Service for Coach a Celebration of His Life : Baseball: Long Beach City College Hall of Famer and part-time actor Joe Hicks memorialized and remembered as one of the game’s best teachers.

Memories of Joe Hicks were spread on a table the day after his funeral. An old black-and-white picture showed the coach sitting on a dugout fence at Long Beach City College as his two batboy sons stood nearby. In another, taken in color years later and similarly posed, his sons had become his players.

“We were always on the field, as batboys, playing catch or sitting on some ballplayer’s lap,” said Jay Hicks, 36. “Mom brought us to every game. What consumed our lives was his career on a baseball field.”

Jay Hicks pitched for his father’s LBCC team in 1975, and his brother, Tom, 34, had been the catcher. They were at their mother’s home last Saturday deciding on pictures to display at a memorial service.

“Joe was always on the baseball field,” Joyce Hicks said. “My father said, ‘Why waste time with Joe Hicks? All he ever does is play baseball.’ ”

Joe Hicks died of cancer Jan. 7 at age 64.

“We put a baseball in his hand in the casket,” his wife said.

Hicks taught physical education and coached baseball at Long Beach City College from 1950 to 1975. He won 514 games and three state titles, spurning several offers to go to Division I universities. More than 100 of his players went on to the pros; 12, including Greg Harris, Casey Cox and Rod Gaspar, made the major leagues. He was in the halls of fame of the American Baseball Coaches Assn. and the Long Beach Century Club.

He retired from coaching after the 1975 season so he could watch Tom play at USC and Jay play at Westmont College in Santa Barbara.

“Wins and losses weren’t his big thing,” said Jay Hicks, an executive at Diamond Sports Inc. in Los Alamitos, a sporting goods firm that his father helped found in 1977. “He was in the game to teach and develop. Attitude was the big thing with Dad. You had to have a good attitude toward your teammates.”

Joe Hicks also acted as an extra in movies and television. And though he did not smoke, he portrayed the ruggedly handsome Marlboro Man in cigarette commercials in the mid-1960s.

He could play a Roman soldier or pop up in an episode of “Gomer Pyle” or “Mr. Ed.” A physical specimen at 6 feet 2 and 230 pounds, he was typecast for sports movies such as “It Happens Every Spring” and “The Dizzy Dean Story,” but also appeared in “East of Eden” with James Dean.

“On ‘The Untouchables’ they were shooting him up all the time,” Jay Hicks recalled.

Joe Hicks had been an athlete at Banning High School in Wilmington and then at UCLA, where he learned coaching techniques from his friend, John Wooden. For two years he pitched in the St. Louis Browns organization.

He was known as a pioneer in baseball instruction. Years ago he would record his players with an 8-millimeter camera, then run the film back and forth for them in his den until they realized what they were doing right or wrong.

He devised a batting tee in the 1950s and produced films titled “Lean and Mean Muscle Building Program for Baseball Players” and “Jump Rope Decathlon for Competitive Athletes.”

“I think he knew as much baseball as anyone I’ve ever met,” said John Herbold, baseball coach at Cal State Los Angeles. “If you were allowed to go to only one guy to learn baseball, he would probably be the guy.

“But the best part about him was that he was willing to share his knowledge. You could call him from Modesto and say you were having a little clinic, and he’d come right up. He wanted to tell the baseball world things that would make better players and coaches.”

Hicks was strong-willed and opinionated, qualities that sometimes caused other coaches, including Herbold, to clash with him. “Every time you played him it was a war,” Herbold said. “There was always a lot of tension because he was extremely intense. But we had tremendous mutual respect for each other.”

Wally Kincaid, former baseball coach at Cerritos College, was a longtime bitter rival of Hicks. “If they had had guns they’d have killed each other,” Jay Hicks said.

But in the last five years, a friendship was formed as Kincaid would visit Hicks and they would rehash games for hours.

That was Joe Hicks’ greatest quality, his sons said, the ability to forgive and forget.

He rarely lost his temper, though his wife recalled with a laugh how he once hopped around on the diamond with a first-aid kit stuck to his foot after he had gotten mad and kicked it. She remembered how hard the players tried not to laugh.

He never forced his sons to play baseball, but they said he made it so much fun they couldn’t resist.

“He was unique,” said Tom Hicks, a teacher at El Camino College. “He didn’t care whether you were batting fourth in the lineup or leading the team in hitting. He just cared because you were on the team and giving it our best effort.”

The brothers formed the battery that helped give their father his 500th victory, 9-3 over Compton College, in 1975. To get the last out, Joe Hicks, standing in the dugout, signaled for Jay to throw a slider. He did and the batter flied out to center field.

“Boy, did we have a celebration,” Jay Hicks said.

Last Saturday, the Hicks home in Long Beach, where Joe and Joyce were married nearly 38 years ago, was still filled with decorations that had been put up to ensure that the former coach’s last Christmas would be joyous.

Though his death had been imminent since September, Hicks had remained in good spirits.

“Joe Hicks was going to lick colon cancer, that was his attitude,” his wife said. “Every time he smiled, I had hope.”

The doctors, she said, had suggested that chemotherapy be abandoned, but Hicks did not want to give up. A new treatment raised his temperature at one point to 105 degrees. He had to use a walker, but disdained a wheelchair.

“His salvation,” Jay Hicks said, “was that he was a very, very devout Christian man. “Everything was positive. Dad didn’t feel sorry for himself.”

Joyce Hicks told of the recent holiday season, how her husband had left his bed for the last time. A picture from that day shows him, thin and balding, sitting with his grandchildren, who always called him Grandpa Baseball.

On Christmas Eve, Hicks had decided he was too weak to watch his favorite movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“I left the sound on and when I came back into the room he had turned himself around to watch it,” Joyce Hicks said. “We watched it all the way through.”

Her tears came with these memories, and through them she said, “We’re pretty lucky to have known him.”

More than 800 people attended the memorial service last Sunday at El Dorado Park Community Church in Long Beach.

It was hard to recognize a lot of the people without their baseball caps.

Joe Hicks, in a large photo that faced the mourners, had his on.