Terrier Town: Summer of ’49

Rivalry and Legends

101 The legendary Gord Bradshaw Rivalry and Legends Legends of ball games and players were around long before I was born. There had been baseball before the Terriers, though I always found this hard to believe. But I remember old-timers telling me, when I was young, about famous players who worked their magic at Dickson Park in the 1800s. I never wrote a word of it down, for I was young and too busy playing ball myself. Now their stories are forever lost. E VEN BY THE SPRING OF 1949, BRADSHAW’S LEGEND AT DICKSON Park still haunted the place, and although he never had another season comparable to the .698 season of 1930, he was a consistent .300-plus hitter. With him catching, Galt won three straight Intercounty titles beginning in 1929. “I’m eighty now,” said Pennell in the summer of 1994, “but I can remember him well. He would have made professional baseball at the upper levels without a doubt.” Stan Markarian, who moved away from Galt to Detroit as a boy— he later became a sportswriter for the Galt Evening Reporter—was sixteen years old in the summer of 1930. He spent part of his summer holidays in town that year, and it was while he was here that he first heard about Bradshaw. “Naturally, as a baseball buff, I was anxious to see him,” he wrote. “Along with a boyhood chum I meandered over to Dickson Park for a look-see at the Intercounty’s new super catcherslugger . En route my chum said, ‘Better make sure there’s a safe place to watch the game. The way that guy Bradshaw hammers the ball around the ball park it would be safer to look through peepholes in a steel fence.’” Markarian’s friend said that “Bradshaw punched holes in the scoreboard at right field, tore bark off the maple trees in centre field, wrecked the cow pens on the left-field embankment, smashed windshields of cars parked around centre field, and even loosened the structure of the grandstand with foul balls.” Markarian, the young Tiger fan from Detroit, was spellbound. “As I stood in the old bandstand situated between home plate and first base, I, like some bigtime scout, watched every move he made.” At the end of the game Markarian turned to his friend: “What the heck is that guy doing in this league? He should be in the majors.” Markarian could see him fitting in well with the Tigers. But Bradshaw never turned pro, something that remains a mystery to this day. Gord’s son Bob was only ten when his father died suddenly of a stroke in the early 1950s. He had never really seen his dad play in his heyday, but he grew up hearing a lot about his father’s baseball prowess. He has always wondered, too, why his dad never turned pro. We may never know the answer. Two stories carry some weight. One was that he was offered a contract, or at least a tryout, with Toronto. But, according to his brother, Doug, himself an Intercounty veteran, “I think Gord got screwed around.” He heard that Hett, the umpire, arranged for a tryout with Toronto, and Toronto sent a letter to Bradshaw via the Galt Terrier executive. Though Doug was hesitant to name names—“some of them are still alive”—he believes that the letter never reached his brother. “Gord never saw it.” The Galt executive, Doug maintains, didn’t want their star player to leave, so they withheld the letter. The next time Hett saw Bradshaw he was incensed. “What the hell kind of a guy are you?” demanded Hett. “What are you talking about, Oscar?” answered Bradshaw. “About the Leaf tryout I arranged for you. The least you could have done was answer the letter they [Toronto] sent you.” “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said Bradshaw. “I never saw a letter.” According to Doug, “someone on the old Galt executive—I don’t want to say who, because you don’t want to stir old things up now— was to blame. But somebody there, in plain language, just screwed him out of a big-league contract. I have seen guys catching in the majors, even today, who couldn’t carry his jockstrap. He was that great.” 102 Terrier Town—Summer of ’49 Another theory, one that Bob heard...