by Henry K. Workman
Editor’s note: The Workman and Temple family’s history with baseball goes back to at least the 1860s, when William Workman Temple, grandson of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, played the sport while attending Santa Clara College (now the University of Santa Clara) in northern California. As this Major League Baseball season opened this week with the World Series-champion Los Angeles Dodgers sweeping the Chicago Cubs in two games at Tokyo, we present the text of a speech given by Temple’s cousin, Henry K. Workman (1926-2020), concerning “Baseball in Southern California, 1900-1950,” including memories of his career and that of his father, Thomas E. Workman, descendants of William Workman’s brother, David, and his wife Nancy Hook. Thanks to Henry’s grandson, Andrew, for providing the document.
I’m going to cover 50 years of Southern California baseball, 1900-1950, and I’m going to do it through the eyes of my father and his friends, who were first attracted to baseball before the turn of the century; then through my own experience with baseball from the mid-30’s to 1950.
My dad was nine years old at the turn of the century. His cousin and best friend, Art Shafer, was about a year older. They both became very good baseball players. So did Zeb Terry, a lifetime friend and teammate of my dad. I often listened to dad, Art Shafer and Zeb Terry talk about their days in the game. So, I can tell you what baseball was like in their day and mine.
Dad and his friends started playing baseball anywhere they could find a level lot and there were plenty of them in those days. Actually, he started playing baseball on Boyle Avenue [in Boyle Heights, founded by the author’s grandfather, William H. Workman, along with Isaias W. Hellman and John Lazzarovich, 150 years ago in spring 1875] in front of his house, which was unpaved and pretty much empty of automobiles. There was no little league in those days. You played where and when you felt like it, and without adult supervision.
Dad and his friends probably first watched baseball being played at Fiesta Park, located between 12th Street on the north and Pico on the south and between Grand on the West and Hope on the east. Local high schools and colleges played on these grounds, along with the baseball winter leagues and regular season “professional leagues” from October 1897 through December 1900. Later, they would have watched and played at Chutes Park (also called Washington Gardens) which opened in 1900.
Dad started at St. Vincent’s College in 1904. He wasn’t a prodigy. It was the 7th grade and he was already 13. It was a combination middle school, high school and college. This put him in the center of Los Angeles baseball activity. St. Vincent’s was at the northwest corner of Washington and Grand, just across the street from a baseball park, Prager Park, on the northeast corner of Washington and Grand, and literally a stone’s throw from Chutes Park (which was approximately at the southeast corner of Washington and Grand). St. Vincent’s was surrounded by baseball parks. For an aspiring ballplayer it was perfect.
My father played a lot of baseball on the St. Vincent’s high school team, and was good enough to play a number of games with the college team while he was still in high school. He even made a road trip with the college team in 1909, his junior year in high school, to play Santa Clara, St. Mary’s [College of San Francisco, now in Moraga near Oakland] and Cal [University of California, Berkeley]. The Vincentian fathers weren’t too strict about who played on what team. If you were good enough at your position you played. In fact, dad always talked about Father Green, who played centerfield for the college club under the fictitious name of Verde.
Dad graduated from St. Vincent’s High School in 1910 (at 19 years of age). He couldn’t get into Stanford from St. Vincent’s, so he went to USC [University of Southern California] in the fall of 1910 and played on the 1911 USC baseball team. He transferred to Stanford in the fall of 1911 but couldn’t play baseball there in 1912 because of the transfer rules. He played at Stanford in 1913, 1914 and 1915. The Stanford captain in 1914 was Zeb Terry. Zeb was a lifelong friend, in fact, [he was] a pallbearer at my dad’s funeral in 1972. He went on to a seven-year professional career with the Cubs and [Pittsburgh] Pirates. In his final year, 1915, dad was not only captain of the team, but was honored by being named as a college All-American, the first at Stanford in any sport. He was almost 25.
Dad often recalled that none of his family paid any attention to his baseball activities, that this was just as well as they knew nothing about it and it would have taken hours to explain it to them. He received offers from John McGraw of the New York Giants and Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics. He actually signed a contract to play for the Giants at $350 a month but his father [William H.] was adamant that he not play professional baseball. Some players of those days were regarded as unsavory characters and not proper companions for the son of a prominent Angeleno family.
Our Southern California climate was a big factor in the development of baseball here. It was a year-round sport. John McGraw spent his winter vacations in Los Angeles. He loved the year-round warmth of Southern California. He loved to gamble at the race track. His arch rival, Frank Chance, the player-manager of the Cubs, who was the most famous man in baseball after McGraw, had a citrus ranch in Glendora. Chance, a Fresno native, spent his winters in Southern California. At the end of every season, he would return home to Southern California to his acres and acres of orange groves.
In addition to the considerable time he spent at the racetrack, McGraw kept himself in shape by playing catch and hitting balls around with local players. This allowed him to keep an eye out for talented prospects he might like to sign for the Giants.
Among the young Southern California ballplayers being watched by major league talent scouts were Fred Snodgrass of Ventura, Walter Johnson of Fullerton, Chief Meyers [from the Cahuilla Indian tribe] of Riverside, and Art Shafer, Zeb Terry and Tom Workman of Los Angeles. Snodgrass, Shafer and Workman played at St. Vincent’s.
Snodgrass, a catcher, joined the Giants in the spring of 1908. After Chief Meyers joined the Giants and became their regular catcher, Snodgrass was switched to centerfield where he was a big success [his drop of a flyball in the 1912 World Series, however, was his main legacy in the sport’s history.]
Walter Johnson is generally regarded as one of the best pitchers of all time. He first gained notice at Fullerton High School. On Sundays he played for a semi-pro club, the Olinda Oil Wells. In 1906 he signed a professional contract with a club in the Idaho State League. In the Spring of 1907 with that club he struck out 166 batters in 12 games, better than a batter and a half per inning. That July he signed with the Washington Senators where he spent a 21 year career and set all kinds of records.
Now I have to tell you about Art Shafer . . . because he was one of the best ballplayers ever that nobody remembers.
He was a grandson of Mathew Keller (Don Mateo) who owned Rancho Malibu Sequit. However, your heritage plus a dime won’t get you a cup of coffee in the baseball business, or any sport, where advancement is solely based on merit. Art graduated from St. Vincent’s High School in 1906 at the age of 17. He played at Santa Clara College in 1907 and 1908, where he was discovered by John McGraw. He played shortstop and third base for the Giants starting in 1909 and played in two World Series, 1912 and 1913. During the 1909-1910 winter season, at the invitation of Keio University, he went to Japan to teach baseball before reporting to the Giants for spring training in 1910. He was so well regarded there that in 1950 he was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. He was described by sportswriter Grantland Rice as giving promise of being one of the greatest infielders of all time. Rice said: “no ballplayer living has any finer future than Shafer provided the Giant shortstop cares to travel at top speed and battle for Wagner’s crown. He can hit, field, throw and run, all above par.” Shafer cared to travel at high speed alright but not in the sense Grantland Rice had in mind.
Shafer was a very handsome fellow. It was said that he got perfumed letters from many admiring ladies. In a 1941 article appearing in the Los Angeles Examiner, sportswriter E. V. Durling printed a letter he had received from a young matron in Manhattan in response to his mentioning Shafer in a column: “I have been happily married for the past 18 years and am the mother of two sweet kids, but when you mentioned Art Shafer of the New York Giants my heart went pitty patter because I used to have dates with that sweet boy.”
Whether because of the perfumed letters or whatever, Art’s Giant teammates affectionately named him “Tillie,” a name that stuck with him for the rest of his life, even among family and friends.
During the 1913 championship season, Tillie had cautioned McGraw that he would be quitting baseball at the end of that season. True to his word he refused to report for the 1914 season. McGraw offered $20,000. Christy Mathewson, the best pitcher in baseball at that time, was only getting $12,000. Shafer turned McGraw down. It is hard to understand why a boy of 23 turned away from what might have been one of baseball’s most glorious careers. (Some teammates: hard drinking, loud swearing, marginally literate.)
I probably got interested in baseball when I was eight or nine years old in the mid-30’s. I used to play catch with my dad but he didn’t try to force baseball on me. We had a large vacant lot adjacent to our house and it was a magnet for all the sports-minded boys in the neighborhood. After a few broken windows we built a backstop that gave our house some protection. Kids from miles around would come to play … touch football in the fall .. . baseball in the spring and summer. We rarely had enough players for a nine-boys-on-a-side baseball game. So we often played “one-old cat” or “over the line.” This was in the middle of the depression so one baseball would be used until it was lost. After the horsehide cover came off we’d wrap the remains in bicycle tape and play on. When bats broke we’d nail them together and tape over the nails. Often we would lose balls in the tall grass in the outfield so we’d pray to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost baseballs, to help us find it.
The nearest playground with real baseball diamonds was Rancho Park, just off Exposition, near La Brea. That was a long bike ride and we had to carry our brown bag lunches as well as our meager baseball equipment. There we would meet and play with kids from other neighborhoods. Unlike today, where it’s Little League, Pony League, Colt League, etc., all with adult supervision, the first level of baseball with some kind of coach was usually high school. I made varsity at Loyola High in my second year there, the spring of 1942. I didn’t play in the spring of ’43 because of a football injury. I played again in my senior year, the spring of 1944. Our center fielder then was Pete Fitzpatrick, a dear friend since high school days. Peter introduced the team to the art of tobacco chewing with disastrous results.
As I said, in the spring of my junior year I couldn’t play baseball, but early that summer, another Loyola teammate, George Hefner, introduced me to local semi-pro baseball. We played at Los Feliz playground (the intersection of Riverside Dr. and Los Feliz Boulevard) where they had two baseball diamonds [this is in part of Griffith Park]. I would drive or hitchhike because it was a long way from where I lived. I played there on Saturdays with a team called the Douglas Brothers where I met Rod Dedeaux, who also played on the team. On Sundays George and I played for the Arcadia Merchants, a team sponsored by Goodman & Sons, LA’s best baseball equipment supplier.
Getting to Arcadia was no cinch for me. Because of the war there was gas rationing. Sometimes my dad would take me and we’d pick up George . Sometimes, I would take a red car [Pacific Electric Railway streetcar] to Hefner’s house in Glendale and his dad would drive us the rest of the way. Because the Arcadia merchants were sponsored by a baseball equipment provider we had great uniforms, jackets and stuff. You couldn’t play during the high school season but you could play all summer and through the winter. In the winter, guys from professional teams would play, even a major leaguer or two. From about May of 1943 through July 1, 1944 when I went into the Navy, I played a lot of baseball.
This progression from sandlot to playgrounds to semi-pro was pretty typical throughout Southern California. Some local high schools, Fremont especially comes to mind, were real baseball factories. They were near large public playgrounds. The same kids would play summer and winter semi-pro ball as I did. I remember the Montebello Merchants and the Rosabelle Plumbers, among others.
Also, local baseball scouts had teams made up of kids they were on the trail of. I played for the Yankee Juniors in Norwalk and the Cincinnati Juniors in Highland Park. Lefty Phillips managed the Cincinnati Juniors. He later became the manager of the major league Angels. I have fond memories of all the major league scouts. I remember Dutch Reuther, Pat Patterson, Bobby Mattick, Sloppy Thurston, Rosie Gilhausen, Bill Essick, Babe Herman, Dan Crowley, and many others.
When I got out of the Navy, I went to USC in the spring of 1946. This hurt my dad’s feelings, he being a Stanford man, but he got over it because we were successful. I went there because I wanted to play for Rod Dedeaux as many did before and after me. In Dedeaux’s 45 years at USC his teams won a record 11 national championships, including five in a row from 1970-1974. Many of Dedeaux’s pupils graduated to the majors. Jim Murray [longtime sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times] once wrote that USC under Dedeaux was the greatest farm club in the history of the major leagues. However, the greatest success to come out of Dedeaux’s program did not play for USC or go to school there. In fact, he did not attend college at all. He was the bat boy and his name was George Anderson. Sparky [who went on to play for the Philadelphia Phillies and manage the Cincinnati Reds and Detroit Tigers, winning three World Series titles] served as bat boy for six years, until the late 1940’s.
At USC we played major league teams in spring training, including the [Chicago] White Sox, Cleveland [Indians, now Guardians] and Pittsburgh [Pirates]. We also played Pacific Coast League teams training in Southern California, including the [Los Angeles] Angels, Hollywood Stars, Portland Beavers and San Diego Padres.
In 1948, we won the league and went on to win the NCAA Championship, beating Yale 2 out of 3 in the finals. [Future president] George H. W. Bush was the Yale captain. I was the USC captain.
On graduation from USC I signed with the Yankees. I played six years in the Yankee farm system, briefly with the Yankees in 1950, and then decided I’d better learn a trade so I went to law school.
I now realize that my progression as a baseball player in the 30’s and 40’s was really no different than that followed by Art Shafer, Zeb Terry, my dad, and many other Southern California boys throughout the first half of the 20th century. For decades, California has produced more major league ballplayers than any other state. Southern California produced more than its share of California’s total. I enjoyed my baseball experience immensely. I wish I could do it again.