"I love talking about it," says Brian Turner. "Just keep asking the questions and I’ll come back with the answers."

The topic is the history of baseball in Northampton and more specifically a new book titled - "The Hurrah Game" - Turner has written with Northampton author John Bowman.

Publication of the book by Historic Northampton coincides with an elaborate and fascinating exhibit now on view at the museum on Bridge Street of photographs, paraphernalia and personal reminiscences of the rich history of the role baseball played in the life of this community.

Turner, who moved here in 1976 after a peripatetic wandering of the world trying to find himself, has dug deep into the roots of Northampton to come up with this detailed and somewhat ignored piece of Northampton history.

The book and museum exhibit are the result of Turner’s indefatigable tolerance for research, which for most of us can be lonely, tiresome work. Not for Turner, who I would see huddled over a microfilm reader virtually every time I visited Forbes Library in the last few years.

"I’m pretty meticulous about everything I do," says Turner, when asked about his baseball research or his skills as a cartoonist and comic book artist or teacher in the writing program at Smith College.

To do justice to the depth of the material gathered about baseball and Northampton, it is necessary to go the book, now on sale at various venues, and to visit Historic Northampton where "The Hurrah Game" exhibit runs through Aug. 16.

But there are many antecedents leading up to Turner’s utter and complete obsession with details about Northampton’s connection with baseball and the game’s ties to Northampton.

It could have been when he was younger reading the works of Harold Seymour, who Turner describes as the dean of baseball researchers who broke new ground with volumes such as "Baseball, the Early Years," "Baseball, the Golden Years," and "Baseball, the People’s Game." "They got me thinking about women and baseball, blacks and baseball," he says.

Maybe it was the unpublished novel that Turner wrote tentatively titled "Ball Field in a Box."

More likely, the most important local antecedent was when Turner came to know Jim Ryan whose house on Corticelli Street in Florence Turner bought in 1989. Ryan, a retired Northampton firefighter, moved next door to live with his sister and Turner and Ryan, as neighbors, eventually found they had a mutual interest - old-time baseball.

For several years, Turner and Ryan would get together intermittently to plumb Ryan’s recollections of Northampton baseball in the early years of the 20th Century.

The conversations developed into a kind of oral history project, with Turner going to the microfilm files of newspaper accounts and then sitting down with Ryan to dislodge personal memories that Ryan had stored up about players and games from that era. "His whole family and Jim loved to talk baseball," says Turner.

He recorded several hours of the conversations with Ryan and it began to become clear that elements of the many anecdotes - the 1912 championship Northampton Meadowlarks and Frank Wickware, the most feared black pitcher of that era - could be shaped into discrete stories.

Turner says at that point he got more fired up and plunged more deeply into his research, eventually he published a couple of his pieces in the local alternative monthly - VMag, which has since folded.

About this time, Turner became acquainted with Bowman, local author and editor of books by local authors, including a book on the Red Sox by the late Gazette sports editor, Milton Cole, and Jim Kaplan, former Sports Illustrated writer who was researching a book on Lefty Grove, the legendary pitcher.

Bowman has already published a piece about the Florence Eagles, a team reaching back to 1865 and which had 100 members and was active until 1867.

In order to tell the story of baseball in Northampton in its full historical perspective, Bowman and Turner figured they had to date the beginnings of the game here, which they were able to do by finding a reference to baseball being played at the Round Hill School as far back as 1823. Turner’s research later unearthed in the Gazette & Courier the first account of an actual ballgame on Aug. 11, 1858 between the Atwaters of Westfield and the Nonotucks of Northampton. He also tracked down the first published box score for that same game in the Westfield Newsletter.

The chronicle of the "The Hurrah Game" comes to an end in 1953 - which coincides with the beginning of Little League baseball, the passing into history of semi-pro ball and the debut the previous year of local lad, Stu Miller, as a major League pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals.,

Bowman and Turner are both members of the Society for American Baseball Research whose publication, National Pastime, will publish Turner’s article about Luther Askins, who played first base for the Florence Eagles in 1865-66, which is now regarded as the earliest racially integrated baseball team.

According to Turner, he and Bowman shared the writing of "The Hurrah Game." "It was a collaborative effort.,’; he says. "John is a professional. He livened up the writing. Sometimes I speak to myself more than to other people."

Bowman, for his part, defers to Turner. "Brian, did far more in the end." Bowman said his own interest in the history of baseball relates to the sociology of the game, while Turner’s special skill in weaving together the delicate threads of local history.

For the record, Brian Turner was born in Springfield in 1949, went to American International College and traveled the world for three years before enrolling at the UMass Master of Fine Arts program in English. In 1979 he founded Scat, a monthly cartoon magazine in Northampton which at one point had a circulation of 30,000. By 1981, Scat had turned into Graphics Guild, a design studio, which was later spun off into William Muller’s Guild Arts Centre and Graphics Guild which Turner’s brother bought and moved to Springfield.

In 1985, Turner began working at Smith as a writing counselor where he has been since, also teaching a fall semester class in essay writing.

With a reputation of being something a cynic, Turner is pleasantly surprised that his dogged efforts in presenting the story of baseball in Northampton have received favorable feedback. "Most people are amazed that anyone would bother to put it all together."

He anticipates there will be revised versions of the soft-cover book later as additional details and clarifications are provided by those with personal information about the subject.

In his low-key manner, Turner also extols for their support those connected with the Florence Association and its president Paul Gaffney and Steve Strimer, a relentless researcher of Florence history and a principal of Collective Copies who designed and printed the book. The initial printing was 500 copies with additional copies being available if demand warrants them.

A final hurrah, says Turner, is due Historic Northampton and its director Kerry Buckley, and his staff, including Alena Shumway and Marie Panik, who constructed the physical exhibit for the museum.

"Baseball is not about baseball, we all know that," says Buckley. "Baseball grew up in small-town America and Brian had an instinct for understanding that."