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Local Family Feels Feller Loss; Became Friends with the Hall of Famer in his Final Year December 22, 2010 |
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Just as his family sat down to eat dinner one evening last winter, Drew Grant's cell phone began to vibrate and rattle on the kitchen counter.
Grant picked up the phone, put it to his ear and heard the caller say, "Drew, this is Bob Feller from Ohio."
Grant was stupefied. He slowly gathered his wits as the Hall of Fame pitcher continued, "Drew, I got those wonderful score sheets you sent me. That was the nicest gift I've received in a long time. Where the hell did you find those?"
The score sheets were photocopies of two pages from a scorebook that provided a neatly-kept record of a baseball game played between Templeton, Iowa and neighboring Maple River on September 8, 1935 at Manning. A one-line pitching summary at the bottom of one of the pages states: "Strikeouts Feller 18 Calicott 7."
On that day seventy-five years ago, young Bob Feller, who grew up on a farm near tiny Van Meter, Iowa, struck out eighteen opposing batters in a town team game. A year later -- on September 13, 1936 -- the seventeen year-old baseball prodigy, pitching for the Cleveland Indians two months after his Major League debut, set an American League record by striking out seventeen Philadelphia Athletics.
Feller, known as "Rapid Robert" and "The Heater from Van Meter", died last week at the age of 92 from complications of leukemia. Inducted into Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame in 1962 alongside Jackie Robinson, he pitched eighteen seasons in the majors, all for Cleveland, won 266 games and struck out 2,581 batters in 3,828 innings. He won twenty or more games six times in his career, led the American League in strikeouts seven times and threw three no-hitters, including the only opening day no-hitter in Major League history.
In the prime of his career at the age of 23, Feller enlisted in the Navy on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and volunteered for combat duty. He spent the next four years as chief of an anti-aircraft gun crew on the USS Alabama and was decorated with five campaign ribbons and eight battle stars.
In 1946, his full season after the war, Feller won 26 games, threw 10 shutouts and struck out 348 batters (Nolan Ryan holds the modern day record with 383). Baseball historians conservatively estimate that the four missed seasons cost Feller at least forty wins and more than six hundred strikeouts.
Regarding those missed seasons, Feller is quoted as saying years later, "I’m not too much concerned about my baseball career. I want to be remembered as a good American citizen who enjoyed baseball and farming with his dad."
Drew Grant was born in 1956, Feller's last year in the Major Leagues. That their paths crossed more than half a century later was a fortuitous event brought about by Grant's relationship with another prominent Iowa baseball family.
A native of Maine, Grant was stationed at the Pentagon in the early 80's after graduating from the Air Force Academy. While working on defense issues on Capitol Hill during the Reagan presidency, Grant met and eventually married Council Bluffs native Laure Wolever, a Pentagon staffer who tracked the defense budget on Capital Hill. Several years later, Drew and Laure moved to Omaha to be closer to her family and raise their two young children, Erin and Kevin.
Laure's father, Chuck Wolever, a Plattsmouth (NE) native who was drafted by the Yankees and played in the White Sox organization, started the baseball program at St. Albert High School in Council Bluffs in 1964 and led the Falcons to their first-ever state title in 1977 and to American Legion state titles in 1969, 1973, 1975, 1983 and 1984. Falcon Field, which Wolever helped build, was renamed Chuck Wolever Field in 2005, and the veteran coach was inducted into the Iowa High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2009.
Chuck's son, Marti, who played on his father's 1973 and 1975 state championship teams, was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds in the 22nd round in 1975, the year the Big Red Machine won the first of back-to-back World Championships. After a two-year minor league career, Marti returned to this area to coach high school baseball at Omaha Paul VI and Council Bluffs Thomas Jefferson and served as an assistant coach at Kansas State University for one season. He then did stints as a scout with the Detroit Tigers, the Yankees and the White Sox before joining the Phillies scouting staff in 1992. Since 2001 he has served as the Phillies' Scouting Director and has played a large role in the Phillies' success over the past decade by bringing players such as Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Cole Hamels to Philadelphia.
Marti's younger brother Marc was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in the 33rd round of the 1984 draft and played college ball at Des Moines Area Community College and Southwest Missouri State University (now known as Missouri State University). He now lives in the Phoenix area where he operates a sports marketing company.
Last fall as Chuck's declining health necessitated a move to assisted living, his family members began the task of sorting through the accumulated possessions in the family's Council Bluffs' home. Found in one of Chuck's file cabinets were the original scorebook pages of the 1935 game in Templeton. It's not known how they came to be in Chuck's possession, but he decided that grandson Kevin, who was finishing his senior season at Millard West and would later be drafted by Detroit, should have them.
Drew and Kevin were naturally quite excited about possessing a piece of history involving a Hall of Famer, and the idea occurred to them that Feller himself might enjoy revisiting this little slice of his personal history. After digging around on the internet, they found a post office box address for Feller in Gates Mill, Ohio, but had no idea whether it was an accurate address.
They photocopied the score sheets and sent them off to the P.O. box, not knowing what to expect. Three days later, Drew's head spun in amazement as he stood in his kitchen listening to Feller on the phone thank him for sending him the score sheets.
"We talked for about thirty minutes," Drew recalls. "We talked about that game, which he remembered in remarkable detail, considering how long ago it was and how many games he must have played after that. It was one of his last local games before he joined the Indians the next summer. He was particularly proud of getting two hits in that game."
Near the end of the conversation, Feller invited Drew to come to the Bob Feller Museum in Van Meter where Feller would be making an appearance in a couple of weeks. Drew and Laure made the trip to Van Meter on December 5th, 2009 and spent about forty minutes visiting with Feller.
"I was impressed by how energetic and robust he was at the age of 91," commented Grant. "He and his wife had just returned from a cruise, he was traveling all over to speaking engagements, and he just seemed very active. His mind was very sharp, very lucid. We talked about baseball, but also about his military service -- something that he and I shared since I had served in the Air Force and, like Bob, my father had served in the Navy aboard the USS Wasp. He was as proud of his service in World War II as he was of his baseball career."
A couple of weeks later, Grant's phone rang again. It was Feller. "He just wanted to talk some baseball," chuckled Grant. "He told me about his grandson who was a freshman pitcher at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Since our Kevin was being pursued by St. Thomas in Minnesota at the time to play baseball -- and both were Division III schools -- we talked about the possibility of the two of them competing against one another some day."
"It's kind of shocking how quickly he must have gone downhill. When we saw him a year ago, he was amazingly fit and robust for a guy in his nineties. Very active, very energetic," observed Drew. "The people at the Museum would say of him, 'his DNA is just different.'"
"When we sent those score sheets to him, we had no idea that anything would come of it. We just thought, 'I bet he'd love to see this,' commented Grant. "And, for us, it really turned into something very special -- and unforgettable. He was an amazing guy."
Reader Comment, submitted Dec. 25, 2010
Thanks to our volunteer photographer, Bob Irlbeck, a Carroll County native, the above article was circulated to friends and family members in the Templeton area shortly after it was published. (Bob, who grew up near Dedham, also sent us an excerpt from the 1982 Templeton Centennial Book which discusses the September 8, 1935 game on page 280.) It should also be noted that the only Maple River player to get a hit against Feller in that game (and he got two!) was named "Irlbeck." Bob, who was quite a good fastpitch softball player in his day, is still tracking down that family connection.
After Bob alerted folks back in Carroll County about our article, we received a Christmas Day email from Dan Pomeroy, a friend of Bob's from Dedham. In the September 8th game Dan's father, Merle, played in left field for Templeton and went 3-for-4 at the plate.
Dan notes that top town team players in that era were somewhat itinerant hired guns who traveled around a bit to play for various teams (we observed the same pattern in our article last winter about Logan Ehler's great-grandfather, who pitched in the same time period). Feller was from Van Meter, but played in the September 8th game for Templeton, located about 80 miles away. Likewise, Merle Pomeroy's home team was Dedham, but he played for cross-county rival Templeton on September 8th.
Dan wrote of an episode earlier that same summer when the Dedham town team recruited Bob Feller to pitch for Dedham against Templeton:
Dad always told the story in the summer of 1935 how he and his Dedham teammate John "Butch" Werner (who was actually offered by the Cubs at one time) drove to Van Meter and 'bargained' with Feller's dad to hire him to pitch in a game for Dedham against Templeton.
Dad was 26 at the time and I suspect most of his team was that age or older. They had pooled their money to do this, and when they got the young kid back to Dedham their teammates were pretty pissed off. The Feller kid was throwing so hard in warmups that everybody figured he'd never last the nine innings, and it had been a long drive and good money thrown away.
As my Dad
always told it ... "three catchers and nine innings later we had beaten
Templeton, Butch and I drove him back to Van Meter, and since nobody
wanted to go back there behind the dish we never 'bought' him again." In a subsequent message, Dan also told of the eventual demise of town team baseball in Carroll County and its legacy:
Town team baseball died out in the Carroll county area in the 50's just as my Dad was finishing his playing career. Men's 12" fastpitch took over, and my hometown, Dedham, with Dad as the coach and Butch Werner as the manager, got VERY good in that. They went to state five straight years from 1957-1961, and in 1962 played the world champion Aurora Sealmasters in a game in tiny Dedham (pop. 300) that drew a crowd of over 2,000.
Throughout the 50's and 60's Dedham played host to District and Substate championships in ASA men's fastpitch. In the 1960's Dedham started up 16" slowpitch and actually hosted the first three state tournaments in 1966-68. That sport then ended up bigger than fastpitch statewide and eventually a team from Des Moines won the ASA National Championship in 16" from a sport born in Dedham.
Feller, the world champion fastpitch team, and the birth of 16".... all
on the same field my dad, my brother Ron, myself, and our buddy Bob
"Tag" Irlbeck played on. Something we're all proud of. |
Grant
and Feller continued their phone conversations a few more times, but
Feller's health took a sudden turn in August when he was diagnosed with
leukemia. He later had a pacemaker surgically implanted after
fainting during chemotherapy. His health continued to deteriorate
over his final few months, and he died in hospice on December 15th at
age 92.