(Photo courtesy of Jerry Browning)
It’s one of Palm Beach County’s iconic historical photographs: baseball legend Connie Mack standing in 1946 at Wright Field, where his Philadelphia Athletics had moved the previous year for spring training and which would be named for Mack six years later.
Mack, then 83, and who would die a decade later, was celebrating 60 years in baseball.
He was dressed in a suit and tie, the uniform he wore in the dugout as well. He was the last manager to get away with it.
Publicity managers had wrangled a horseshoe-shaped wreath, emblazoned, “Good Luck Mr. Mack.” But they needed something else. A kid. So Palm Beach Post sports editor Bob Balfe — whose “Post Time” was the inspiration for this column’s moniker — called Caroline Browning.
“They asked me to get my twins (and) dress them in a baseball hat, a football shirt and dungarees so they could pose as playground representatives of all the kids in West Palm Beach,” Caroline — now 97 — said for the 1994 Palm Beach Post history book Pioneers in Paradise.
Jimmy, 7, was at a friend’s house. So the job fell to Jerry.
“This is one of the times at that age that Jimmy and I didn’t do something together,” Jerry, now 71, said recently. “They came up and handed me this big wreath. I do remember handing it to him (Mack). I got to sit on the bench for about three or four innings.”
Jerry said he’d been to games at what was then Wright Field, but “at the time, I probably didn’t know who Connie Mack was.”
There Jerry stands: cap askew, bill bent up, jeans rolled up above the ankles and feet bare. Jimmy said organizers had wanted Jerry to represent sandlot ball, which he often played barefoot.
Later, he said, relatives in Ohio saw newsreel footage of the encounter in movie theaters.
“They all wrote my mother on the lines that, ‘If you can’t afford shoes for the boy, we’d be glad to send you money,’ ” he said.
Jimmy said he’s not jealous of Jerry. “It was nice that he got the opportunity,” he said.
Jerry would go on to play football and baseball for the old Palm Beach High School and spent a decade at Pratt & Whitney before moving to South Carolina. He retired to West Palm in 2002.
Brothers Jimmy (left) and Jerry Browning in West Palm Beach. Jerry is holding a 1946 West Palm Beach photo (expanded at right) that was taken of him and baseball legend Connie Mack. His twin brother, Jimmy, was at a friend’s house and missed being in the photo. (TAYLOR JONES/Palm Beach Post)
Tags: baseball, Municipal Athletic Field, sports
By Bill McGoun
The recent death of Bobby Thomson brought back memories of The Year I Discovered Baseball.
Oh, I had been aware of the national pastime, but I didn’t get really interested until the late summer of 1951, when I was housebound with what probably was a cold. I found the Game of the Day on radio (this was before Palm Beach County had television) and soon was hooked.
It was a great time to be hooked. On Aug. 11 the Brooklyn Dodgers had a 13 1/2-game lead over the New York Giants. Then the Giants made their move. The Dodgers won more games than they lost during the rest of the season, but the Giants won 50 of their last 62. On the final day of the regular season the Giants pulled even, forcing a best-of-three playoff.
The Giants won the first game, the Dodgers the second. In the final game, Brooklyn took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth at the Polo Grounds. With one out, one run in and two runners on base, Ralph Branca came in to pitch for the Dodgers. He threw two pitches. Thomson hit the second one into the left-field seats, the so-called Shot Heard Round the World.
I can still remember the announcer saying, “Thomson hits a fly to left. No, wait, it might be, it might be … ” and the rest was pandemonium. Never before, or since, has a team come from so far back to win the pennant. It was a spectacular finish then, and it still is considered one of the greatest moments in the history of the game.
New York Giants players and fans converge on Bobby Thomson to reward him with a mauling after his pennant-winning, three-run home run in the ninth inning of the third playoff game with the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York Oct. 3, 1951. Running in left, is Ed Stanky. Trying to get to Thomson is Manager Leo Durocher (hatless, third from left). In center background is Freddy Fitzsimmons, coach. ‘The Giants won, the Giants won, the Giants won,’ 5-4, to clinch the National League Pennant. (AP file photo)
That winter I went out for the junior-high basketball team. I may not have been the worst player ever to set foot on the court in the old gym at what then was Lake Worth Junior-Senior High School, but I’m sure I was in the Bottom 10.
I was relegated to the B team and only got in when we were 20 points ahead or 20 points behind. The best thing that happened to me that season was at the end when coach John Golden, who also was the high-school baseball coach, asked me if I would like to keep the scorebook for the baseball team. I would and did.
I didn’t fully appreciate what a special season that was because I had nothing with which to compare it. The Trojans rolled through a 16-game regular season with a 15-1 record. Six times the opponents were held hitless, twice each by Herb Score, Gene Kuhar and Gene Wheeles. They disposed of South Broward in a best-of-three regional series to advance to the state Class A tournament in Fort Pierce.
Score, a left-hander with a blazing fastball, was the headliner. A lot of major-league scouts would show up for his games, though it was the worst-kept secret in Lake Worth that he was going to sign with the Cleveland Indians. He had been recruited by Cy Slapnicka, the legendary scout who had found Bob Feller in Iowa 15 years earlier.
Herb Score won the 1955 AL Rookie of the Year award. (AP file photo)
Interestingly, Score wasn’t much of a factor in the state tournament.
Though ill, he pitched the first game against Bronson, and it was one of his worst starts of the year. He gave up three runs in the first two innings before settling down for a 4-3 victory, on occasion throwing up behind the dugout between innings.
From then on it was up to the Trojans’ other left-hander, Don James. A seven-run Trojan second inning set the stage for a rout of St. Paul’s of St. Petersburg in the semifinals. Golden pulled James after four innings and let Kuhar finish up a game that ended 12-1.
James gave up two runs to Cocoa in the first inning of the finals, then pitched nine shutout innings. Lake Worth tied the game in the sixth and pushed across what would be the winning run when Joe Mason singled Jack Bailey home in the top of the tenth. It was a nail-biter all the way and I cheered myself hoarse from the Trojan dugout.
Lake Worth lost to the Class AA champions, Miami Edison, in Lakeland the next night but, like the Giants’ loss to the Yankees in the 1951 world series, it was anticlimactic. The Trojans had played the best in their class and had prevailed.
Score signed with the Indians the day after the Edison game. He would go on to set the major league record for strikeouts by a rookie in 1955 and win 20 games in 1956. Then, on May 7, 1957, a line drive from the bat of the Yankees’ Gil McDougald hit him in the right eye.
He was out for the season and never regained his form. He retired in 1962 and became the Indians’ radio announcer. He died in 2008, a decade after an automobile accident from which he never fully recovered.
I have witnessed some thrilling sports events since that June night in 1952. I was in the Orange Bowl in 1969 when Joe Namath made good his boast that the Jets would beat the Colts in Super Bowl III, and in what now is Sun Life Stadium when the Florida Marlins won their first world championship in 1997. That also was Score’s last game as an announcer.
But nothing ever has equaled the excitement of that June night in Fort Pierce that capped The Year I Discovered Baseball.
Bill McGoun is a retired editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He is the author of four history books, including Lake Worth High School: A History and Southeast Florida Pioneers, which tells the history of Palm Beach County, the Treasure Coast and the Lake Okeechobee region through the lives of noted individuals. He is working on a history of the Palm Beach County school system.
Tags: baseball, schools, sports
On Oct. 13, 1924, the Palm Beach High School Wildcats football team defeated the Gainesville Purple Hurricane in the first ever event at Municipal Athletic Stadium in West Palm Beach. The stadium was near the corner of Tamarind Avenue and Okeechobee Road, where the Kravis Center parking garage now stands. It was renamed Wright Field in 1927 and Connie Mack Field in 1952. See then and now photos of the stadium site here, and read more about the history of Municipal Athletic Field here.
From Oct. 14, 1924, Palm Beach Post: “Favorable comments of the spectators were divided equally between the showing of the local prep eleven and the condition of the playing field in the city’s new athletic plant. The carpet of the St. Lucie grass was as smooth as a carpet and the system of drainage kept the water entirely off the field.”
Lake Lytal, inducted into the Palm Beach County Sports Hall of Fame in 1991, was the Wildcats quarterback.
Tags: Municipal Athletic Field, sports, This Week in History
By Michelle Quigley
The Milwaukee (later Atlanta) Braves played their first spring training game at the new West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium on March 9, 1963. The Kansas City Athletics, featuring local boys Haywood Sullivan and Dick Howser, defeated the Braves 3-0. Warren Spahn was the losing pitcher.
The stadium was demolished in 1999. (1968 Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: sports, This Week in History
By Michelle Quigley
On Feb. 17, 1932, the Palm Beach Kennel Club introduced greyhound racing and parimutuel wagering to Palm Beach County. About 4,000 people attended the opening night races.
Read more about the history of the kennel club in this Post Time column from 2007.
Greyhounds racing at Palm Beach Kennel Club in September 1975. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: sports, This Week in History
