My Big Game 1957

I grew up in Lafayette, Indiana in the 1950s. It was a baseball town in those days. In 1949 a Little League team from Lafayette played in the first Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. A Class D minor league baseball team for the Boston Red Sox was based in Lafayette.

I had a passion for baseball. My older brother Warren was an outstanding pitcher on a Lafayette little league team in the spring of 1954.  I was 8 years old and loved to play catch with my him and tag along with him to team practices.  Somehow, I managed to make the team but sat on the bench for all 20 games, except for one at-bat in the last game when I hit a single.  Warren went on the make the little league all-star team and I wanted to follow in his footsteps.  

After that bench experience, I determined to work hard and improve my baseball skills so I could play in all the games. Once the winter faded in 1954, I started riding my bicycle all over Lafayette seeking out pickup baseball games with older kids. I also started a whiffle ball league with like-minded kids my age. Playing on my own and the little league team over the next two summers lifted my game.

By 1957 I had grown and was a pretty good little league pitcher and third baseman. My team was supported by a sports store called Deckers. Deckers competed with three other teams in the Boys American League, while the other side of town had four teams in the Boys National League.

Game attendance was always noisy, particularly for Deckers. The father of our best pitcher was a former Purdue University two-time All-American halfback. He sat right behind home plate and seemed to scream the whole game, mostly berating his son’s pitching, calling him a loser, and not being in the game mentally. No one ever challenged him. As teammates, we cringed at the criticism but said nothing. Later in junior high his son froze on his first football kickoff return and never played football again.

The local Lafayette Journal & Courier newspaper had a reporter regularly check our 20-season games, writing weekly articles about the games, including box scores and key game plays. My mother read the sports page every day and kept clippings of any reference to my play.

On August 10, the paper announced the batting order and lineups for the city championship of Boys Major League Baseball that evening between Deckers and the Boys National League champ Savings. The August 11 paper article described the game as very close, with Savings leading 2-1 going into the bottom of the last inning for Deckers’ last at-bat. The first two batters grounded out. The next two batters doubled and tripled, tying the score 2-2. I then came up to bat and the article read ” Pete Smith then became the ‘man of the hour’ as he rammed a double over the centerfielder’s head to score the winning run.” I remember feeling an intense elation as my teammates hugged me, yelling along with the crowd.

                      Lafayette Journal & Courier Article About My Championship Game, August 1957 

I consider Lafayette my hometown in large part because of my big game, and later games in summer leagues and high school. Baseball gave me identity, focus, and good memories during my socially clumsy junior high and high school days in Lafayette.  Looking back deeper, the double itself mattered for only a few moments.  What stayed with me was the lesson that improvement comes from effort.     

 

Pete Smith at Murdock Park, Lafayette, Indiana, 1957

My High School Senior Year 1963

          

As I think back now, my senior year became a turning point. Losing football forced me to discover strengths I did not know I possessed.

Senior Class President, Lafayette Jefferson High School Yearbook, 1963

(Pete Smith, Lower Right Photo, on Right)

As soon as school started in September 1963,  three senior football player friends called me to join them at one of their houses.  They said they wanted me to run for senior class president because they liked me and felt I was a leader.  The most likely winner was then a snobbish bookworm and I was a friend, a letterman athlete and they thought with jock support I could win.   There were 350 in my class.  I was good at sports but an introvert socially.  I agreed but then just watched my buddies promote me to my classmates.  I lost the election in a close race with me coming in second out of 4 candidates but learned there had been a malfunction in the voting machine.  The next day my civics teacher encouraged me to request another vote.  I got energized and involved, bringing the vote irregularity to an emergency student council meeting, and arguing persuasively, based on the teacher's support, for a revote, which was scheduled for the next day. That night at a local frozen custard high school hangout my long-time childhood friend and the candidate who finished third talked to me.   He told me he would tell his supporters to vote for me since he would lose anyway.   I agreed and won the election the next day.  The lesson learned is that the game (whether politics or sports) is played away from the ball.  

One of the football players named Mark Surface who talked me into running for class president came up to me mid-semester and asked if I could help him prepare for an American history test. He was failing history, and was challenged in other subjects.  I had refocused from football to student leadership and academics.  He came to my house and I showed him how I took class notes and regularly rewrote the notes including key points from assigned readings.  He thanked me as he told me he never took notes and only studied the night before tests.  After graduating from high school I met Mark while he was working as an electrician apprentice in the basement of building at Purdue University and mentioned he ought to consider college.

Dick Hadley and Mark Surface, High School Friends, Greg Smith and Me in 800 Hitt Street Living Room, 1962

I never recalled these incidents again until our class’s 50th-year class reunion.  I was praising Mark for his induction into the Indiana High School Football Hall of Fame for coaching wins in over 250 games.  He looked at me, put his arm around me, and said that our high school and other conversations were worth more than I will ever know in his life. That is one of the best memories I now have of my senior year.  

I was a member of a high school church group my senior year and once a year three of us were asked to give testimonies or Christian experiences in place of the Sunday sermon.  The minister asked me to do it so for my time I read a story I wrote about God’s hand in saving my dad’s life from life-threatening injuries in an auto accident a few years earlier.  Many people came up after the church service and praised me.  When I met my mom later, however, she was angry.  A lady had come up to her after the service and made a point of telling her a word I had mispronounced and the correct pronunciation.  Life lesson learned- praise and criticism often arrive together.

A few weeks later I submitted my church talk in my very exacting English composition class.  I got the paper back with a comment that it was very sincere and touching but had two grammatical errors so a grade of C.  The teacher told me that he was preparing me for college and I needed to focus on grammar and punctuation now so it would be second nature in college.  

To help pay for my college expenses I took a part-time job in the Purdue University Agronomy Department watering plants on weekends and holidays in the research greenhouse and in the 6 climate-controlled incubators.  My supervisor said he hired me instead of a university student because I always showed up and they didn’t.  I wasn't a university student so he really shouldn’t have hired me.

As the second semester came around, my parents asked me where I wanted to apply for college.  They never told me I needed to go to college but it was just always assumed in our house we would all go to college as both my parents had and we had grown up near college campuses.  My oldest brother Steve was attending Indiana University and I applied there and nowhere else, never visiting before I enrolled.  I looked up to him and was trying to follow in his footsteps- he was president of the IU student body, Phi Beta Kappa, and had been selected for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.  Plus I enjoyed history a lot and in those days IU was the liberal arts university and Purdue, in my hometown which I wanted to leave, was the agricultural and engineering school in Indiana.   

As spring baseball season rolled around, I was slotted as a pitcher, not an every-game player.  The starting left fielder suddenly announced his girlfriend was pregnant and the school administration prohibited him from playing.  My other older brother Warren had been a starting second baseman and I looked up to him too and wanted to follow in his footsteps.  I decided to take daily batting practice, work on fielding, and eventually won the starting left-field position.  Our team won our conference title.

Lafayette Jefferson High School Baseball Team, North Central Conference Champions, 1963

(Pete Smith, Photo Center) 

Lafayette Jefferson High School Senior Portrait From School Yearbook, 1963

(Pete Smith, Lower Right Portrait)

By the end of my senior year, I no longer defined myself primarily as an athlete. Leadership, academics, friendships, and service to others had begun to replace football as the center of my life. Looking back, those changes prepared me far better for the future than any touchdown pass ever could have.