1938, the Hall had

The Honor Rolls of Baseball were established in 1946 by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's Permanent Committee to establish as a second level of induction designed to recognize non-playing contributors. The committee designed the Honor Rolls to commemorate managers, executives, umpires and sportswriters, as an addition to their regular vote of old-time players. Though sportswriter Henry Chadwick was elected in 1938, the Hall had not devised a plan to extend recognition to these contributors, and this was the first attempt.

Samuel Osmond Barber II was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the mid-20th century. Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression. However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto (1945) and Medea's Dance of Vengeance (1955); and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Nocturne (1959).