2 Lives Are Linked in Tragedy, Success : Nelson Gary Jr. Had Bitter Times Trying to Follow Path Cut by Hero Pete Gray

Aficionados of baseball trivia--and made-for-television movies--know that Pete Gray made it to the major leagues as a one-armed outfielder. He played 77 games for the St. Louis Browns in 1945, batting .218.

But what of “Little Pete,” Nelson Gary Jr. of North Hollywood, whose life became forever entwined with Gray’s after Gary had severely burned his right arm in an electric mangle at age 2 and had to have it removed?

Gary became a national celebrity in 1944 when, as a 3-year-old, he and his parents traveled to Tennessee, courtesy of the readers of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, to see Gray play for the minor league Memphis Chicks.

Pictures of Gary and his hero were published in newspapers across the country, and Gray and Gary became fast friends. Later, a picture of them hung in baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Their relationship was featured last month in an ABC-TV movie, “A Winner Never Quits.”

Inspired by Gray, with whom he corresponded and with whom he spent several weeks each summer until he was 10, Gary became an accomplished player himself.

By the time he entered Van Nuys High School, he had been featured in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” for hitting .437 in Little League and had appeared on Art Linkletter’s and Groucho Marx’s television shows.

Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Ted Williams had written to him.

Gary is 44 now.

An investment counselor for an Encino firm, Yaeger Securities Inc., he lives with his third wife, Joyce, and their 6-year-old son, Alan, in Woodland Hills.

He quit playing organized baseball 22 years ago but is now an A-ranked club tennis player.

His life has been far from idyllic, despite what appeared on the surface to be a dream-like childhood.

Formerly a heavy drinker and self-described “wild man,” Gary has survived two broken marriages and, through the stock market, “made and lost two fortunes,” he said.

His two oldest sons--Nelson III, 19, and Jason, 16--have both been involved with drugs--Nelson III to the extent, his father said, that he almost died last summer before completing a rehabilitation program.

Before giving up hard liquor and becoming a “born-again” Christian nine years ago, Gary underwent psychological tests, he said, that revealed “one of the most hostile readings you could have.” Shortly thereafter, his parents, Nelson Sr. and Helen, died within three weeks of each other.

Gary went through 1 1/2 years of therapy, reconstructing the traumatic events of his adolescence.

“Little Pete” said he was driven as a child by an unrealistic father whose own dream of reaching the major leagues was never realized, and by a mother whose feelings of guilt about her son’s accident and bitter memories of her one-armed father made it impossible for her to be satisfied with her son’s accomplishments.

Gary said that although it was drilled into him at an early age that it was his responsibility to make the major leagues, he never received what he considered to be a legitimate chance to play professionally.

An all-league right fielder at Van Nuys High, he was a three-year starter at Occidental College. In his senior year at Oxy in 1962, his squeeze bunt drove in the winning run in the deciding game as the Tigers won the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship.

Gary was offered a chance to play in Japan, he said, and a couple of U.S. teams asked if he’d be interested in barnstorming for their minor league affiliates. But few Americans played in Japan in those days, and Gary didn’t want to be part of a publicity gimmick for a U.S. team.

“I would have wanted to make it as a ballplayer--not as a gate attraction,” he said.

Gary seems bitter that he wasn’t given a chance, even though he says that he wasn’t really interested in a professional career.

“I really stopped working in high school,” he said. “I worked just like every other high school kid who played baseball, but that’s not enough if you’ve got one arm and you want to make it in professional baseball.”

He said he realized that it was his father’s dream to have him make the majors--not his.

“It got all out of proportion,” he said of his father’s involvement. “I’d be at Oxy and he’d call me five or six times the night before a game: ‘Have you done this, have you done that? Are you ready for this, are you ready for that?’

“He was fantastic when I was a little kid, but after I really got good, it was like anybody who has a dream and sees that he has a kid who can fulfill it. He got carried away with the whole thing.”

His coach at Oxy, Grant Dunlap, said that Gary had an exceptional arm and one of the best baseball minds of any player he had ever had, but was a light hitter and slow afoot. His career batting average at Oxy was below .250.

“If you take a small college player who can’t run like the wind and has no power, his chances of making it are just about nil,” Dunlap said.

Still, Gary resents not getting a chance.

After a lengthy harangue against baseball scouts--”Frankly, they were the dregs of the earth,” he said--Gary said he believed that he deserved a chance to play.

“I was tired of it and I didn’t want to work at it but I wasn’t nuts about the fact that I wasn’t given the opportunity,” he said.

And his belief that he didn’t give it his best has haunted him for more than 20 years, he said.

Gary said that with his outgoing personality, he could have been to handicapped people what the reticent, publicity-shy Gray had not been.

“The press and the other things wouldn’t have bothered me as much as they did him,” Gary said. “I think I let Pete down, and I let handicapped people down.”

Until the movie of Gray’s life was made, Gary said, he didn’t realize the tremendous guilt he felt.

“But now he’s getting the recognition he deserved,” Gary said of Gray, who lives in seclusion in Nanticoke, Pa., and who for 40 years rejected offers to have a movie made of his life.

“He should be something more than a trivia question. He should be known. Heck, if he did it today, he’d be on TV so much you’d be nauseous at the sight of him.

“I can’t tell you how much of a load has been lifted since the movie was made.”

The events that shaped Gary’s life began to take form just three days after he lost his arm, when his father was shown a newspaper article about Pete Gray.

Nelson Sr. wrote a letter to the Memphis Chicks, asking for an autographed picture of the one-armed outfielder. The letter was brought to the attention of David Bloom, sports editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, who urged his readers to contribute to a fund that would bring young Nelson east to meet his new hero.

When Nelson and his parents arrived in Memphis, the reluctant Gray at first refused to meet them.

But at Russwood Park the next day, Gary, wearing a replica of a Chicks uniform made from one of Lou Gehrig’s old uniforms, spotted Gray and ran across the field to greet him.

“How about a kiss, Pete?” the youngster asked. Gray broke down and cried and, in the game that followed, got five hits.

A friendship was born.

Back home, Gary began to apply what Gray had later taught him. For hours, he played catch with his glove, which had the padding removed to make it more pliable--just like Gray’s. He kicked a ball with his right foot to improve his sense of balance and posture. He kept track of Gray’s progress in the newspaper.

“I was patterned after Pete Gray,” Gary said. “I never thought I’d marry because Pete Gray never married. I thought I’d never date. Each year he lived, I thought, ‘That’s another year I’ll live.’ ”

He wanted so much to be like Gray, Gary said, that when he found out that Gray wasn’t able to tie his shoes, Gary refused to tie his. Having mastered the art of catching the ball and then tossing it into the air as he threw off his glove, Gary became an all-star in youth baseball. His appearances were ballyhooed.

From the Santa Monica Evening Outlook of Aug. 28, 1952: “Nationally famous Nelson Gary Jr., one-armed outfielder for the Sherman Oaks Kiwanis Little League nine, will play with his team in an exhibition game against Santa Monica Kiwanis tonight.”

As a Little Leaguer, Gary gave exhibitions before games. He said that King Features offered him more than $50,000 to make a national tour but that he had to refuse because the payment would have made him ineligible for high school baseball.

Groucho Marx, upon hearing that he batted .437, told Gary: “Why, Ted Williams didn’t hit that much.”

Answered Gary: “Yeah, but Williams faces tougher pitching.”

Two days later, Gary received a note from Williams. “From one slugger to another,” it read.

Gary’s father continued to promote him, but by the time he got to high school, his interests had diversified. He continued to play baseball, but he also got involved in student government. He was a bright and popular student, graduating in the top 5% of his class of 800 at Van Nuys High.

Still, he wrote in an essay during his senior year at Oxy in which he said that his state of mind was tied directly to his baseball exploits.

“Whether I did good or bad in a game controlled my home life and added toward things practically to a manic-depressive state,” he wrote in 1962.

” . . . In college, everything was subjugated to baseball during its season; my studies went by the wayside and the pressures of the season were enough to cost me two different girls who I had been going with before the start of another traumatic session.

“I rebelled against this pressure in baseball by not working as hard at it, but I still went out for the team because of the status involved and the unpleasantness incurred in my home when there was talk of quitting baseball.”

Gary said that his home life began to unravel before he reached high school. “My father’s motivations were extremely healthy ones for maybe the first 10 years,” he said last week. “Then things got a little mixed up.”

His father, he wrote in the college essay, “always felt frustrated because baseball was his first love and he does not truly know whether he could have made it or not.”

Until he went through therapy, though, Gary said he could never understand his mother’s attitude toward him.

“My dad and I had some problems but, basically, I understood where he was coming from,” he said.

“But why would my mother still feel guilty if I was an all-league baseball player, an A student, popular, etc. Why didn’t it change? I had overcome my handicap and my mother wouldn’t let me off the hook.”

Gary said that through therapy, he realized that his mother’s feelings toward her father, who had left his family, affected their relationship.

“She really had some mixed feelings that she could never verbalize,” he said. “She carried a tremendous burden. I’m not mad at her. It took me a long time not to be. It’s something I’ve been dealing with for the last four or five years. I think I’m about over it.

“It hasn’t come easily.”

At 5-10 and 160 pounds, Gary is 10 pounds lighter than when he played at Occidental. “I’m a much better conditioned athlete now than I ever was,” he said.

He continued to play baseball on weekends after graduation from Oxy, but once he stopped playing in 1964, he put away the glove that he said had been like a part of his hand for more than a decade and didn’t touch a baseball again for nine years.

Was his father disappointed that he hadn’t pursued a baseball career?

“I would say that would be the understatement of the year,” he said.

His relationship with his father improved when he became a financial success, he said. Still, he said that his father, angered over his son’s first divorce, wrote his only child out of his will.

A less hostile, often engaging Gary laughs about that now.

His green eyes fairly sparkled as he said that he’s as happy now as he has been in almost 30 years.

Nelson III, who couldn’t return two balls in a row over the net as recently as six months ago, is the No. 1 player on the Pierce College tennis team. “I’m very proud of him,” Gary said. Jason has dropped out of Calabasas High but is a successful door-to-door salesman, Gary said.

Gary is “more empathetic and more aware” than he was in the past, he said, and he has learned to love baseball again.

“I don’t like to be quite as within myself,” he said.

Would it be possible today for a one-armed player to make it to the majors?

“I think it can be done,” he said. “It would take the singleness of purpose of a Pete Gray. There are no physical handicaps, but what you do with it emotionally is a lot more difficult than overcoming anything physical.”

Gray was a tremendous influence on him, he said.

“I think what Pete Gray taught me was not to be Pete Gray,” he said. “I was more well rounded because, first, I had baseball. It was my entry.

“What Pete Gray allowed me to do was to make all the mistakes and do all the things that normal, everyday, non-one-armed people do. He allowed me to be in society.”

For better or worse.

‘What Pete Gray allowed me to do was to make all the mistakes and do all the things that normal, everyday, non-one-armed people do. He allowed me to be in society.’

--NELSON GARY JR.