Terrier Town: Summer of ’49

Tulsa Tommy Warren

333 Tulsa Tommy Warren T OMMY WARREN DIDN’T STAY LONG IN GALT AFTER THE season ended. The day after our final loss, Warren deposited a large sum of money at the Imperial Bank. Bill Gregg, the bank manager, alerted Murray to Warren’s situation. When Warren asked Gus to sign his release papers in preparation for his return to Oklahoma, Murray refused. There was no way Warren should have had that kind of money. Besides, he had heard stories about that missed catch in the seventh game. So Warren had someone else sign the release papers to take the money back across the border, and then he was gone. He had not asked Murray about the prospect of playing for the Terriers in 1950. After he failed to show in Tulsa, where trouble was waiting for him, the authorities began a search. His whereabouts were unaccounted for. When he had arrived in Galt, no one knew that less than a month before he left Tulsa that spring, Warren had been in serious trouble with the law. In early March he had been arrested by his former boss, Tulsa sheriff George Blaine, and charged on a felony count of obtaining money under false pretenses. The arrest had drawn a good deal of publicity because Warren, a hometown star—he had graduated from Tulsa Central High School and then enlisted in the navy the day the United States entered World War II—and deputy sheriff, no less, was well-known around town. Kids looked up to him. People respected him solely because of his baseball ability. Many liked to rub shoulders with him, if only to say they knew the former major-leaguer. Baseball, Warren knew, could carry a man a long way in life. For one thing, being a star player meant there were certain advantages that came to him. Doors were opened, whereas without baseball, he knew they would have been shut solid. On March 24, not long after Warren was first arrested, two new charges were laid for alleged fake car deals. The trial was set to take place in district court in April, which would give Warren time, he thought, to head off to Galt for the home opener. But State crown attorney Elmer Adams had what he believed to be a strong case. Adams’s plan to set all three cases against Warren on the next district court jury docket was announced shortly after Warren pleaded innocent to the two new embezzlement charges in common pleas court. Two Tulsa residents had lost thousands to Warren’s schemes. Lee R. Eller was reportedly swindled out of $13,800, while Warren W. Fulton lost $2,200 in another shady deal. The two new charges followed demands by four used-car dealers and a tavern operator that additional charges be filed against Warren covering part of the $20,000 they reportedly lost to him. Warren was accused of promising his victims new cars that were never delivered. But Warren, who had been released on $1,500 bond paid by professional bondsman C.B. McAllister on the first charge, pleaded innocent before common pleas judge H.E. Chambers. McAllister now put up two new thousand-dollar bonds for the popular pitcher. Preliminary hearings were scheduled for the following Monday, but Warren waived his right to the hearings on all three charges and Adams was ready to prosecute the best of the three cases first for the opening trial. It was customary for prosecutors, when a defendant was slated for more than one trial on a docket, to try one and strike the others for trial on a later docket. One charge alleged that Warren, acting as agent for Elder on February 4, “unlawfully, willfully , wrongfully, fraudulently and feloniously” appropriated $6,600 entrusted to him by Elder. Elder told Adams that he lost a total of $13,800 to Warren in two car deals and sought to file two charges, but Adams decided to file one charge for Elder and one for Fulton. Fulton claimed that Warren bilked him out of $2,200 which he entrusted to the former deputy sheriff. But there were other victims in the car-deal racket who were indicating that they, too, might file charges later. 334 Terrier Town—Summer of ’49 When Warren was first charged in February, the thirty-year-old Tulsa native was the acting deputy sheriff in Tulsa. Gilbert Asher...