Terrier Town: Summer of ’49

Lefty Comes to Town

145 Padden and the Pirates, 1933 Lefty Comes to Town Perry Como topped the music charts that July with his hit song “Some Enchanted Evening,” and Kool-Aid packages (all six flavours) could be had for five cents apiece. The Sunset Drive-In was showing movies to large crowds; life was very good. B Y THE MORNING OF MONDAY, JULY 11, GUS MURRAY COULD finally inform the press that he’d signed two new pitchers. Only one of them stuck with the team. Lefty Perkins was listed as a Michigan State southpaw. Murray and Padden were relieved. Pitching had been our only weakness, and even at that, it wasn’t so much a weakness as a missing piece in a puzzle. Our pitchers were good. We just needed more of them. Padden knew Perkins, but to the rest of us he was a mystery man. Little was known about this new college boy. By looks alone he was obviously no spring chicken. Word was that he’d been in the service during the war, and was only now resuming his college career. Both Padden and Murray knew that Perkins was no Michigan State player. About the closest Perkins had ever been to East Lansing, Michigan, was Galt. Perkins wasn’t even his real name. If there ever was a Don Perkins out of MSU, this wasn’t him. His real name was Harry Sollenburger, and he was a Second World War veteran out of Pennsylvania. Like Lipka in Brantford, and several others, his best baseball years were spent in the service. He had played for Padden’s Manchester Yankees team in the New England League the year before. The real Don Perkins, after agreeing to come to Galt, had failed to show. Padden first told Murray about Sollenburger early in the spring, but several weeks had passed before Sollenburger contacted him. By that time Padden, thinking the Terriers had missed a league deadline for signing new players, told Murray he knew of a left-hander from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, who was interested in coming to Canada, but he would have to come as Perkins. “Is he any good?” asked Murray. “You bet,” said Padden. “He’ll help our club.” That was all Murray needed to hear. He trusted Padden. So Murray phoned Sollenburger in Chambersburg and told him to come up. Sollenburger, whose options, by the summer of 1949, were limited, wasn’t prepared to quit the game yet. He still had some playing left in him. But what nobody bothered to mention was that he would have to play under the alias of Lefty Perkins. “I didn’t get there until early July,” Sollenburger recalled years later. “I didn’t know it until I got there but they had a ruling that nobody could join a team after July 1. They had some fictitious names so they gave me one.” Sollenburger’s pride was hurt somewhat, but he was willing to go along with it. The alias would allow him to play another summer. That was the important thing. Besides, as he soon learned, the Terriers lived like kings in the small southern Ontario city. Their names were household words not only in Galt but in other Intercounty cities. And it wasn’t as if Murray and the Terriers were the only ones guilty of signing players under fictitious names. Many of the teams did it. In 1950 Murray signed Bill Horne to a Terrier contract. Horne didn’t want to coast on his famous father’s coattails, nor did he need the pressure that came automatically with his real last name: Hornsby. With his father’s permission, he became, that summer in Galt, Bill Horne. The only people who knew that Rogers Hornsby was his father were Gus Murray and a couple of other Terrier executives. Gus enjoyed his weekly chats with Rogers Hornsby, a legend who was regarded as one of the greatest players of all time. The senior Hornsby was interested in the progress of his son, Bill, and was always eager to hear from Murray. In 1950 the Brantford Red Sox gave a player an alias, signing a young man known as Pedro Juarez, whose real name was Preston Gomez. Brantford president Larry Pennell, a lawyer, said it was all perfectly legal. “He could have called himself Smith and it would have been okay,” Pennell said. “We had his outright release. 146 Terrier Town—Summer of ’49 [3.141.35.60] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...