The Mouth That Roared (5 page)

I recognized, however, that I lacked the athleticism needed to play the game professionally. I was okay with that. I knew basketball would remain a part of my life regardless of how long I played on a team. Even after I became a professional baseball player, I made time to play hoops two or three times a week in some very good semipro leagues around the Delaware Valley.

In baseball, I was never the best player on my school team. Part of that had to do with the quality of our squad, which went undefeated my junior year. The left-handed ace of our pitching rotation that year, a senior named Paul Tebbutt, signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians. Another left-handed pitcher, Bob Garvey, signed with the Cardinals.

Another factor was the partial break in my right arm that prevented me from playing up to my ability and cost me a chance to compete in a national amateur baseball tournament in the summer of 1954.

I contributed to the unblemished season by pitching 14 innings and playing right field the rest of the time. To this day, Tebbutt likes to remind me that I saved one of his two no-hitters that year by throwing out a guy at first base from right field.

By the time I graduated high school, I felt I had become a pretty seasoned baseball player. During summer vacation, I played on an American Legion team. And when I turned 18, I played for a semipro team that competed against squads with players in their twenties and thirties. We’d barnstorm around the state, traveling to towns like Farmingdale and Harrington. The level of competition in that league was higher than anything I saw until I reached the minor leagues.

*

Nobody in my family cared much for sports. Neither of my parents was athletic. I inherited my size from my paternal grandfather. So did my older sister, Thelma, who grew to be nearly 6'0".

My father’s life, at least until his drinking got the better of him, centered on working. As I said, he owned a garage in Wilmington where he fixed and stored cars. That’s where I learned to drive—during the summer of my 13
^th
birthday. I’d go onto the lot and move cars around until they were all squeezed in as close as possible. A lot of his customers worked at the nearby DuPont chemical plant. Because the apartment building they lived in lacked parking, they left their cars with us. Every morning, we’d pick a few of them up and drive them to work. At 5:00
PM
, either my dad or I would ride down and pick them up.

When he wasn’t shuttling workers to and from the DuPont building, my dad fixed up cars. I’d sit and watch in amazement as he completely disassembled and reassembled vehicles without missing a bolt. I always admired him for that, partly because it was a talent I never developed.

Other than summers at the garage, my dad and I didn’t spend much time together. Our only shared activity was hunting. On a pretty regular basis, he, my grandfather, and I would go railbird shooting down at the Delaware Marsh. My dad would pole the boat through the marsh, and my grandfather and I would sit and wait for the birds to pop up. I came to be a fairly good shot on those outings and maintained an interest in hunting for the rest of my life.

In fairness to him, I didn’t exactly seek out my dad for companionship. The truth of the matter was I wasn’t around that much. If I missed dinner, my parents knew I was out playing ball. My mom would put a platter in the refrigerator for me to eat when I got home. Every now and then, I’d catch hell about not being home for a special dinner, but for the most part, my parents let me do my thing. They recognized that I could take care of myself, including in the classroom. I took college prep courses and usually made the honor roll.

To earn a little pocket money, I mowed lawns in the neighborhood. My only other break from sports came on Saturdays, when I headed to the local movie theater to catch a Western or war movie. The theater was a mile from my house. To stay in shape, I ran there and back. Sitting in the dark theater, I watched in awe as John Wayne or another leading man of the day took on the bad guys.

My mom, Mayannah Green, was a saint. She kept the family together. My sister Thelma, who passed away at the age of 89 in 2012, was 11 years my senior. My younger sister, Carole, is four years my junior. Despite the financial difficulties that arose as my father’s drinking problem worsened, my mom kept the household running. Whatever we needed, we usually got. She was a church-going gal, and I grew up going to Bible school and Sunday services. After I signed a professional baseball contract, I remember her saying, “Dad’s not keeping the bills right. We’re struggling.” That was news to me.

After he lost his garage, my dad ended up with a paper route. To compensate for my family’s lost income, my mom waited tables at Newark Country Club and New Castle Army Air Base. She never cried poor, and she made sure my sisters and I were never lacking for food or anything else.

*

Two of my high school coaches helped mentor me. My football coach, John Chanowski, encouraged me to stay on the team even though I wasn’t a naturally gifted football player. “Don’t quit,” he told me. “It’ll help you with your other sports.” He was right. Frank Loucks, my basketball coach, took me aside after my junior year and told me he would work with me to make the all-state team my final season. He did, and I made all-state.

When I became a senior, several major league scouts took notice of me. The Phillies, Philadelphia A’s, Giants, Boston Red Sox, and Pirates all came to see me play. I attended a three-day try-out camp with the Pirates in Elkton, Maryland, the summer I graduated high school. I still have the invitation from Pirates scout Rex Bowen that reads, “Boys are asked to pay their own expenses to the school, but if they are ever signed to a contract, all of their expenses will be refunded.”

In my senior yearbook, I listed a straightforward future ambition: “To go to college and make myself a career in the sports world.” While others in my class of 148 students hoped to “raise a herd of Hereford cattle” or become a “first-class plumber,” I knew my future was in sports. I was voted the most popular male student in my graduating class. So, yeah, I guess you could say my high school years were pretty special.

I wasn’t disappointed that I didn’t get offered a professional baseball contract out of high school, because Bob Carpenter, a Delaware businessman who preceded his son, Ruly, as owner of the Phillies, offered me a pretty inviting alternative.

Mr. Carpenter ran the Friends Foundation, which for all intents and purposes was the University of Delaware’s scholarship program back then. There were no baseball scholarships at the time, but Mr. Carpenter knew my ability on the hardwood and got me a basketball scholarship. The idea was for me to play basketball for the Blue Hens in the winter and baseball in the spring. As far as I was concerned, it was an ideal situation.

Mr. Carpenter’s generosity made me feel even more positive toward the Phillies. Growing up in Delaware, they became my favorite major league team. I never attended a game at Shibe Park, or Connie Mack Stadium as it was later renamed, but I listened to games on the radio. As a pitcher, I looked up to Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons, the aces of the 1950 Whiz Kids team that reached the World Series when I was in high school.

By my junior year of college, I was co-captain of the Delaware basketball team and made the All-Middle Atlantic Conference team. I knew I wouldn’t go any further than the college level, but I enjoyed the opportunity to play a few more years of organized basketball. It was exciting to play against a lot of the Philadelphia schools and a few East Coast powerhouses.

*

The university was very much a football school at the time. Baseball was treated like a red-headed stepchild. Unfortunately, my baseball coach at Delaware turned out not to possess much acumen. He was a professor who got the coaching job because nobody else wanted it.

Mr. Carpenter was a big fan of all the university’s sports teams and even traveled to some of our away baseball games. He was in the stands for a game I pitched my junior year at West Chester University, which had a couple of players the Braves were looking to sign.

I took a one-run lead into the bottom of the ninth inning. We were one out away from wrapping up the win when a West Chester player hit a bomb to center field. The ball would have cleared almost any fence in existence, but luckily for me, this field didn’t have any fence at all. Still, it looked like a certain inside-the-park home run. I turned around and watched the ball sail over the open field. I also watched as our center fielder, Jimmy Zaiser, started closing ground on it. Jimmy stuck up his glove and speared the ball about 450 feet from home plate to preserve the win. After the game, Mr. Carpenter slapped me on the back and told me he had just witnessed the best performance he’d ever seen from a college pitcher.

Thanks in part to that amazing play by Jimmy, I went 6–0 with a 0.88 ERA my junior year.

The same scouts who looked at me in high school periodically checked in with me during my college career. But the Phillies had an obvious edge over the rest of the pack. Not only were they the closest thing I had to a hometown team, but their owner had paid my way to college. If the Phillies offered me a contract after my junior year, I was going to sign it. And in the spring of 1955, at the age of 20, I did just that. My signing bonus was $4,000.

Harold “Tubby” Raymond, an assistant football coach for Delaware and a friend of the Carpenter family, gave me a ride that day to Mr. Carpenter’s Philadelphia office. Raymond went on to coach baseball at UD for eight seasons and was head football coach at the university for 36 seasons.

I split my first year of professional baseball between Mattoon, Illinois, and Reidsville, North Carolina. I got off to a bumpy start at Class-B Reidsville, going 1–1 with a 10.06 ERA. That earned me a quick demotion to Class-D Mattoon. I fared better there. On my 21
^st
birthday, I fanned 15 hitters in a game against the Hannibal Citizens. To that point, I had struck out 40 hitters in 23⅓ innings of work. Over my entire time with Mattoon, I went 4–3 with a 3.44 ERA.

My ambition was to make a career for myself in the sports world. I knew I had to make the most of this opportunity, and it felt great to get the journey started.

In the fall of 1955, back home after my first year of professional baseball, I cruised over to my old high school in a new yellow-and-black Mercury I had just bought with my signing bonus. I felt like some kind of conquering hero as I drove around the grounds of Conrad High.

I was making a loop around campus when a petite brunette on the field hockey team caught my eye. As the petite brunette would later tell it, she and her friend saw me, too. “Look at that car!” her friend exclaimed as I drove by. “Look at the guy driving that car!” my future wife responded.

I didn’t stop to introduce myself to Sylvia Taylor but later I did some asking around about her. In a small town like Newport, Delaware, you didn’t need to work too hard to find out about someone. I learned that Sylvia attended Conrad, where she was a varsity field hockey, basketball, and softball player, as well as a drum majorette. As luck would have it, her cousin worked with my sister Thelma at the DuPont Company in Wilmington. I asked Thelma if she and her co-worker could fix me up with Sylvia, and a few days later, Thelma said Sylvia would be expecting a call from me.

I phoned Sylvia and invited her to go out to the movies with me that weekend. She agreed. When I picked her up for the date, she asked what movie we were going to see. She probably wanted to catch
Rebel Without a Cause
,
Picnic
, or
Guys and Dolls
, all of which were box-office hits in 1955.

The car had cost a lot of money, and I was running a little low on cash, so I had to dash Sylvia’s hopes of sitting in a movie theater balcony and watching James Dean, William Holden, or Marlon Brando.

“Actually, I thought we could go and watch home movies with my friends,” I told her.

I’m lucky she didn’t get out of the car and run back inside her house. She stayed, and we ended up having a great time. She got along well with Hoddy and Sandy, my married friends who hosted the movie night. At some point during the evening, Sylvia told the room full of 21-year-olds that she was a 15-year-old sophomore. That came as a surprise. Sylvia carried herself like a college girl, however, so our difference in ages didn’t really bother me. We arranged to go out on a second date, and pretty soon, we were going steady.

Sylvia’s parents may have had a different take on our respective ages. They were wary of me. One night that fall, I didn’t bring her home until 2:00
AM
. The moment Sylvia opened the front door, her father, a big man, came hurtling down the stairs. “If you can’t get my daughter home at a more decent hour, then you’ll have to find another girl!” he barked at me.

I assured him it wouldn’t happen again.

Fortunately, Sylvia’s father liked baseball. To make up for bringing their daughter home late some nights, I got into the habit of bringing Mr. and Mrs. Taylor hoagies and a half-gallon of ice cream every time I came over to pick her up.

When I left for spring training, I had to put my burgeoning relationship with Sylvia on hold. It was difficult at the time, but I think the separation served a purpose. For one thing, she needed to focus on finishing high school. Her mother, the first person in her family to graduate from college, worried that our romance would distract Sylvia from her studies. To keep the relationship alive, we wrote tons of letters back and forth while I was off playing ball.