Long Gone But Still Beloved : St. Louis Browns’ Fans Work to Keep Strange Legacy Alive

Here lie the remains Of Jethro Gaines, A late Mound City tenant. He swore to fast Until at last The Brownies won a pennant. --Tombstone in a St. Louis cemetery, 1939

At a restaurant here known as the St. Louis Opera House, the name of the house band is Brian Clarke and the St. Louis Browns.

In another area of town, Rich Hawksley runs a shop called the Baseball Collectors’ Corner, which deals exclusively in St. Louis Browns memorabilia.

Every Friday in Calabasas, Calif., a group of men meets for lunch, perpetuating the existence of the old St. Louis Browns Fans Club of Chicago.

Bill Borst, a professor with a Ph.D. in history, launched the St. Louis Browns Fans Club here three years ago and it has grown from 28 to more than 500 members, including a Jesuit priest in Japan, actor Dabney Coleman, three members in London and at least three dozen in California. The club holds an annual dinner, inducting former players into what’s known as the St. Louis Browns Hall of Fame.

In Baltimore, where St. Louis’ American League franchise was moved in 1954, a mini-controversy has developed about whether the records of the old Browns ought to be kept with the records of the Orioles.

What’s going on here? A rock ‘n’ roll band named the St. Louis Browns? A nostalgia nook where the items run from Oscar Melillo’s uniform to Matt Batts’ bat? A weekly lunch for a group whose slogan used to be: “Are we downhearted? No--we’re Brown- hearted!”? A Hall of Fame--not Shame--for the St. Louis Browns?

What these people are doing is showing devotion to a team that has been dead for 34 years. Were Bill Veeck, the last, lamented owner of the St. Louis Browns, still alive, he would be saying, “Where were all these people when I needed them?”

You can understand post-move followings for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the Philadelphia Athletics. These were teams with proud histories, championship clubs that, borne by the desire for new riches, were spirited away to other cities.

The Browns, who began in 1902, didn’t really move. They were exorcised from St. Louis after the 1953 season.

This was a franchise better known for its one-armed outfielder, Pete Gray in 1945, and its midget pinch-hitter, Eddie Gaedel in 1951, than its greatest player, George Sisler, 1915-27, or its only pennant in the war year of 1944.

The Browns finished last or next to last 22 times. In eight of those seasons they lost 100 or more games.

They once drew only 90,000 in an entire season. For their last game, on Sept. 27, 1953, they drew 3,174. The players were unable to take batting practice that day because the financially strapped team was short of baseballs.

“I don’t know what it is, but there seems to be a resurgence of interest in the Browns,” says Brian Clarke, the guitarist who heads the group at the St. Louis Opera House. “You see kids in the neighborhood wearing St. Louis Browns hats. It must be big enough that somebody’s started making them again.”

Despite his group’s name, Clarke is too young to have seen the team play.

“We formed our group in 1984,” he said. “That was the 40th anniversary of the Browns’ only pennant, so it seemed like a good name. Now, it’s a conversation piece. Young people who never heard of the Browns come up and ask where we got the name.”

Borst, 43, is another unlikely Brown booster. He grew up in Queens, a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers because of his mother and Vin Scully.

“Scully taught me baseball,” Borst says. “My love for the game is the result of his vocal cords.”

After the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, Borst became a Met fan. Then, in a prime example of poor timing, he moved to St. Louis in the summer of 1969, just as the Mets were starting a tear that wouldn’t end until they had won the World Series.

In 1984, Borst met some fellow members of the Brooklyn Dodgers Fan Club in Cooperstown, N.Y., during the induction of Pee Wee Reese into the Hall of Fame. At the Albany airport on the way home, Borst, who had read an informal history of the Browns by a Chicago author, got to talking about the franchise.

“It had a 52-year history,” Borst said. “Despite the lack of success, it was still rich in tradition, and I felt that it was an endangered species.”

By October, Borst had rounded up a small group to start the club, which, he pedantically insists, is officially the St. Louis Browns Historical Society.

Borst teaches a college course called “Baseball as a Social History,” has a two-hour weekly radio show and has written several books, including a paean to the Browns, “Last in the American League: The St. Louis Browns,” and a trivia collection about the Browns that includes 111 questions.

“One for every game the team lost in 1939,” Borst said.

At the fan club’s first “Hall of Fame” dinner in 1985, George Sisler, Kenny Williams, George McQuinn and Ned Garver were inducted. Others honored since then have been Roy Sievers, Urban Shocker, Johnny Tobin, Harlond Clift, Luke Sewell, Satchel Paige and Baby Doll Jacobson.

Old Brownies Nels Potter and Don Gutteridge have been indignant that they haven’t been included. Borst said Clift called him an S.O.B. when he wasn’t inducted into the hall with Sisler and the others in the first year.

It is unlikely that Bill Veeck will ever be admitted.

“Too many guys remember Veeck as the guy who sold the team and let it move away,” said Jim Scott, a retired newsman who is largely responsible for a 1987 calendar that has a snippet of Brown history for every date. Without the brown-tinted calendar, you probably wouldn’t know that:

--Catcher Clint Courtney died while playing Ping Pong.

--Outfielder Roy Sievers, rookie of the year in 1949, got a free pair of baseball shoes as his signing bonus.

--Pitcher Ellis Kinder had smelt dumped on him by a sea gull at Fenway Park.

--Garver, a pitcher, was given a $25,000 contract after he won 20 of the last-place team’s 52 games and batted .305 in 1951. “We could have finished last without him,” Veeck said.

--Bing Crosby wore a St. Louis Browns sweat shirt in the movie, “Going My Way.”

--Dizzy Dean, retired six years, left the radio booth to pitch four scoreless innings for the Browns against the Detroit Tigers in 1947.

Borst estimated that out of 700 Brownies, 235 are still alive. The youngest is J.W. Porter, 54, and the oldest is John Daley, 100, whose entire big league career was an eventful 17 games with the Browns in 1912.

Daley hit an inside-the-park homer at Fenway Park and claims that after taking a called third strike in another appearance, he coined the excuse, “You can’t hit what you can’t see.”

The 86-year-old Sewell, who managed the Browns to their only pennant--18 members of the team were 4-F and exempt from the draft in World War II--died in May, a week before the fan club was going to honor him.

Dead the same month at 62 was Bobo Holloman, who pitched a no-hit game for the Browns against the Philadelphia A’s before 2,473 in 1953 in his first big league start. Ten weeks after his no-hitter, Holloman was demoted to the minors because of wildness and never pitched in the majors again.

Hawksley, the Browns collector, works at Anheuser-Busch, which is paradoxical since it was the brewery that bought the rival Cardinals in 1953 and, according to Veeck, indirectly forced him to sell the Browns to out-of-town interests.

“I always rooted for the Browns instead of the Cardinals,” the 47-year-old Hawksley said. “I think it was because the Browns had the Knothole Gang and you could go to most of the games free.

“You had to pay for the weekend games, but you could buy a bleacher ticket and then hop over to the box seats right after the game started because there weren’t many people in the park. You couldn’t do that at a Cardinal game (both teams played at Sportsman’s Park). They had triple the ushers that the Browns had.”

Hawksley has the ticket stub from the last game the Browns ever played.

Industrious research just might turn up every living person who was there, since Dick White can account for about 50 or 60 who took the train from Chicago for the occasion. White, a retired public relations man who lives in Woodland Hills, Calif., was part of an entourage organized by Will Leonard, the Chicago Tribune columnist who had a fetish about attending closings.

The train was the Blue Bird Special, but Leonard got the railroad to change it to the Brown Bird Special. Everybody needed safety belts.

The Chicagoans arrived about midnight the night before the game, carrying an R.I.P. wreath that they were going to hang on the ballpark’s main gate. Leonard, or somebody, went to a phone booth and called the police with the phony report that there was a disturbance at an all-night diner across the street.

In minutes, four squad cars arrived at the scene, along with a newspaper photographer.

“We got six columns on the front page in the St. Louis paper the next day,” White says. “There was a one-column shot of (President) Eisenhower swinging at a golf ball.”

According to White, Borst would frown on such horseplay.

“I’m a member of the St. Louis club, and also the group that meets in Calabasas,” White said. “Our group is more hail-fellows-well-met. Borst is more serious. He’s taken me to task before about the way we have fun with the Browns.”

Borst is no stick-in-the-mud, however, and not without his wry moments. The Cardinals might be in first place here, but they are still the Cardinals, the uppity-up, long-ago intracity rivals of the Browns.

So Borst and the St. Louis Browns Fans Club will go to Kansas City next month for an American League game. Not coincidentally, the Royals will be playing the Orioles, the Baltimore reincarnation of the Browns.

“We’re going to reclaim the franchise,” Borst said.