Print
E-mail
Comment
Rate
Harrison quite a pitcher in his day
 |
| Gene Harrison is pictured during his playing days in Baytown. |
By WANDA ORTON, Special to The Rockport Pilot
Editor's note: The following story first appeared in The Baytown Sun. Gene Harrison grew up in the Baytown area. He and his wife, Debbie, now reside in Fulton
To a skinny kid from Highlands in the 1940s, those guys playing fast-pitch softball were his heroes.
Gene Harrison was that skinny kid, a wannabe athlete and former polio victim who in his adult years would be fast-pitching in tournaments far and near, bringing home some 60 trophies.
Harrison remembered his boyhood role models, local players like Johnny Spurgeon, Webster Brinkley, Hap Marshall, Bob Tucker and Johnny Johnson.
“They all motivated me to become a fast-pitch softball pitcher,” he said. “I was fortunate enough to eventually play with some of the best teams in Texas. What great friends I made over the years while playing all over Texas, Louisiana, and a few times in California. The long road led me through two state championships, one second place and one fourth place. My pinnacle was playing in the nationals in California in 1982.”
Harrison traced his formative years to Highlands Elementary where any “new kid on the block” had to learn to be tough to survive. A transfer student from Baytown Elementary, Harrison was thrust into a different world in Highlands.
“Highlands in 1947 was a farming community - totally unlike Baytown,” he said. “Rice farming ... fig farms ... shell roads. Everyone had cattle, hogs, chickens and gardens. And new guys in the fourth grade got beat up, mostly from classmates who wanted to see how tough the new guy was.
“Then came the games. Kickball. Played exactly like softball except that you kicked a soccer ball that was rolled to home plate by the pitcher. Kick that ball and run forever!”
One day the boys decided to play softball, a game foreign to the new kid from old Baytown.
“So, here comes my turn to bat against Buzzy Byers. Buzzy was mature beyond my years immeasurably. When he pitched that ball past me for three strikes I thought my head would never stop spinning. That was my beginning. I was a frail, undeveloped, polio-recovering fourth grader in a strange, new environment.”
But Harrison learned to love all of his classmates at Highlands Elementary and, to this day, treasures his memories of that phase in his childhood.
Harrison enjoyed his years at Baytown Junior High as well. “The years at good old BJH were so good for my physical development. I was tall, but, oh, so thin. I could hide behind a willow sapling in a 20-mph wind. The teachers were so good. I did not realize this until years later.
“Our coaches were Don Gibson and Harold Barfield. They are so very responsible for getting me interested in anything athletic. I was not very good at anything in particular at that stage of my life, being too small and undeveloped. Maturity had not even approached the horizon.
“When I left BJH and moved into the surreal and majestic atmosphere of the great Robert E. Lee High School, I actually thought I was in heaven. New friends, great teachers and an unmatched legacy in sports, especially football.
“I made an unsuccessful attempt to play baseball, but family economics and lack of talent and physical development ended that. I did manage to make the Senior Summer League All-Star team during the year prior to my last year at REL.”
Practice zone
Although he had no idea he would ever play fast-pitch softball, Harrison, starting at the age of 12, practiced constantly. Using broken pieces of sheet rock, Harrison would mark off a strike zone on the back of the family's tin barn in Highlands and he would pitch to that target over and over.
By the time he graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in 1955, matters other than sports occupied Harrison's mind. He attended Lee College, joined the National Guard, and settled into his first real job at the Highlands Post Office.
He walked a seven-mile route, delivering mail six days a week.
“No softball during those years,” he said. After more than three years of walking, Harrison drove a route for three more years. Harrison later worked for a brief time at United Rubber in Baytown and then spent more than 35 years with DuPont in La Porte.
His initial experience in fast-pitch softball was with a team in a league in Baytown at Roseland Park. “I knew nothing about rules, regulations, or anything else about pitching,” he said. “I just knew how to deliver the ball to the plate or at least in the vicinity of the plate. I knew one pitch and only one pitch. Just throw it underhand as hard as you could. That pitch would break from right to left going from the pitcher to the catcher.
“My brother Tommy was my catcher at that time. Being left-handed, he wore his glove on his right hand. That pitch would break right into his thin glove at the only speed that I knew - wild and fast! Tommy's right hand may still be hurting today.
“As I recall, we only lost one game in that league. That loss was to the great Baytown Hawks.”
The turning point for Harrison came one day in 1969 when a friend needed a pitcher for his team in a fast-pitch softball tournament in Liberty.
They won.
“This was my very first trophy for anything,” Harrison said. “It's a small thing about three inches high. I still have it.”
The players talked him into joining their team. “We won almost every tournament we played - in Liberty, Cleveland, Shepherd, Tarkington Prairie, Dayton - and eventually decided we needed more challenges. Leagues and tournaments in the big city of Houston seemed to be the next step up for our very young country-boy team. We managed to be competitive with the big-name teams. This was in the early 1970s.
“Our Highlands team members were Larry Casey, J.E. ‘Jaybird' Bird, Danny James, Ken Rupp, Mike Henderson, Glen Adams, Bill Morisak, Joe Twardowski, R.C. Jannise and a few others that time has removed from my memory.
“After so many years with several different teams, I had learned to be able to throw strikes as needed. I eventually reached the point where I could put the ball where I wanted with each pitch. If I walked any batter, it was intentional. However, I still had not reached the perfection that I wanted. After a lot of thought, I decided to try to pitch harder. Faster. I had learned how to deliver about 12 different pitches, including four change-ups. That was the start of my most successful years - all in the Houston area.
“Then the better teams started calling. The Texas City Bucks came next. We won the 1978 Class A state championship. I had an injury so I didn't get to play very much in that tournament.
“Most of the teams in the Houston area were very competitive but we were all friends. One of my friends who was a pitcher for a rival team was Sam Cooper. A team had approached Sam from Caldwell to pitch for them in the state tournament in San Angelo. Sam was already committed to play for another team so he told Caldwell's manager to contact me.
“I helped to pitch the Caldwell Merchants to a fourth-place finish in the state tournament. That was another step up for me. I am so proud of that team. In that tournament we beat Sam and his team as we progressed through the bracket. I pitched that game.”
California dreamin'
For Harrison, one of the highlights of playing fast-pitch softball was pitching in a tournament at Long Beach, CA.
Nacho Hernandez of Houston, who sponsored and managed a mostly Hispanic team called the Houston Nine, called him late one night in 1982 and asked him to pitch for his team in the July 4 weekend tournament at Long Beach. Harrison pitched against a team called the Vista Bombers and won. The Vista team had finished fourth in the nationals the previous year.
“I played from March through October for many years. At peak season, I was off to somewhere in Texas, Louisiana, or California almost every weekend.
“Some of the teams that I played for were Highlands, Cleveland, Anahuac, Dayton, Matagorda, Port Lavaca, Bryan, Caldwell, College Station, Dime Box, Texas City, Baytown, South Houston the Alabama/Coushatta Indians on their reservation and a multitude of Houston and Pasadena teams. One year I pitched for eight different teams on various weekends.
“Softball life was a bit hectic in 1982. As time wound down to late season playoffs, I was getting worn out from so much activity. However, I had to respond to a call from another friend who asked me to go and pitch for his team in the nationals in Redding, CA. This was Wayne Abke's Dime Box team.
“Somewhere along the way in the early 1980s, I got involved with two competing teams. I was splitting time trying to play for both. These two teams were national championship caliber - Buster Haack Realty in Hempstead and Gourmet Foods of Houston based in Cypress.”
Harrison pitched Buster's team to a second-place finish in a state tournament in Brenham.
“Buster's team was playing in a league in Brenham one summer. He would call me and tell me the game time. I would drive straight from work at DuPont to Hempstead with my uniform and equipment to a steak dinner waiting on Buster's table. Then he would drive me to Brenham to pitch a league game for him. I never lost a game for him in that league. After the game, he would drive me back to Hempstead and then I would drive home with arrival about 2 a.m. Then up at 4:30 a.m. to go to work. I did that for an entire summer once or twice a week, and then tournaments on the weekends. I was a very busy guy.
“One year I pitched in about 200 games. Seventy or so that I started and the rest in relief. At the end of that year I was completely worn out. A hard lesson learned.”
As time went by, Harrison became involved in Old Timer teams. “You had to be over 50 to play. Rules were slightly different, but basics are the same.”
After resting a year because of an arm injury, Harrison returned to help pitch one of the Houston teams to the Old Timers State Championship in San Antonio.
“Then came my old buddies from the Texas City Bucks. We played for two or three years as Old Timers. We won a lot and lost very few. That team is embedded in my mind forever, just as is my Highlands team. Next in line in my mind would have to be the Caldwell team. Even so, all of the teams that I played for are very special.
“The friends that I have made over the years through softball are worth all of the effort, expense, pain, loss of sleep, and all of the exhilaration and heartbreak that I have experienced.
“I have seen players run full speed into fences to catch a fly ball ... dive headlong into a base to help their team ... play into the wee hours of the night in extra inning games - 12- and 15-inning games ... a home run at 1 a.m. in Matagorda to win a 1 to 0 game, and then have to come back the next morning at 7 a.m. for the next game. I have seen my team stand behind me and eventually win as I had to pitch 12 inning games more than once.
“We have played in the rain. We have played in 109-degree heat. We have played before 5,000 fans in Long Beach.
“All of these heroic ball players are/were amateurs. They all had jobs that they had to report to afterward. They all had talent and dedication.”
Harrison and his wife, Debbie, live in Fulton, their retirement city of choice. It's near the water, which they love, and they enjoy being active in the Rockport-Fulton Area Chamber of Commerce.
To a skinny kid from Highlands in the 1940s, those guys playing fast-pitch softball were his heroes.
Gene Harrison was that skinny kid, a wannabe athlete and former polio victim who in his adult years would be fast-pitching in tournaments far and near, bringing home some 60 trophies.
Harrison remembered his boyhood role models, local players like Johnny Spurgeon, Webster Brinkley, Hap Marshall, Bob Tucker and Johnny Johnson.
“They all motivated me to become a fast-pitch softball pitcher,” he said. “I was fortunate enough to eventually play with some of the best teams in Texas. What great friends I made over the years while playing all over Texas, Louisiana, and a few times in California. The long road led me through two state championships, one second place and one fourth place. My pinnacle was playing in the nationals in California in 1982.”
Harrison traced his formative years to Highlands Elementary where any “new kid on the block” had to learn to be tough to survive. A transfer student from Baytown Elementary, Harrison was thrust into a different world in Highlands.
“Highlands in 1947 was a farming community - totally unlike Baytown,” he said. “Rice farming ... fig farms ... shell roads. Everyone had cattle, hogs, chickens and gardens. And new guys in the fourth grade got beat up, mostly from classmates who wanted to see how tough the new guy was.
“Then came the games. Kickball. Played exactly like softball except that you kicked a soccer ball that was rolled to home plate by the pitcher. Kick that ball and run forever!”
One day the boys decided to play softball, a game foreign to the new kid from old Baytown.
“So, here comes my turn to bat against Buzzy Byers. Buzzy was mature beyond my years immeasurably. When he pitched that ball past me for three strikes I thought my head would never stop spinning. That was my beginning. I was a frail, undeveloped, polio-recovering fourth grader in a strange, new environment.”
But Harrison learned to love all of his classmates at Highlands Elementary and, to this day, treasures his memories of that phase in his childhood.
Harrison enjoyed his years at Baytown Junior High as well. “The years at good old BJH were so good for my physical development. I was tall, but, oh, so thin. I could hide behind a willow sapling in a 20-mph wind. The teachers were so good. I did not realize this until years later.
“Our coaches were Don Gibson and Harold Barfield. They are so very responsible for getting me interested in anything athletic. I was not very good at anything in particular at that stage of my life, being too small and undeveloped. Maturity had not even approached the horizon.
“When I left BJH and moved into the surreal and majestic atmosphere of the great Robert E. Lee High School, I actually thought I was in heaven. New friends, great teachers and an unmatched legacy in sports, especially football.
“I made an unsuccessful attempt to play baseball, but family economics and lack of talent and physical development ended that. I did manage to make the Senior Summer League All-Star team during the year prior to my last year at REL.”
Practice zone
Although he had no idea he would ever play fast-pitch softball, Harrison, starting at the age of 12, practiced constantly. Using broken pieces of sheet rock, Harrison would mark off a strike zone on the back of the family's tin barn in Highlands and he would pitch to that target over and over.
By the time he graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in 1955, matters other than sports occupied Harrison's mind. He attended Lee College, joined the National Guard, and settled into his first real job at the Highlands Post Office.
He walked a seven-mile route, delivering mail six days a week.
“No softball during those years,” he said. After more than three years of walking, Harrison drove a route for three more years. Harrison later worked for a brief time at United Rubber in Baytown and then spent more than 35 years with DuPont in La Porte.
His initial experience in fast-pitch softball was with a team in a league in Baytown at Roseland Park. “I knew nothing about rules, regulations, or anything else about pitching,” he said. “I just knew how to deliver the ball to the plate or at least in the vicinity of the plate. I knew one pitch and only one pitch. Just throw it underhand as hard as you could. That pitch would break from right to left going from the pitcher to the catcher.
“My brother Tommy was my catcher at that time. Being left-handed, he wore his glove on his right hand. That pitch would break right into his thin glove at the only speed that I knew - wild and fast! Tommy's right hand may still be hurting today.
“As I recall, we only lost one game in that league. That loss was to the great Baytown Hawks.”
The turning point for Harrison came one day in 1969 when a friend needed a pitcher for his team in a fast-pitch softball tournament in Liberty.
They won.
“This was my very first trophy for anything,” Harrison said. “It's a small thing about three inches high. I still have it.”
The players talked him into joining their team. “We won almost every tournament we played - in Liberty, Cleveland, Shepherd, Tarkington Prairie, Dayton - and eventually decided we needed more challenges. Leagues and tournaments in the big city of Houston seemed to be the next step up for our very young country-boy team. We managed to be competitive with the big-name teams. This was in the early 1970s.
“Our Highlands team members were Larry Casey, J.E. ‘Jaybird' Bird, Danny James, Ken Rupp, Mike Henderson, Glen Adams, Bill Morisak, Joe Twardowski, R.C. Jannise and a few others that time has removed from my memory.
“After so many years with several different teams, I had learned to be able to throw strikes as needed. I eventually reached the point where I could put the ball where I wanted with each pitch. If I walked any batter, it was intentional. However, I still had not reached the perfection that I wanted. After a lot of thought, I decided to try to pitch harder. Faster. I had learned how to deliver about 12 different pitches, including four change-ups. That was the start of my most successful years - all in the Houston area.
“Then the better teams started calling. The Texas City Bucks came next. We won the 1978 Class A state championship. I had an injury so I didn't get to play very much in that tournament.
“Most of the teams in the Houston area were very competitive but we were all friends. One of my friends who was a pitcher for a rival team was Sam Cooper. A team had approached Sam from Caldwell to pitch for them in the state tournament in San Angelo. Sam was already committed to play for another team so he told Caldwell's manager to contact me.
“I helped to pitch the Caldwell Merchants to a fourth-place finish in the state tournament. That was another step up for me. I am so proud of that team. In that tournament we beat Sam and his team as we progressed through the bracket. I pitched that game.”
California dreamin'
For Harrison, one of the highlights of playing fast-pitch softball was pitching in a tournament at Long Beach, CA.
Nacho Hernandez of Houston, who sponsored and managed a mostly Hispanic team called the Houston Nine, called him late one night in 1982 and asked him to pitch for his team in the July 4 weekend tournament at Long Beach. Harrison pitched against a team called the Vista Bombers and won. The Vista team had finished fourth in the nationals the previous year.
“I played from March through October for many years. At peak season, I was off to somewhere in Texas, Louisiana, or California almost every weekend.
“Some of the teams that I played for were Highlands, Cleveland, Anahuac, Dayton, Matagorda, Port Lavaca, Bryan, Caldwell, College Station, Dime Box, Texas City, Baytown, South Houston the Alabama/Coushatta Indians on their reservation and a multitude of Houston and Pasadena teams. One year I pitched for eight different teams on various weekends.
“Softball life was a bit hectic in 1982. As time wound down to late season playoffs, I was getting worn out from so much activity. However, I had to respond to a call from another friend who asked me to go and pitch for his team in the nationals in Redding, CA. This was Wayne Abke's Dime Box team.
“Somewhere along the way in the early 1980s, I got involved with two competing teams. I was splitting time trying to play for both. These two teams were national championship caliber - Buster Haack Realty in Hempstead and Gourmet Foods of Houston based in Cypress.”
Harrison pitched Buster's team to a second-place finish in a state tournament in Brenham.
“Buster's team was playing in a league in Brenham one summer. He would call me and tell me the game time. I would drive straight from work at DuPont to Hempstead with my uniform and equipment to a steak dinner waiting on Buster's table. Then he would drive me to Brenham to pitch a league game for him. I never lost a game for him in that league. After the game, he would drive me back to Hempstead and then I would drive home with arrival about 2 a.m. Then up at 4:30 a.m. to go to work. I did that for an entire summer once or twice a week, and then tournaments on the weekends. I was a very busy guy.
“One year I pitched in about 200 games. Seventy or so that I started and the rest in relief. At the end of that year I was completely worn out. A hard lesson learned.”
As time went by, Harrison became involved in Old Timer teams. “You had to be over 50 to play. Rules were slightly different, but basics are the same.”
After resting a year because of an arm injury, Harrison returned to help pitch one of the Houston teams to the Old Timers State Championship in San Antonio.
“Then came my old buddies from the Texas City Bucks. We played for two or three years as Old Timers. We won a lot and lost very few. That team is embedded in my mind forever, just as is my Highlands team. Next in line in my mind would have to be the Caldwell team. Even so, all of the teams that I played for are very special.
“The friends that I have made over the years through softball are worth all of the effort, expense, pain, loss of sleep, and all of the exhilaration and heartbreak that I have experienced.
“I have seen players run full speed into fences to catch a fly ball ... dive headlong into a base to help their team ... play into the wee hours of the night in extra inning games - 12- and 15-inning games ... a home run at 1 a.m. in Matagorda to win a 1 to 0 game, and then have to come back the next morning at 7 a.m. for the next game. I have seen my team stand behind me and eventually win as I had to pitch 12 inning games more than once.
“We have played in the rain. We have played in 109-degree heat. We have played before 5,000 fans in Long Beach.
“All of these heroic ball players are/were amateurs. They all had jobs that they had to report to afterward. They all had talent and dedication.”
Harrison and his wife, Debbie, live in Fulton, their retirement city of choice. It's near the water, which they love, and they enjoy being active in the Rockport-Fulton Area Chamber of Commerce.
 |
||
| Kreneck to speak about surveyors |
Article Rating
Reader Comments
The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of rockportpilot.com.
Submit a Comment
We encourage your feedback and dialog, all comments will be reviewed by our Web staff before appearing on the Web site.
ZAGDA wrote on Feb 14, 2009 3:53 PM:
Instead of presenting this to the scientific world in a peer reviewed journal, these guys publish it in this book in an attempt to sway public opinion. I could go on as many of the statements in this article are misleading, or blatantly ludicrous. Suffice it to say, it looks to me like this book is much more about influencing public opinion than any scientific review of whether human activity is causing climate change.
It is sad some people will believe this as fact. "