WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: JIM HEFFER : Before ‘Big D’ There Was ‘Big H’ : Pitchers: Drysdale and Heffer were intimidating stars at Van Nuys High. One achieved professional stardom and its trappings, the other struggles anonymously in an art supply shop.

Jim Heffer’s art canvas supply shop stands anonymously among a dozen other tiny businesses in a modest industrial park in Canoga Park. It is tucked back from Canoga Avenue across the street from a lumber yard, and little about the aging exterior suggests anything beyond the ordinary.

Not even his business neighbors know that more than 35 years ago Heffer towered above all baseball players in the San Fernando Valley. In those days, he relegated Don Drysdale, the Hall of Fame pitcher with the Dodgers who now serves as a broadcaster for the team, to No. 2 status on the Van Nuys High teams in the early 1950s.

Since graduation day in 1954, the former teammates have headed in opposite directions. Drysdale compiled a 209-167 record in 14 major-league seasons with the Dodgers and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1984, the same year the Dodgers retired his number (53). He played in five World Series, was selected to 10 All-Star teams and won the Cy Young Award in 1962.

Since retiring in 1969, he has worked as a sportscaster for four major league teams, including the Dodgers for the past three years.

Aside from one spring-training session, Heffer never threw a pitch in a professional game, rejecting a minor-league contract with the Milwaukee Braves in 1955. He threw out his arm in a semipro game soon after and became a first baseman before quitting at 25.

The two men have not seen each other in more than 20 years, and it has been a short lifetime since they brawled briefly in the Van Nuys High parking lot as a pair of high-strung 12th-graders. Drysdale has remained a fixture in the Southern California sports scene, a celebrity who still doles out as many autographs as a major-league star.

Heffer, who lives in West Hills, struggles to keep his small business afloat and faces a mountain of medical bills incurred after his wife suffered a series of strokes and he was stricken by a pair of heart attacks in the past two years.

At 53, Heffer voices no bitterness about his fate, nor does he harbor jealousy toward his more successful former teammate.

In fact, Drysdale has few fans more supportive than Heffer, who enjoys the reaction he gets when he occasionally mentions to new acquaintances that he played baseball with the famous pitcher.

“God, those were good days,” Heffer said this week at his shop. “I’m proud of the things I accomplished and the enjoyment I gave my family.”

Heffer was a precocious athlete, maturing at an early age. Organized youth leagues for players under 12 had yet to form in semi-rural Van Nuys right after World War II, but the 8-year-old Heffer was quickly adopted by the municipal-league team his father coached. He played catch with the men on the Mission Seed team and three years later served as a late-inning pinch-runner and defensive replacement. At 12, he pitched in his first game and started winning immediately.

He joined a league for 12-year-olds-and-up the same year and by the time he entered Van Nuys as a 14-year-old sophomore he was a veteran ballplayer with the physical stature of a grown man. He already had achieved his full height of 6 feet and weighed 200 pounds. “It seems like I can’t remember a time when I weighed less than 180,” he said.

Heffer looked so much older than his age, in fact, that he had no trouble buying beer at Lombardi’s liquor store on Burbank Boulevard, even though he was seven years under the legal limit.

Heffer still carried some baby fat and was among the rare athletes in those days who wore glasses when he competed. Still, he struck an intimidating posture on the mound.

“Christ, he had a beard like (Sal) Maglie,” Drysdale said in reference to the former Dodger and Giant pitcher noted for his dark, glowering countenance. “Jim threw hard and he was the biggest kid around. For all of us in those days, he was overpowering. He had good stuff. It was nice to have him on our side.”

Heffer compiled a 22-5 record in three seasons and led Van Nuys to three consecutive San Fernando Valley League titles and a berth in the Los Angeles city championship game in 1954.

It was sometimes easier to beat an opponent than it was to get to an opponent’s home field.

“Back in those days, the only paved roads running east and west in the Valley were Ventura Boulevard and Sherman Way,” he said. “It was a real excursion out to Canoga Park. Once our bus driver got lost and we wound up stuck in the mud on Roscoe (Boulevard).”

Heffer was 5-0 against the Hunters, including two shutouts and three two-hitters. Doug MacKenzie, Canoga Park’s coach of 37 years until he retired in 1987, considers Heffer among the toughest opponents his teams faced.

“It wasn’t fair. It seemed like it was always Heffer when we played Van Nuys,” MacKenzie said. “He had a tremendous arm and used his whole body. It was like a man against boys when he pitched against us.”

Heffer made a name for himself as a sophomore in 1952 when he beat the City’s top pitcher, Ralph Mauriello of North Hollywood. Mauriello, who accepted a $35,000 bonus from the Dodgers, won his first 23 games for the Huskies. The week before he faced Heffer he lost his first game, a 3-2 decision to lowly Verdugo Hills, a team he pitched a no-hitter against the year before. “Mauriello was a terror. We couldn’t believe it when we read about it in the paper,” Heffer said.

Mauriello lost to Verdugo Hills on a two-run home run in the seventh inning, and, coincidentally, Van Nuys beat him the same way. The Wolves trailed, 2-1, in the seventh when Drysdale, a sophomore second baseman no taller than 5-foot-4, reached first on catcher’s interference. Ivan Reeve then homered to give Heffer the win. Mauriello beat Heffer in a rematch, 5-4, and finished his high school career with a 28-2 record.

“Drysdale deliberately reached back and hit the catcher’s glove,” Mauriello said good-naturedly from his Canoga Park office where he runs a computer consultant company. “He always tried to find a way to beat you. Then Reeve hit a fastball on the outside part of the plate. It’s amazing the things you remember.”

Mauriello remembers Heffer as physically imposing, even though he was two years his junior.

“He wasn’t that tall and was slightly overweight, but no one cared what with the way he could throw the ball,” Mauriello said. “He had that barrel chest and was dominant in high school. He had a tremendous fastball and had already reached his full size and strength.”

The following year, Heffer was 8-2 and ace of a staff that now included Drysdale, who had grown to 5-foot-7 but still played second banana to Heffer. The following year, Drysdale sprouted to 6-3 and formed with Heffer the City’s top 1-2 pitching punch. Heffer still wonders why he waited until Drysdale added all that size to pick a fight with his teammate.

If not the best of friends, the two had been pals since playing together in junior league ball and often socialized together. Drysdale was a passenger the day Heffer, who was 15 and had no license, took his father’s car for a spin. Not surprisingly, the joy ride ended in an accident and prompted a stern lecture from a municipal court judge, who let Heffer off with a reprimand.

“Don and I got along fine but we were both kind of stuck on ourselves,” Heffer said. “We were very spoiled as athletes and got away with murder. Anyway, for some reason I started a fight with him. It was nothing against him. I just think he happened to be there.”

As seniors, the two pulled easy duty as aides for the gym teachers. One day, while Drysdale was working on a class roster, Heffer spilled ink on the roster for no reason. When Drysdale objected too strenuously for Heffer’s taste, he did it again. Drysdale responded with a call to arms.

“I heard it was a very comical fight because our body types were so different,” Heffer said. “The coaches let us go for a while but they broke it up, I think, because they thought I was dead. Don hit me right over the eye and it swelled up the size of a softball. People said the fight was a draw, but I think I got the worst of it.”

Drysdale remembers the fight the same way, and laughed just as hard as Heffer when recalling it. Each said the animosity disappeared the next day, thanks in part to Bill Ford, the team’s late baseball coach.

“Bill Ford was one of the big influences in a lot of our lives,” Drysdale said. “He was a bulldog-type coach and he made sure we were teammates first. He was probably laughing like hell during the fight, but he made it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate that any more.”

The two pitchers settled their differences in time to lead Van Nuys to its third consecutive league title. Entering the final day of the season, neither pitcher had lost, advancing the Wolves to the final of the Dorsey Invitational tournament, which served as the City playoffs.

Van Nuys accomplished those feats without the benefit of classmate Robert Redford. Popular mythology holds that Redford starred in high school as an infielder and earned a baseball scholarship to Colorado.

“I read that somewhere and wondered where they got that,” Heffer said. “I never once saw Redford so much as with a glove in his hand.”

Still, Van Nuys advanced to the final of the Dorsey tournament and called on Heffer. Don Buford, who later played for the Baltimore Orioles, hit Heffer’s first pitch for a single and Dorsey routed the Wolves, 8-1. The only bright spot for Van Nuys was Heffer’s second-inning home run.

The disappointment of his first loss in more than a year was amplified when the scouts who had followed him throughout his senior year lost interest in him. The Dodgers signed Drysdale for $2,200 and sent him to Bakersfield. Meanwhile, Heffer’s phone stopped ringing.

“It did kind of surprise you,” Drysdale said. “I don’t know what happened. The scouts might have thought that even though he was so overpowering so young, he had reached a plateau. Like he wasn’t going to grow any more.”

In 1955, Heffer was invited to a Braves’ spring-training site in Ontario and was offered a minor league contract--but no bonus--with Boise, a Class-C affiliate. He rejected the deal and never heard from a major league team again.

He took a job for a collection agency in downtown Los Angeles and eventually opened his own business. It took nearly 10 years for the reality to set in that he would lead a life without baseball.

“When I didn’t get a bonus, I was really deflated and disillusioned, but it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I really regretted not pushing harder for a career in baseball,” he said. “My biggest disappointment is that I didn’t fulfill what I was led to believe was my destiny, playing professional baseball.”

That admission seems to carry little pain for Heffer, who considers himself lucky, perhaps because of rather than despite his current problems. When his wife, Mary, underwent surgery in 1988 to remove an aneurysm in her brain, doctors gave her little chance to live. She survived the surgery and two subsequent strokes. Heffer then survived two heart attacks a month apart.

“We’re not in good shape financially and it’s not always easy for us,” he said. “But we’ve got it made compared to a lot of people. We’ve still got our house and I’m my own boss. I don’t go to too many Dodger games, but even if I had the time, I could find more prudent places to put my money. But we’ve come back from a lot and have a helluva lot to be grateful for.”