Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (4 page)

“Thurm was like part of our family,” recalls Susie Wilson. “He’d go down the alley by his house and show up at my grandmother’s all the time just for her homemade cookies. And if there was a holiday, like Thanksgiving, there would be Thurman and Duane, sprawled out on the floor watching football with everyone else. They’d play sports trivia—Thurm always knew the answers.”

His specialty was Big Ten Football. He knew everything.

“The cookies!” remembers Susie’s uncle, Tom Wilson. “When he was famous and back home in Canton, he’d still come by for the cookies. Duane too. They loved my grandmother, who lived to be 102.

“Being boys, we got into fights now and then,” says Tom. “Once we had a fight while playing baseball and my dad ran over to break it up. He said, ‘Boys, boys, stop it, it’s not like either of you will make it to the major leagues!’ He was wrong.

“Another time we’d play this game in his basement with my brother Larry and with Duane and Thurman, where we’d turn off all
the lights and just start beating each other up. And Thurman hit me so hard in the kidney that I peed blood for a week!

“When the Munsons moved here from Randolph, they really didn’t have much. My family helped them move, and we actually gave them shoes to wear. But I was the one who saw what an athlete he was, and I took him with me to sign up for Mighty Mite baseball when he was nine. I wanted him on my team, but someone else got him first. I would have loved to have played Mighty Mite with Thurman.”

“Thurman was the most regular guy you could imagine,” adds Susie. “He wouldn’t even call himself a jock if you asked him, even playing all the sports. He did it for fun. But he also would say, ‘I’m gonna play for the New York Yankees one day’ And you sorta thought he was really going to do it. When I picture him now, he’s walking down the hallways in school, in jeans and a T-shirt with an open shirt over it. Just a regular guy.”

He would go on to Lehman High School. Built in 1920, it is today Lehman Middle School, with McKinley now the public high school in northwest Canton. (In 1976, Canton restructured its secondary schools, closing Lehman as a high school and expanding Canton McKinley.) The Lehman Polar Bears found in Thurman one of the greatest athletes the school had ever known. He was captain of the football, basketball, and baseball teams, earned nine letters, and was all-city and all-state in all three. He was a halfback, end, and a linebacker in football and a guard in basketball, where he averaged twenty points a game. Mostly he played shortstop on the baseball team, but eventually he caught, and occasionally even pitched.

“He’d strike out ten in a seven-inning game,” recalls Pruett. “We played off each other. I’d be a better hitter because of him; he’d be a better pitcher because of me. And we’d play Wiffle ball by his house on Frazer and he’d hit the ball to the top level of his house; he’d
cream it. When it got dark, we’d go over to the synagogue on Twenty-fifth Street and keep playing because the lighting was better there.”

“He was very competitive and better than the rest of us in every sport other than golf,” says his classmate Randy Board. “That bothered him a lot. He took up golf later than some of us and always wanted to beat the more experienced golfers.”

“Even though he was a top-level athlete, he was fun to be on a team with,” says Earl Rodd, who was a basketball teammate and considered himself the “last man” on the team. “If you were on the court with him in practice, he always did his best to run the plays and make things work for everyone. It didn’t matter if you were the twelfth man on the roster.”

Bob Henderson coached Thurman in basketball during Thurman’s senior year. Henderson was only twenty-six and in his first year at Lehman. He also taught science. When he arrived he asked others, “Who do I have? What can I expect?” They pointed to Munson. “Five-nine and dumpy!” recalls Henderson. “This is my star?”

He was, by all accounts, a pleasure to coach. He was cocaptain of the basketball team, and Henderson remembers the final game of the Canton All-City Night, a round-robin tournament for the four city high schools, with five thousand seats packed. In this last game of the season, Lehman was down by a point with four or five seconds to play. Thurman stole the ball and headed for a layup. Naturally, he got clobbered and fouled.

Henderson called time and sat the kids down, looking for some words of wisdom. “I can still hear him now, it was an exact quote—he said, ‘Don’t worry about it coach, it’s in the bag,’ with that little smile of his. And of course he makes the two foul shots and we win.

“He was so coachable, and so honorable, he’d even call in if he was late getting home. We had a 10:30 curfew. He called me around 10:35 one night to say he had missed curfew and just got home.”

“He was really gifted in football too,” said Tom Albu, the cocaptain
with Thurman in his senior year. “He liked the excitement of it; and football was a big event in Canton. Maybe he wasn’t that big, but he could play the game. He had that great eye-hand thing—he was an end, and he could glance up, see the ball, and be where it was going to land. And he’d return punts on the dead run like something you’d see in an old Red Grange film. He had the moves of a professional wide receiver, and one time he bought a book by Raymond Berry of the Colts, and he’d study it over and over again. He always wanted to get better.

“He was just so good at everything. Once we went bowling. I clobbered him. It was so uncharacteristic. Then I thought, ‘Maybe this was his first time …’ A week or so later he called and invited me to bowl with him. And this time he clobbered me. He had obviously learned something or practiced a few times.

“He’d spend a lot of time at our house; he liked our family. Sometimes he just did it to get away from his own home. He’d sleep on our back porch. I remember one time when his mom was at our house, and she was just berating him and berating him in front of us, and he’d just keep repeating, ‘Oh Mom, oh Mom.’ It was so embarrassing.”

“We’d draw twenty-two thousand people to high school football games,” says Carl Santilli, who owned Thurman’s favorite restaurant, Lucia’s. “What other town this size does that? Kids come to play us from other schools; it scares the shit out of them, they’ve never seen such a crowd at a high school game. Thurman fed off that.”

His baseball coach, Don Eddins, was a handsome, powerful man in his late thirties who never played college sports but learned how to run a disciplined sports team. Thurman described him as “a real driver and a hustler. He taught me a lot about the game, and I enjoyed playing for him.”

He may in fact have been a father figure to Thurman, who never got positive reinforcement from Darrell. “Thurman was Coach Eddins’s
favorite,” says Pruett. “And when Moose Paskert, the baseball coach at Kent State later came around, Eddins told him that Thurm was ‘cocky and a winner.’

“What Thurman brought to the field was the ability to figure out how to beat you. If you had twenty-one outs in a seven-inning game, he’d figure out how to extend it to thirty-one, with walks, shots into the gap, whatever. He was so good at waiting on a pitch and then driving it into the gaps. He did all the little things. There were no easy outs to give away as he figured it. Nobody played the game like that. He’d do it in basketball too, where he’d save a ball from going out of bounds by slapping it at an opponent’s leg. That stuff just wasn’t done back then.”

Munson hit .581 in 1965 and was the shortstop on the all-Ohio team. It was certainly during those years that he began to seriously think he could one day be a professional player.

“He started as a shortstop but was switched to catcher because no one else could handle Jerome Pruett,” says Jim Lurie, who served as the Polar Bears statistician. Pruett would be a fifth-round draft pick by the Cardinals in 1965, but never made the majors, hurting his arm in 1967 when he was under a major league contract.

“Coach Eddins came to me and said, ‘What would you think of Thurman catching you?’” says Pruett. “And I said, ‘Fine!’ Well, you never saw anything like it. He’d be calling for curveballs on three and two when all I really threw was heat. But he’d say, ‘When I put down two fingers, I want you to throw the curve!’ And he’d do it on three and two, which was really high risk!

“The first time he actually caught was our junior year [1964]. I threw ninety-plus as a junior, and a young man by the name of Terry Ripple couldn’t handle my rising fastball, which sometimes rose from the dirt in front of home plate. We asked Thurm, and with his likable but take-charge personality, he and I became one, and he really did impart objectivity to my rogue talent. His favorite cartoon
character was Huckleberry Hound; he’d imitate that character for fun, and it fit him; he had that cockiness.

“Thurman caught when I pitched, and then started catching some of the other pitchers. After I graduated and signed with the Cardinals, the gang said he really blossomed, got stronger, went to the pinnacle of confidence, and became known as
the
catcher, instead of the guy who could beat you with his head and his bat.

“No one really showed him how to do much; he just had a passion for being the best. So through watching others, like the Indians catcher John Romano at that time, and doing his own type of research, he just basically let his instincts take over.”

“I just let my development as a catcher come naturally,” Munson said. “Defense wasn’t that important to me then. I just loved to hit, and it didn’t matter to me where I played in the field.”

In the summers Thurman would play in the Canton City Baseball League, and although he was the youngest player, he was the star. It was a terrific league for development of his skills; a well-run amateur league that played about forty games a summer. He played for the Huskies, which was coached by his sister Darla’s first husband, Denny Gothot. Denny coached in that league for twenty-seven seasons.

Lenny May remembers, “Denny, who threw very hard, was throwing balls at Thurman’s head and Thurman’s role was to deflect the balls with the bat. It sticks in my memory because of the ease with which Thurman dealt with the pitches and the lack of interest the rest of us had in participating in that.”

Moving up to the Junior Boys Baseball League, he played for the Seran Agency team. In his three midteenage summers, Thurman hit .369, .300, and .440, batting third in the lineup and playing shortstop. The team would regularly go to Battle Creek, Michigan, for the American Amateur Baseball Congress national tournament.

“In American Legion ball, we played for Post 44 back in 1963 and
we had this little thing where we’d tip our caps to each other when one or the other of us got a hit,” recalls Bob Beldon, who went on to play quarterback for Notre Dame and then spent two years with the Dallas Cowboys as a backup to Roger Staubach. “And we’d do it when we passed each other in town too; it just became our thing.”

“He always had fun at sports,” says Joe Gilhousen, who went to the Worley School with him and played with him in American Legion ball. “He was always the best player at whatever he did, but he did it all with fun. Later he recruited me to go to Kent State with him. I was like his little brother there; he looked after me.”

In 1964 Thurman drove with his father and Duane to a tryout run by the Pittsburgh Pirates, in Columbus, Ohio.

“It seemed like it was two hundred degrees that day and we sat around a lot waiting for Thurm’s name to be called to take a few ground balls and bat,” says Duane. “He was a shortstop then, and when he took those ground balls after sitting in the hot sun for what seemed like an eternity, he was less than spectacular. Then when it was his turn to bat, he swung at the first and only pitch he got and hit a one hopper back to the pitcher, and the rest is history. The Pirates didn’t know what they had missed.”

His classmates remember him as funny, mischievous, realistic, mature, and generally good to be around.

Recalls Joe Kociubes, “We shared a delivery route for the afternoon paper, the
Repository
. I think he was transitioning it over to me so he could spend more time at sports. One day he was talking about his grades, and he said, ‘I could work hard and turn myself into a solid B or B-plus student. Or I could continue to put my energy into sports and try to become a professional ballplayer. Why doesn’t it make sense for me to get C’s and take a shot at the big leagues instead of putting my energy into getting B’s?’”

“He was smart though,” says Susie Wilson. “And he enjoyed himself. I remember biology lab the day we had to dissect frogs. I was at
the table behind him with a guy on each side of me. Thurman leaned over and said, ‘You ready for this?’ He was laughing. But I was ready, and the two guys I was working with couldn’t deal with it. No sooner did I cut open the frog than the guy on my left passed out and the one on my right started to get nauseous. Thurman was loving it. He called up front—‘Mr. Mutchmore, Mr. Mutchmore, we’ve got one down here and another one on the way!’”

Perhaps the most important moment in Thurman’s life came in 1959 when he spotted a pretty girl in the schoolyard.

Thurman was twelve when he met Diana Dominick at the Worley School. They had both served on the Junior Patrol, walking children across the street. Thurman considered her a “rich kid” because she got thirty cents a day in spending money from her parents, and he didn’t get any. And she’d spend the money on potato chips and Coke for Thurman.

Neither of them was a rich kid.

“I was with him the day he met Diana,” recalls Susie Wilson. “We were in the Worley School playground when this pretty girl appears, and Thurman said to me, ‘Who’s that? She looks nice.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s Diana Dominick.’ He liked her at first glance.”

Thurman would always call her Diane, almost as though he hadn’t heard the name right or just wanted to save a syllable. His friends and teammates would be introduced to her as Diane. But she called herself Diana. Eventually, after Thurman died, she was Diana to everyone. But she was always Diane to him, and to those who knew her through the Yankees.

She would follow him on his paper route, and Thurman remembered running a mile to her house, giving her a kiss, and then running back to his own home on Frazer Avenue. “Not a bad way to get my running in,” he’d say.