it is. Indeed, Dwayne's a fan and he wants
to get to know the family and preserve that legacy,
(18:49):
and he fights for it, and he pays out of
his own pocket for it and ultimately gains the trust
of this family. A white man from Pittsburgh, a Puerto
Rican family coming together around a shared passion and love.
Roberto Clemente and his legacy a classic American story. Here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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