It Happened in Cambridge

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The Galt Terriers opened the 1950 Senior Intercounty baseball season on Saturday, May 13, with less fanfare than when they began their 1949 campaign.

The Galts of ‘49 were supposed to win it all. By common consensus, the ‘49 Terriers had the best team in the league. Even the Brantford players, who beat Galt in the playoffs to win the Intercounty title, thought Galt was better.

So, for Galt fans, that long, cold winter of 1950 was hard to swallow. Hard, because there was no Intercounty championship in town when everyone thought there should have been.

Still, the crowd that came out on that cool, dreary day to open the 1950 season was 3,500 strong. That was more than a thousand fewer than the home opener in ‘49, but it was enough to show that baseball fans in Galt were willing to give Terrier president Gus Murray and his import-studded Terriers the benefit of the doubt.

Home run king Tex Kaiser, a Preston native who played pro hockey in the winters, drove all night from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to make it in time for the game. He was in Indiana with the Kitchener Legionnaires for the Sandlot World Series.

Led by ‘Jumbo’ Jim Bagby, a former major-league pitcher for Boston and Cleveland, the Galts won 10-2.

Less familiar was outfielder Bill Horne, a bit of a mystery. Nobody had ever heard of him, though word had it that Murray had brought him up from St. Louis.

Galtonians knew him as a young, good-looking player who always smiled.

He went 3-for-4 on opening day, immediately ingratiating himself with the fans, especially after his second-inning double set the stage for a three-run rally.

Later, the truth came out: Bill Horne was Rogers Hornsby’s second son.

Local fans knew the Hornsby name. Rogers, elected to the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown in 1942, was perhaps the greatest right-handed hitter the game has known.

His .424 average (in 1924) is a record that still stands, and his lifetime .358 average over 23 seasons is second only to Ty Cobb’s.

“I had met his father in Baltimore (at the winter baseball meetings) the winter of 1950,” Terrier operator Murray said.

But the winter of 1949-50 did not bode well for Hornsby. A son by his first wife, Second Lieutenant Rogers Jr., was killed in a B-50 bomber crash near Savannah, Georgia.

The crash occurred on the evening of December 23, 1949; Hornsby learned of it when a wire-service reporter called him with the bad news.

Rogers had spent the preceding dozen years going from one baseball-related job to the next, always hoping to return to the majors.

His only other son, William Pennington Hornsby, several years younger than Rogers Jr., was born at St. John’s Hospital in St. Louis on June 2, 1925, to Rogers and Mary Jeannette Pennington, Hornsby’s second wife.

Just days earlier, Rogers, then hitting .401, had been named playing manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. At season’s end he would be voted the league’s most valuable player.

Baby William, named for Rogers deceased older brother, was destined to be the only child Mary Jeannette and Rogers would ever have together. He took on his mother’s oval face, dark eyes and complexion, but he had his father’s characteristic dimples.

The next season, 1926, Hornsby brought a World Series title to St. Louis. His managing style was simple: “Managing a ballclub is mainly using common sense,” he said. When the Cardinals returned to St. Louis with the Series tied, a crowd gathered, waiting for the official pennant celebration. The mayor fought his way to Hornsby and his wife, presented the couple with a bouquet of roses, and was surrounded by well-wishers. Jeannette’s hat was knocked askew. The chaotic scene was frenzied and confusing. Separated from her husband and frightened, Mrs. Hornsby started to cry. So did little Billy, waiting in a nearby Lincoln with his nurse.

That October, shortly after the Cardinals won the Series, the Hornsbys travelled to Austin, Texas, for the funeral of Rogers’ mother, who was to be buried at the family cemetery in nearby Hornsby’s Bend.

Bill didn’t go to the cemetery, nor did his mother. On the way there, a cousin, Ernest Jarmon, who was driving the family in the procession of cars to the cemetery, suddenly stopped to avoid hitting the car ahead. Billy was thrown against the front windshield and had to be flown back to Austin to have three stitches sewn onto his forehead.

Rogers was on the road and away from Billy frequently as the youngster grew up. But baseball was Rogers Hornsby’s life; it always would be.

When Galt’s Gus Murray met him at the baseball meetings in 1950, he liked him. “He was a gentleman as far as I was concerned. He never drank or smoked, but he was weak for horses. He was a compulsive gambler.”

Though he never abandoned the horses, even for his family's welfare, he could make little Billy feel on top of the world at times.

Such was the case when Hornsby began wearing a numbered jersey – American Leaguers had begun the practice in 1929 and National Leaguers in 1933. One day, he suited up with an “11” on his back for no reason other than that it was Billy’s favourite number. “I don’t believe in it myself, “ he said, “but just to make him feel good I told him I would.”

By then (1934), Hornsby was the playing manager of the cross-town rival St. Louis Browns. When school was out that summer, Billy hung around Sportsman’s Park as the Browns’ batboy, wearing his father’s number with pride. He even joined the team on a midsummer road trip. For a young kid, life just didn’t get much better than that.

But trouble loomed on the home front. Tension between Rogers and Jeannette permeated the household; financial difficulties arose, and Rogers's job changes became almost annual.

In Charles Alexander’s recently published biography, Rogers Hornsby, he writes that Jeannette Hornsby began drinking around this time and started to put on weight. She even filed for divorce but Rogers persuaded her to withdraw the suit, though they eventually separated.

Still, Billy seemed to be doing well. At 16, and much to his father’s delight, Bill, now enrolled at Mexico Military Academy in Missouri, was emerging as a star athlete. But he would soon leave school and enlist in the Marine Corps, where he spent more than two years in the South Pacific during World War II and earned a Purple Heart.

Early in 1946, when Bill Hornsby, now 19, received his discharge, he travelled to Chicago to see his father. At 6’ 1” and 194 lbs., and being the son of baseball’s purest hitter, he had every reason to believe a professional career awaited him, though, as he told reporters, he knew he couldn’t hit like his famous father.

From Chicago he would go home to St. Louis to see his mother, then rejoin his dad to help out with the Daily News baseball school in Chicago.

Shortly afterward, the White Sox hired Rogers Hornsby to go to Pasadena and work with their hitters during spring training. Bill went too, and together they saw Rogers Hornsby Jr., the offspring of Rogers’ first marriage, an engineer who had enlisted in the Army Air Corps and flown 50 missions overseas during World War II as a navigator.

As Alexander notes, it was the first and only meeting between the two half-brothers.

Later that spring back in Chicago, a Boston Red Sox scout signed Bill to a minor-league contract with Lynn, Mass., of the Class B New England League.

But Bill couldn’t keep pace at that level and was sent to the Red Sox farm club at Oneonta, N.Y., in the Canadian-American League.

“There he proved himself a capable infielder who hit with occasional power,” writes Alexander, “but he had trouble with anything but a straight fastball.”

The next season, 1947, he returned to Lynn playing Class B.

When Rogers took a job managing the Beaumont, Texas Class AA team in 1950, Bill followed and tried out with about 25 other young hopefuls. One of those players described Bill as “a slick fielder who couldn’t hit a lick.”

It was ironic that hitting was Bill’s only weakness, while it was his father’s greatest strength.

Weeks later, after Murray and Rogers talked over the telephone, Bill was on his way to Galt, Ontario. The money was right; besides, the league, generally rated Class A, was enjoying a late renaissance. Crowds of four or five thousand were not uncommon.

It wasn’t a terribly productive summer at the plate for Hornsby (or Horne, as he was initially known), who struggled with a mid-.200 average. But he was good in the field.

And he was active off the field, too. Murray remembers him as a good-looking young man with a couple of girlfriends in Galt that summer.

“He was a ladies’ man,” Murray said. “One of his girlfriends was an usherette at the park.”

Alexander calls him a journeyman player, and Murray agrees, though he says Bill got his fair share of hits in 1950. “He was tall, clean-cut, and fussy about his uniforms and shoes, and he was a versatile player.”

Wray Upper, who was a 17-year-old junior on call-up from the Galt Pups, said Hornsby was a capable player. “He was a pretty fair ballplayer,” he said. “His fielding was good, and he had a good arm.”

Upper recalled that Hornsby liked his uniform just right. “Everything had to be just spotless. When he went out onto the field, he looked like he was going to church; his uniform was spotless, and he dressed the same way off the field. He was a good-looking man and always dressed well.”

Bill Hornsby was 24 that winter of 1950 and a free agent. He grew up with baseball; he could remember being around ballparks from his earliest days.

In Galt’s 10-2 opening-day win at Dickson Park, Hornsby hit three, including a second-inning double that set the stage for a three-run rally. He also drove in a run and stole two bases.

Hornsby flashed brilliance that summer. On June 22, he hit a grand slam deep into left field in a 7-6 loss to the visiting Stratford Nationals.

On June 26, Hornsby went 2-for-3 at the plate as former Brooklyn Dodger star Goody Rosen, donning his uniform for the first time that season, hit a home run. But still the Terriers lost, this time 4-1 to Waterloo.

In a 13-2 Galt Terrier win over St. Thomas, Hornsby was hit twice by pitched balls. After the second hit, he returned to the Galt dugout and said, “Those guys must think I’m a pin cushion.”

Bill Hornsby left Galt at season’s end and returned to St. Louis. He stayed in baseball until 1954, when he finally quit after breaking his hand. Son Brad was born in 1956 and a daughter, Terry, was born a year later.

Bill worked for the Falstaff Beer Company in St. Louis, something his father, Rogers, a lifelong abstainer, detested, until 1969. He then took a job with a beer distributor in Jackson, Tenn.

In 1972, he opened his own Stroh’s distributorship in Nashville and stayed there until 1984, when he sold out to the local Coors Distributor.

He and his family had a running joke about not revealing his age. “He was always 39 after he hit that age,” said Terry. He was a little sensitive about that. We always joked about it with him, ‘You’re still 39’.”

But Bill took it all in stride. He was good-natured about it, as he was about most things.

That was the case when young Brad and Terry, in mischievous moods, came up with nicknames for their dad. “One of the nicknames he liked,” said Terry, “until he heard the song, Troglodyte. Then he found out it meant Cave Man.”

He died of a stroke in late June of 1984 at age 59. It happened unexpectedly. He was driving his vehicle when he felt very ill. He pulled over to the side of the road. Someone approached. They took him to the hospital in Nashville, and then transferred him to a Veterans Administration Hospital, where he lingered for 48 hours before dying.

His wife, Vida Kampe, born Jan. 4, 1929, in St. Louis, died a couple of years later.

“He was a very outgoing, friendly individual,” said Brad, a lawyer living in Murfreesboro. Terry, now a mother of two, remembers him smiling all the time. “He had a very good personality and was well liked.”

Just as Rogers had been away from home for long periods when Bill was young, Bill was also frequently away during Brad’s formative years.

“I did not play ball,” said Brad. “Back then everyone expected you to be great because of my grandfather. So I wrestled, ran track, and played football.”

Bill told his daughter, Terry, that he had a lot of pressure to play ball. “He wasn’t given an option of not playing ball.” Perhaps because of that, he didn’t pressure his son to play ball. “He never pushed me,” said Brad, now a father of four, “although he wanted me to play sports.”

Rogers Hornsby died in 1963, when Brad was seven. “At that time he was just my grandad. He was living in Chicago and would come down once or twice a year.” One time, he brought a sterling silver bat that the baseball writers of New York had presented to him early in 1963, retroactively recognizing him as the National League’s most valuable player for 1924. He left it with Brad and Terry. “We would play with it around the house,” said Brad.

“We used to beat each other over the head with that silver bat,” said Terry.

They also played ball in the backyard with several autographed bats Rogers brought them, as well as a baseball he and Dizzy Dean signed.

Terry still has that ball, which her father also signed.

Eventually Bill sold the silver bat for $10,000.

Terry recalls her grandfather visiting them at Christmas, often bringing lots of pictures.

“And I remember going up to Chicago to visit him, and we went to the racetrack. I had no idea how famous he was. To me, he was just Grandpa.”

Bill took his family to Cooperstown to see where their grandfather was enshrined as one of the game’s all-time greats. “I remember seeing the plaque,” said Terry. “Dad was very proud of his father, and he wanted to make sure my brother and I went up there to see Cooperstown.”

Although many of their grandfather's mementos are gone, Brad and Terry still hold on to a few. To this day, Brad treasures an 18k gold watch inscribed, “To Rogers, from Joe DiMaggio.”

In most respects, Bill Hornsby and his family were the typical American family, comfortably middle-class, with Mrs. Hornsby a stay-at-home mom.

“I was given every benefit,” said Brad. So was Terry, who, like her brother, wasn’t pressured to play sports.

Today, Terry's daughters, Jessica, 11, and Lauren, 9, both play softball.

“He was a very good father,” she said. “We knew our limits and never crossed over. My brother and I never got into trouble. We respected both him and Mom so much.”

Rogers Hornsby gave his grandchildren 30 autographed Louisville Slugger bats when they were young, and today Terry laments that not one has survived. “We used them all and they were lost over time. If we knew then what we know now, we would have held on to them. But Grandpa gave them to us to use.”

Today neither Brad nor Terry has their father’s dimples, the ones Rogers himself passed down, but some of their children do.

And to the question of how good a ball player their father was, this description came. Brad was in St. Louis one time, and an elderly man introduced himself. He had umpired games involving Bill Hornsby. “He told me he had good speed and a good glove, and he could hit the ball pretty well, but he couldn’t hit a curveball.” Perhaps if he could, he too would have made it to the majors.

Bill Hornsby is buried in the veterans’ cemetery in Madison, Tenn.