Turley Left Game Far Behind

Professional athletes too often become lost causes outside their own world of fun and games. Hand them The Sporting News, not The Wall Street Journal. Give them a box score instead of a stock table.

An extraordinary exception is Robert Lee Turley, the fabled “Bullet Bob,” a man of sterling pitching accomplishments who won the Baltimore Orioles’ first American League game after the franchise was restored in 1954.

Turley is an almost make-believe success story . . . except it’s all true. He doesn’t allude to it, but he may be the wealthiest retired baseball player in America. What Turley and his wife, Carolyn, have created as their private residence in this southwest Florida resort community is an absolute spellbinding example of architectural splendor.

Tourists clog the street, Copeland Drive, as they linger long enough to marvel and photograph “The House That Bob Built,” which suggests by its massive appearance that it might be a museum, church or library. A conservative estimate of its cost is put in excess of $6 million, excluding furnishings and other amenities.

This is not your typical getaway bungalow. Its size is overwhelming; the structure itself is breathtaking. There are five levels, 37,000 square feet of space, five bedrooms, 6 1/2 baths, four kitchens, a formal living room, library, music room, billiard room, dining room, and a 52-foot square cathedral-like entrance hall with 10 columns.

What is called the “great room” has a herringbone hardwood floor, a gold leaf ceiling that is dressed off with 6,000 pounds of plaster molding imported from England. There’s also a 7-foot, 500-pound chandelier.

The house is so huge (12 times the size of the average residence on Marco Island) that communications presented a problem, which was alleviated by the installation of an electronic intercom system, plus--imagine this--31 telephones.

This imposing monument to a grand lifestyle few Americans can identify with has been registered for perpetuity in a Turley family trust. There’s even a time capsule for some future generation of Turleys to open for inspection so they’ll be able to reflect upon the past, which is now the present.

All of this magnificence is a credit to the perseverance, intelligence and stupendous salesmanship of Turley, whose achievements in business far surpass what he attained in baseball, even though he spent 12 years in the American League, pitched in five World Series with the New York Yankees and in 1958 won 21, lost 5 and earned the Cy Young Award.

Turley was born to a family of modest circumstances in Troy, Ill. His father worked at a packing house and frankly told his son he couldn’t afford to send him to college. So Bob put his pitching talents on display for the St. Louis Browns at Sportsman’s Park. A coach named Joe Schultz, who warmed him up, was visibly impressed.

He was a bargain find, costing the Browns a mere bonus of $200 and a contract for $600 a month, or a total of $1,200, with their Belleville farm club of the Illinois State League in 1948. He had a million-dollar arm but never made more than $35,000 in a career that included service with the Browns, Orioles, Yankees, Boston Red Sox and California Angels.

Now Turley, as one of the chief executives of the A.L. Williams Insurance Co., doesn’t need to worry about salary negotiations or trying to convince management he’s worth more than it wants to pay.

Baseball, at this stage, seems little more than a passing chapter in his life as he looks out from a balcony toward scenic Roberts Bay, where at the edge of his three-acre property is a dock and two Turley-owned boats, one named “Nonsense,” a yacht that sleeps eight, and the other plain “Common Sense.”

At the Marco Island Airport, there’s a private plane, a Citation Jet, accommodating six passengers, and a pilot awaiting his command. Affluence wears well with Turley. He is friendly and enthusiastic, sincere and still boyish at age 59, even if his career zoomed off into the stratosphere.

He smiled as he pointed to a row of royal palm trees and said, “They cost more to buy and transplant than what I made my first year in the big leagues.” Not a brag; just a factual statement of an impressive financial status.

Bob recalls fondly his old baseball friendships, the likes of Mickey Mantle, Bill Skowron, Yogi Berra, Billy Hunter, Lou Sleater, Bob Nieman, Gus Triandos, Lou Grasmick and Irv Hall, who was his manager at Aberdeen in the Northern League when he put together a 23-5 campaign. Those personal associations make for pleasant memories.

Turley’s third wife, Carolyn, is a vibrant, artistic woman whose main interests include geriatric care, music and watercoloring. The architect of record for the Turley “castle” is John K. Dyehouse III of Naples (Florida, not Italy) but there’s no doubt Mrs. Turley has put her imprint on the structure, furnishings and landscape.

It might be defined as neo-classical in design, with strong Italian and English influence. It has sprawling European gardens, with statuary of marble and brass. They call it Casa Nel Sole, or “our house in the sun.”

There’s a three-car garage, a swimming pool with a state-of-the-art purifying system and, instead of chlorine, hydrogen peroxide is added to the spa water for health reasons. The recreation area includes tennis and volleyball courts, horseshoe pits and a golf putting green, plus a pavilion for dressing and showering.

“We’ve hoped to capture the grace of the European villas of the past and the comfort of Florida living in our home,” explained Carolyn. “We wanted to adapt the neo-classicism of Italian villas and 18th century English houses to our own home plan.”

What the Turleys have produced here is an awesome tribute to diligence and business acumen. It’s merely an accident that he was once a prominent baseball player--an incredible contrast to the afternoon he agreed to accept a $200 signing bonus and a salary of $600 a month for what remained of the 1948 season.