Posted on 01/14/2015 11:44:29 AM PST by Osage Orange
How Baseball Hall of Famer Warren Spahn came to make his home in Oklahoma
By Jenni Carlson....
1-13-15
Warren Spahn was born and bred in Buffalo, N.Y., then played baseball in Boston, Milwaukee, New York and San Francisco.
But he made his home in Oklahoma.
The story goes that the lanky leftie settled near Hartshorne because his wife was from Oklahoma — and that’s true.
But that’s not the whole story. The rest of the tale includes a random reunion with a childhood chum, a couple of gal pals from Tulsa and a bit of sage advice from one of those women.
To understand why the Spahn Award will be given out here Wednesday night, you must know how Warren and Red came to meet LoRene and Brooksie.
It was a night that changed all of their lives.
* * *
Warren Spahn and Roy “Red” Reimann grew up in the same German neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y. They went to the same Lutheran church. They attended many of the same schools.
But their friendship was cemented on the baseball fields around town.
In those days, the moms would pack lunches after school and on weekends the boys would play baseball for hours. The only rule was that they had to be home by dark.
Warren, long and lithe, was a pitcher. Red, strong and stout, was a catcher.
Together, they made a dominant tandem.
Warren eventually signed a professional contract and went into the minor leagues. Red went to work for Wurlitzer, the piano and organ manufacturer located nearby. For several years, the friends largely lost touch.
Then in 1942, Warren enlisted in the Army and was assigned to Camp Gruber, southeast of Muskogee.
Not long after, Red enlisted, too. He loved drawing and singing and had even applied to work for Disney as an illustrator. That kind of work didn’t suit his parents, who repeatedly told him it wasn’t honorable, and in a snit over his parents’ resistance, Red decided to join the Army.
He was assigned to Camp Gruber.
It wasn’t long before Red heard about another Buffalo boy in the Oklahoma heat, but he was stunned when he found out it was Warren. The childhood chums renewed their friendship.
They also got back on the baseball field together. By then, Warren had risen through the minor league ranks and made a brief appearance in the majors, pitching in four games for the Boston Braves. Paired with Red, they were quite the force in the camp’s intramural leagues.
When they weren’t playing ball in their downtime, they often made the trip into Tulsa.
That’s where they met LoRene Southard and Brooksie Boyd.
* * *
LoRene and Brooksie had been roommates for a couple years. They had gotten to know each other working as secretaries for the government, and even though Brooksie was a decade older than LoRene, they loved going out together. Bowling. Night clubbing. Partying.
One night, it was getting late and Brooksie wanted to go home.
“I partied,” she would later tell her children, “but I needed my rest, too.”
LoRene convinced her to stay out just a little longer, and soon after, Warren and Red walked over and introduced themselves. Even though Warren took a shine to Brooksie, she took a shine to Red, who was red-headed just like she was.
The two sets of friends started going on double dates — Red and Brooksie, Warren and LoRene — and by the time the men got their orders to deploy, Red and Brooksie were serious. They were married three months after they met.
Soon after, Warren and Red left for the European front, and LoRene and Brooksie stayed behind in Tulsa.
* * *
Brooksie had never planned on getting married because with a mother and a father who’d long been at odds, she became a provider for her three younger siblings.
She put herself through secretarial school, got a job with the government, even went north to work in the secretarial pool on the building of Alaska-Canadian Highway before Alaska was even a state. Eventually, she decided to buy a house for her family. With her siblings in and around Oklahoma City, Brooksie found a place in Britton, then a town near Britton Road and Western Avenue that has since been swallowed by Oklahoma City.
Buying the property was an ordeal, though. Even though she was gainfully employed, Brooksie had to get her unemployed father to co-sign.
That experience made Brooksie realize how hard it was for women to acquire property then. When she learned that LoRene was considering selling some property she’d inherited, Brooksie was quick to advise against it.
“It’s hard for a woman to get property,” she told LoRene. “Keep it. You never know.”
LoRene wasn’t so sure. She and Warren had gotten serious, writing letters back and forth during the war. He intended to come home and get back into baseball, and if he did, they were sure to bounce around the country.
And regardless of the future, she was in Tulsa then, and the property was near Hartshorne, in the far southeastern corner of the state. It wasn’t a little plot of land either. It was hundreds of acres.
“Just keep it,” Brooksie encouraged. “If you’ve got land, you’ve got something.”
LoRene decided to take her friend’s advice.
* * *
Brooksie and LoRene remained roommates until their men came home from the war.
Both were lucky to be able to do so. Warren and Red saw some of the worst of the fighting. The Battle of the Bulge. Remagen Bridge. D-Day.
Warren was nicked by bullets on his stomach and the back of his head. He took shrapnel in his left foot.
Red suffered even more severe injuries while out on motorcycle reconnaissance. After hitting a trip wire stretched across the road, he was knocked off his motorcycle. He had on an American uniform, but because of his German last name and some German contraband in his uniform, the German soldiers who laid hold of him thought he was a spy.
They beat him and left him for dead.
Belgium farmers later found Red, and the freckle-faced red-head had been beaten so badly that they thought he was a black man. He was in a coma for several months.
Not long after he regained consciousness, the area was liberated and he got to come home.
Red and Brooksie settled in Britton in the house that she’d bought.
A few months later, Warren came home, too. He had been playing baseball with an Army team, and he was throwing so well that the Boston Braves wanted him to report to the big-league team as soon as he arrived back in the States. He made his first post-war start on July 14, 1946.
Less than a month later, he married LoRene.
They lived in Boston, but every chance they got, they came back to Oklahoma to visit Red and Brooksie. There would be card games. There would be booze. There would be stories and jokes and laughs and smiles.
When it came time for Warren and LoRene to decide where to make their offseason home, the decision was easy — they’d live in Oklahoma.
LoRene, after all, already owned a pretty piece of property.
* * *
Red and Brooksie helped Warren and LoRene find the perfect spot for a house on the Hartshorne acreage, then Red, who worked as an architect at OG&E for 33 years, designed the home.
Over the years, Red and Brooksie and their three kids would make frequent trips to the ranch to see Warren and LoRene and their son, Greg. Sometimes on holidays. Sometimes on vacations. Sometimes just because.
The families were as much a part of each other’s lives as possible.
After the kids came along, the adults would still play cards and tell stories, but they would also play baseball with the youngsters.
“I remember playing baseball with Warren a million times,” said Linda Griffith, Red and Brooksie’s middle child.
She remembers Warren as having the biggest presence that she ever met. Much like her father, Warren was outgoing and funny.
Linda thought the man with the big nose was so great that he became something of a standard for her.
“I equated big noses with fun and neat and attractive,” she said.
She laughed.
“My husband has equally as big a nose.”
Linda and her brothers Larry and Robert knew Warren was a big deal. They saw their dad turn away autograph seekers at their door every now and again when Warren was visiting. They heard about Warren’s $75,000 contract and thought that they now knew someone who was really, really rich. They knew he won a World Series, a Cy Young and more big-league games than any other left-handed pitcher in baseball history.
But more than anything, they thought he was important because the Spahns were among their parents’ nearest and dearest friends.
* * *
Linda Griffith still marvels all these years later at the many events that brought her parents together with the Spahns.
Any small event could’ve changed the course of their lives. What if her father had waited to be drafted and had been sent somewhere other than Camp Gruber? What if her mother had decided to go home early the night that she and LoRene met her father and Warren? What if LoRene had decided to just go ahead and sell that land near Hartshorne?
“It’s a God thing,” Linda said. “I firmly believe we are where we’re supposed to be.”
Turns out, Oklahoma was where Warren Spahn was supposed to be.
After he retired, he managed the minor league team in Tulsa. He tried unsuccessfully to convince Red to coach with him, but Warren always had him help when Tulsa would come to Oklahoma City for a series.
Warren was out of baseball completely by the early 1970s, and while he could’ve retired in somewhere beachy or snowy, he stayed in Oklahoma. He loved the friendliness of the people. He loved the peacefulness of the place. Even after LoRene, Red and Brooksie died — all within eight years of each other — he stayed.
He died in 2003 and was buried in Hartshorne, too.
He wasn’t raised here. He didn’t star here. But for Warren Spahn, this was home.
Great story!!
Spahn, Sain and two days of rain
Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.
Patriots....
“The only problem for the Giants and us faithful fans, both at the game and at home listening, was that the old man Spahn was also holding the Giants scoreless! So as we entered the bottom of the 13th it was still 0-0! Giants manager Alvin Dark approached Marichal when he came off the mound after the top of the 13th and asked him how he felt. Juan looked out at the old man Spahn warming up to pitch the 13th inning at 42 years old and broke baseball protocol by telling his manager in no uncertain terms “See that old guy out there? He’s 42! I am NOT coming out of this game until he does or we win!” With that, Dark shrugged his shoulders and walked away.”
Love Marichal tells Dark if the old guy is pitching, he is pitching also.
Whole story at http://www.csnbayarea.com/blog/andrew-baggarly/july-2-1963-spahn-vs-marichal-best-pitchers-duel-ever
Warren Spahn is still fondly remembered in Boston by the older baseball fans ... not only for his MLB career but for his early involvement with the Jimmy Fund.
Ah, the good old days when baseball was played by ordinary men with extraordinary talent - for the love of the game.
Years ago, the chuckleheads running Major League Baseball, owners and players, permitted a strike to cancel the World Series. I retaliated by turning my attention to college football and purchasing several VHS tapes of past World Series highlights. One tape was of the Milwaukee Braves defeating the New York Yankees in 1957.
It was amazing to see how much differently the game was played. The athletes were all deadly serious. In his lone win, Warren Spahn actually blew a lead in the late innings and his manager, Fred Haney, conferred with him and left him. Milwaukee tied the game and won in extra innings and Spahn recorded a complete game victory. There is simply no way such a thing would happen today with starting pitchers who cannot complete six innings or throw more than one hundred pitches.
Spahn was an iron man and a fairly good hitter as well.
I was almost 12 when My folks took me to Spahnie Night at County Stadium. (see photo above)
Thanks for posting that!!
Great story!!
Spahn hit so well he was occasionally used as a pinch hitter. Spahn hit 35 homers over the course of his career and batted .333 with over 100 at bats one season. He probably could have made it as a first basemen if his arm wasn't so good.
Then in the sixties the Spahn and Burdette got old and the Braves shipped out two pitchers, Joey Jay and Juan Pizarro, who went on to have great seasons with other teams. The Braves still had great hitters in Aaron, Matthews, Torre, Adcock, and some others, but mediocre pitching killed them. Which proves it's always better to have great pitching over great hitting. Like the Dodgers.
I remember reading a story in which Spahn was pitching against Stan Musial. Musial hit a screaming line drive that struck Spahn in the solar plexus knocking him off his feet. Spahn retrieved the ball and still threw Musial out at first base. Two of the greatest ball players who loved the game.
Anyway when the bridge finally fell into the river it took some of our guys with it - Mr. Spahn had just come off of it.
Maybe someone can help me out with this; my recollection of what I read is kinda vague.
Wow. My Grandpa was a semipro catcher who,though a Yankee fan, loved Warren Spahn and had me watch him when I was a young kid learning to be a catcher. My Dad, who played third base on a semipro team where Whitey Ford was the star pitcher and first baseman afterthe war was also a Yankee fan. I lol at the arguments they used to have about whether Spahn or Ford was the better pitcher.
I enjoyed the article immensely and kudos to the reporter who can actually write and research well.
He was a utility player...they said.
Could play every position...Used to pitch and the story goes they called him "Juicy"...cause he was juiced a bit when he pitched...or not...Ha!!
My Uncle Fin....always called him Juicy...and my mom and grandma referred to him that way, now and again. Quite a few of the grand kids did too...
I've a picture of him..with his baseball teammates....back in the day!!
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