Bury My Heart at Cooperstown: Salacious, Sad, and Surreal Deaths in the History of Baseball

Contents

Dedication

Foreword by Mike Vaccaro

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

What a Way to Go

George Snuffy Stirnweiss • Gus Sandberg’s Blowout Loss • Witness Tampering • Snakebitten • Badly Rattled • Ralph Socks Seybold • Mike Donovan • Emil Hillbilly Bildilli • Johnny Scalzi • Harold B. Rowdy Elliott • Harry Wolverton • Howard Freigau • John Rube Benton • Karl Drews • Mike Dorgan • Chet Red Hoff • Ken Hubbs • Worst Seat in the House • Passing the Buck • Last Lap • Kill the Umpire! • Killed by the Umpire! • Killed because of the Umpire! • Billy Martin • Burt Keeley • Mike Fornieles • Dick Radatz • Eddie Grant • Frank Eustace • Fred Holmes • Al Kellett • Harry Blake • Joe O’Brien • Mike Kelley • Ruppert Mills • Sandy Piez • Lewis Snake Wiltse • Bert Myers • Jim McKee • Roberto Clemente • Thurman Munson • John Kane

Clap for Your Heroes

George Davis • Adam Comorosky • James B. Chippy McGarr • Bill Moriarty • Bill Phillips • Butch Rementer • Bobby Mathews • John Jiggs Donahue • Danny Clark • Charlie Hoss Radburn • John Hinton • Icicle Reeder • John Valentine • Pat Duff • Harry Betts • Jake Aydelott • John Bates • Charlie Morton • Harry Wheeler • Frank Pears • Frank Siffell • Ezra Sutton • Bill Popp • Chick Evans

Bronx Cheer

Urban Shocker • Miller Huggins • Eddie Bennett • Lou Gehrig • Charley O’Leary • Johnny Grabowski • Tony Lazzeri • Herb Pennock • Babe Ruth • Joe Giard • Walt Beall • Mike Gazella

Murderers’ Row

Gordon McNaughton • Gus Polidor • Hiram Hi Bithorn • Howie Fox • Ivan Calderon • Dan Leahy • Monroe Dolly Stark • Ed Morris • Frank Grube • Frank McManus • George Craig • Johnny Ryan • Thomas Mox McQuery • Pat Hynes • Arthur Lawrence Bugs Raymond • Sam Parrilla • Bill Wilson • Bob Schultz • Dernell Stensen • Don O’Riley • Ed Irvin • Fleury Sullivan • Frank Bowes • John Larry McLean • Len Koenecke • Louis Marquez • Luke Easter • Lyman Bostock • Miguel Fuentes • Tim McKeithan • Tony Solaita • Mother Watson

TB or Not to Be

Christy Mathewson • Alex Farmer • Amos Cross • Michael Bub McAtee • Cy Bentley • Hugh Campbell • Mike Chartak • Jim Devlin • Fred Kommers • Pat Newnam • Thomas Parson Nicholson • Willie Garoni • Newt Halliday • John Egyptian Healy • Ed Hughes • Kid McLaughlin • Tricky Nichols • Hank O’Day • John Puhl • Yank Robinson • John Skopec • Fred Warner • Marsh Williams • Rube Waddell • Lew Richie • Virgil Ned Garvin

Hump Days: Tales of Hunchbacked Mascots

Louis Van Zelst • Hugh McLoon • Eddie Bennett

Last Call

Allen Sothoron • Barney Olsen • Bill Hart • Bill Whaley • John Brewery Jack Taylor • Buzz Murphy • Chris Rickley • Cy Blanton • Dan Marion • Earl Smith • Fritz Henrich • George Watkins • Guy Lacy • Harry Lochhead • John Jackson • Larry Corcoran • Logan Drake • Mike Roach • Mike Slattery • Monk Dubial • Pete Childs • Ruby Schwenck • Jimmy Hudgens

Suicide Squeeze

Willard Hershberger • Jackie Price • Fraley Rogers • Bob Langsford • Art Irwin • Bob Gandy • Bob Rothel • Ed Cannonball Crane • Charlie Hollocher • Chet Chadbourne • Drummond Brown • Eddie Hohnhorst • Elmer Leifer • George Jeffcoat • Guy Morrison • Jim McElroy • Jim Oglesby • Limb McKenry • Lyle Bigbee • Morrie Rath • Pea Ridge Day • Andrew Skeeter Shelton • Stan Pitula • Tom Miller • Wally Roettger • Walt Goldsby • Tom Warren

Too Young to Die

Alan Storke • Austin McHenry • Bill Vinton • Blaine Thomas • Frankie Hayes • John Cerutti • Marty Honan • Pat Kilhullen • Pembroke Finlayson • Sherry Magee • Gene Krapp and Tony Suck • Matty McIntyre

Afterword: Grave-Hunting for Dummies

Needles and Haystacks • Final Thoughts

Dedication

To my wife and partner, Joanne, who believed in me from practically the first moment we met and told me to never quit. To my mother, Rose, who has always been there for me! Guess what, we did it! To all my nieces and nephews, thanks from Uncle Frank! To all my in-laws, especially Rick DiCanio and Kurt Nellis, both of whom helped out with info and fascinating tidbits! Thank you to my mother-in-law, Vita DiGiovanni.

This book is also dedicated to the memory of my father, Frank, brother Joseph and sister Elaine, who are always with me in spirit. Also to the memories of my little ones, Podey, Pinky, and Babe, who crossed over while this work was being created. Also a special thanks to Dr. Neal Beeber of the Rutherford Animal Hospital, one of the great Yankees fans that I know. Yeah, I know, I am always fashionably late!

Thanks to Timmy and Barbara South. Hey Tim, will we ever live down the famous Fabian Kowalik incident at the HOF library?

This book is also dedicated to Kenny Gunny Dawson, USMC retired, and all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces fighting the real struggle of good versus evil.

To the Coach, Robin Gunn and Trish Hackler, my two dear friends in Florida who always remind me how warm it is down there when it’s 12 degrees in the middle of December.

—Frank Russo

To my loving parents, Zoltan and Eleanor, who always gave me the home-field advantage; my beautiful wife, Angie, who continues to keep me in the lineup despite my occasional slumps; and my sons, Alden and Garrett—they come ready to play every day.

—Gene Racz

Foreword by Mike Vaccaro

Here’s the thing about baseball fans: it isn’t just that we care. It isn’t just that we care deeply. It isn’t just that the daily marathon of a baseball season consumes a larger portion of our brains, our souls, and our nervous systems than anything else in our lives (and, yes, you can take anything as literally as you please). It isn’t just that we can spew statistical numbers—755; 511; 56; 73; 4,256; .366— more easily than we can our own phone numbers (and if you needed to look up those numbers to know that they are Hank Aaron’s career home-run total; Cy Young’s career victory total; Joe DiMaggio’s seminal hitting-streak number; Barry Bonds’ single-season home-run mark; Pete Rose’s all-time hit mark; and Ty Cobb’s all-time batting average record, then perhaps you aren’t as big a baseball fan as you thought).

Heck, it isn’t just that we can spend hour upon hour upon hour in saloons, salons, and sacristies peacefully arguing about the game (unless the discussion revolves around the Red Sox–Yankees rivalry, in which case bloodshed is inevitable).

No. Baseball means even more to us than that.

Frank Russo gets that. He understands that. Since 1999, he has stewarded an amazing website called thedeadballera.com. At the time, I was a sports columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, and when someone turned me onto that site, two things became immediately apparent:

1. I would need to be physically removed from my computer, so arresting was the content contained on that site.

2. I would need to write about this guy at once.

Which is what I did. And I have to tell you: at first, I was a little cautious. Let’s face it, there was at least a 5 percent chance that a guy who spends so much time devoted to tracking and charting the demises—both unfortunate and inevitable— of baseball players might be a little odd. A little offbeat. A little different. A little…well, out there.

Of course, it took about 30 seconds of conversation to understand that Frank was simply that most wonderful brand of baseball fan. He’s so devoted to the sport, so completely loyal to its history and to its legacies, and so steadfast in the baseball fan’s belief that there is never a fact that is too trivial that he’s created an astonishing encyclopedia of information, and he’s managed to strike the absolute right balance between reverence and humor—not easy when you consider the fact that the primary subject matter is, you know, dying.

Devotees of thedeadballera.com already know this.

Readers of this book, which Frank has authored alongside the gifted journalist Gene Racz, you will soon discover the same thing, as soon as you make it past this testimonial. You will be informed, you will be entertained, you will be treated to hundreds of facts and tidbits of trivia that will make you the scourge of your next fantasy baseball draft. Mostly, you will be struck by the same thing I was the first time I found myself glued in front of the computer screen: if you really care about baseball, and if you truly care about the men who have comprised this wonderful game for a century and a half—and there are more and more of us every day who do care—then you will care deeply about each of the players profiled in Bury My Heart at Cooperstown.

I’m reminded of that first day I met Frank, back in January 1999, when we’d driven through the bitter New Jersey cold and walked to a grassy finger in the middle of Fernwood Cemetery in Jamesburg. He’d pointed to a simple slab of gray slate.

There it is, he said.

And there it was, indeed: the final resting place of Franklin W. Hayes, revealing the kind of information (1914–1955) that wasn’t on any of his baseball cards while he was playing for the Philadelphia A’s, St. Louis Browns, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and Chicago White Sox from 1933 until 1947, making six All-Star appearances as a catcher.

I have to confess that until our visit I had never even heard of Frankie Hayes, who had a lifetime batting average of .259 and hit 119 Major League home runs, and I consider myself the kind of rabid baseball fan whom people at cocktail parties either flock to or run away from, depending on their own levels of affinity for the game. Yet in learning about his death, I was moved to find out more about his life, meaning that by the end of the day, I’d become one more person touched by the life of a complete stranger who was—in the words of Casey Stengel—dead at the present time, and had been such for well over 44 years. I’d like to think that if he could have, Frankie Hayes would have bought Frankie Russo a beer and shook his hand in thanks for allowing him to be remembered.

When I was a kid, when baseball truly did have an all-encompassing grip on my soul and my daily existence, there were certain days that struck me deeply, so deeply that I still recall them today: the days when I would hear on the radio or read in the newspaper that a baseball player had died. I vividly recall where I was when I learned that Thurman Munson had been killed in a plane crash, that Lyman Bostock had been felled by a gunshot wound, that Danny Frisella had died in a dune-buggy accident, that Bob Moose was killed in a car crash on the way to a birthday party, that Danny Thompson had succumbed after a battle with leukemia.

Why?

I suspect part of it is the inevitable twinge of tragedy that accompanies the death of a young athlete, something that has fascinated people at least as far back as the British poet A. E. Housman, who famously penned these haunting words about athletes who were taken before their time:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

Of course, in our minds, in our culture, athletes inevitably die two deaths: the physical and the athletic. The ones I mentioned earlier are, thankfully, the exception rather than the rule. But on some level, it’s just as sad when old ballplayers die long after their on-field exploits so that hardly anyone remembers who they were, what they did, and how free they ran when they were young, unburdened by the troubles that inevitably occur away from a baseball diamond. Thanks to Frank’s website, that hasn’t been the case for quite sometime. Every player is accorded the same respect, whether it is Babe Ruth, the most famous player of all, who died of throat cancer in 1948, or Len Koenecke, an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers who hit 22 lifetime home runs before being killed at age 31 on September 17, 1935, after being battered with a fire extinguisher in a plane by a member of the crew.

And thanks to this book by Frank and Gene, we have a volume that officially provides the same kind of insight on a variety of fresh topics. And you know the best part? Baseball devotees will love this book for their own reasons, but so will nonacolytes, too. Maybe in different sets of hands that would have been impossible to pull off. But in Frank Russo’s and Gene Racz’ hands, what you’re about to read will soon become one of those books where the corners of the pages quickly wear away from overuse.

Enjoy.

—Mike Vaccaro

November 2005

Preface

When I launched my website—thedeadballera.com—in 1999, I never intended it to be macabre or depressing. I named it after a time in major league baseball before 1920—before the advent of the lively ball—and it was the only site at the time dedicated to the memory of deceased big leaguers.

Collecting close to 200,000 hits, the site took on a life of its own, and so did my baseball research. I found myself straying far from my original intent of simply documenting and compiling a comprehensive baseball necrology. I began chronicling the most interesting lives of ballplayers along with some very interesting deaths.

After all the time spent sifting through material in libraries and archives, I always find myself heading out to the actual grave sites of the deceased. Some may call it morbid, and maybe there’s some truth to it, but tracking down the headstones and markers is always like standing before a little piece of history.

And like history itself, these ballplayers are much more than simply names and numbers in a book to me.

In order to bring the material to life, I entered into a collaboration with longtime sportswriter Gene Racz, who wrote essays to accompany the player profiles, which he also edited, reworked, and helped organize into a coherent volume.

Our curiosity about these players remains as strong as ever, and we hope you will find them interesting and entertaining as well.

—Frank Russo

Acknowledgments

Unknowingly, I actually first started collecting data for this book back in the summer of 1968 while away at military school. Many people have helped me over the years with my baseball research, and of those people many have become my good friends.

The majority of the player information used in this book was obtained from player files at the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Over a five-year period, I made over 35 trips to Cooperstown, scouring more than eight thousand files.

So right off the bat, (bad pun, sorry!) I must thank the staff at the HOF library, especially my buddy, Freddy the Real Stewie Griffin Borowski. Also a special thank you to the woman I drove crazy on several occasions, the lovely Claudette Burke. And a special thanks must go out to the man with the craziest sense of humor I have ever known, Timmy Wile E. Coyote Wiles.

Additional information was obtained using ProQuest Historical Newspaper search and the archives of The Sporting News. The majority of the transaction information used in this book was provided by retrosheet.org.

Over the years I have interviewed many relatives of deceased players. They provided many interesting facts and tidbits that helped to make this book what it is. Thank you to all!

Also, I have to thank my grave-hunting buddies. Grave hunters are the people who get their butts in the grass and do the hard work of finding and photographing the final resting places of the ballplayers.

To Russ the Mad Monk Dodge, whom I have been friends with for well over seven years now, and who also originally wrote several of the bios for the book, showing that he is one of the best and most knowledgeable baseball bio writers out there.

Connie Nisinger, Conan the Librarian, my source in St. Louis, who, like me, proves that you have to be a little nutty to go out on a lousy day in November to snap a grave photo just for the hell of it!

Joyce Ellsworth, the Queen of Cleveland. You are one of the best people I know, simply put.

Dave Lotz, my buddy in Texas who helped me with research when others flat-out refused.

I also want to thank the following SABR members who helped me out over the years with my research requests:

Stew Thornley, the first SABR member I got to know and an expert grave hunter, who is one of the foremost authorities on the final resting places of members of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Eric Sallee, cousin of Harry Slim Sallee, Jim the Sandman Sandoval, a great guy and a damn fine man! Ron Henry of the SABR Vets Committee, Dave Vincent of the SABR Bio Committee, whom I have worked with closely for more than three years now. (Can you believe it? A Yankees fan and Red Sox fan getting along—amazing!) Also Bill Carle, head of the SABR Bio Committee and Richard Malatzky. Thanks also go out to Wesley Fricks, curator of the Ty Cobb Museum and to Cecelia Tan, a great writer and true Yankees fan living in the heart of Red Sox Nation. Also the great Bill Deane!

Also special thanks to my agent, Kathi Paton. To my two buddies at the New York Post, Mike Vaccaro and his Post Compadre Kevin Kernan. So when do we all go to dinner?

I am eternally grateful to the various physicians I have been in contact with over the past 20 years, with extra special thanks going out to Dr. Jeremy Rothfleisch, MD; Dr. Lewis Levine, MD; and Richard DiCanio, RN, for their help with medical terminology and diagnosis. Their vast knowledge and experience was of the utmost help to me in clearing up several medical mysteries.

Also special thanks goes out to my buddy, Brian Van Horn, who helped out with his huge collection of vintage baseball cards. Also the staffs of the East Brunswick Public Library and the New Brunswick Public Library.

Also thanks to the caretakers, office workers, and security people of the cemeteries that I’ve visited over the past 25 years. Lastly, thanks to my neighbor Bob and his uncle, who helped send some wonderful information my way regarding Snuffy Stirnweiss.

Thank you to the Bear Paw Winery and the 7th Inning Stretch of Cooperstown, New York, for making my final research trip in October 2005 a most pleasant experience!

—Frank Russo

I’d like to thank Nicholas DiGiovanni, talented author and colleague, whose sage advice was instrumental in getting this book published. I would also like to thank my wife, Angie, whose professional editing skills and sound judgement helped keep the content sharp and the tone consistent.

—Gene Racz

Introduction

There’s a hard bite in the chill wind gusting across the open expanse of St. Peter’s Cemetery in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It’s late February, and Frank Russo’s black leather jacket is not getting the job done, but he’s too absorbed in his search to notice. Head down, off in a familiar corner, he’s foraging through the fallen leaves for the modest headstone of John Pa Harkins—city native who once pitched for the old Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers. He died of a heart attack in 1940.

It’s right here somewhere, said Russo, never more sure of himself on a grave hunt in his life. The former disc jockey and member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) has cataloged hundreds and hundreds of deceased ballplayers in various categories and stories and put them on his website, thedeadballera.com.

Harkins was Russo’s first because his final resting place is a short infield’s throw from the Russo family plots. Tending them as a young boy with his father, he remembers being asked to salute an adjacent grave of a soldier who fell during World War I.

We didn’t know him, it’s just that my father was a veteran and it was a basic sign of respect, said Russo. A seminal experience perhaps, recognizing and honoring the dead. It’s something he would later turn into a hobby bordering on the obsessive—not with veterans, but with big leaguers.

Russo has a hard time himself explaining his passion for something that some would consider macabre. It has more to do with research than fetish. To him it’s all about history—about getting a record or setting one straight.

As a member of SABR, he has a categorical mind that’s also very much interested in the Civil War. His scholarly streak and burning curiosity drive him to dig deeper than simply names and dates.

Forgive the metaphor.

You look at an obit, or a grave site, and your life gets summed up in one line—born here and died there. There’s got to be more, said Russo. "The hardest thing about dying, I think, is not knowing that you will die but knowing that 100 years after you die no one will know that you even existed.

A lot of people don’t understand what I do. But it’s simply saying, ‘I remember.’

—Gene Racz

What a Way to Go

Flat-out bad luck or god-awful poor judgment. Those are the two major reasons most of the folks in this chapter met their demise.

Take, for example, minor leaguer James Phelps, who made a running catch during a game in Louisiana in 1909 and was bitten by a poisonous snake in the outfield. He finished the game and then died.

Then there’s veteran Los Angeles Angels’ catcher Gus Sandberg, who made his last earthly decision in 1930 when he decided to light a match to see how much gas was left in the tank of a car.

And how about retired New York Yankee George Snuffy Stirnweiss, father of six, who drowned in the Raritan Bay when his New York–bound train plunged into the water after the train’s motorman suffered a heart attack?

Car accidents, blood poisoning, falling out of a window—there are plenty of ways to go. Interestingly, there’s been only one fatality on the field in the history of major league baseball. That’s when Yankees pitcher Carl Mays beaned Ray Chapman at the Polo Grounds in August of 1920.

The amateurs and minor leagues are a different story, with numerous accounts through the years of players and spectators alike getting killed by thrown balls and swung bats. At five ounces of wrapped rubber, string, and horsehide, the