It was a nagging mystery that only a detective’s daughter — and the New York Post — could solve.
For more than 20 years, lawyer Angela Albertus and her sisters tried to find a childhood picture of their father at a Dodgers doubleheader at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, a photo he bragged about much of his life.
For years, they had been striking out. But last week, after thousands of keyword combinations and hundreds of late-night Google searches, Angela hit a home run.
“I immediately called my sisters,” Angela said. “I was yelling, ‘Call me. I found the Ebbets Field picture.’ ”
On her screen, in a scanned copy of The Post from Aug. 26, 1941, was a skinny 14-year-old Alfred Albertus, perched on a steel beam at the stadium before he and his pal were kicked out.
Her elation was tempered only by her inability to share the moment with the man who mattered most. Albertus, who spent 37 years on the NYPD, died in 2011 at age 84 without ever seeing the photo again.
But he left a few clues, the biggest of which was that the photo ran in a newspaper, perhaps The Post.
“It is closure,” said Angela, 47, an attorney with the city’s Law Department. “I only wish he lived to see it. It’s bittersweet. But he guided me from above.”
Albertus steered her in the right direction, but a couple of the details were a little off the mark.
For instance, Albertus insisted the Labor Day doubleheader was against the Giants.
So, the keyword combinations produced nothing, as did trips she and her sisters made to the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
But still, they were determined.
“My father grew up very poor,” Angela said. “There were no pictures of him from his childhood. All our lives we wanted a picture of my father, and we wanted to see what he looked like when he was younger.”
But during one late-night inquiry, Angela did learn about a pre-Labor Day doubleheader against the St. Louis Cardinals. She tweaked her search and, a few keystrokes later, Angela achieved the investigative equivalent of winning the pennant.
“He looked familiar to me,” she said. “Three people have commented that he looked like me.”