Roswell Higginbotham, star athlete of Texas A & M college and minor league ballplayer, served with the US Navy in WWII and lost his life on this day in 1943.
Roswell G. Higginbotham, known as “Little Hig,” first gained prominence as an outstanding backfield football player at Sherman High School, Texas, and went on to become a renowned football and baseball player at Texas A&M from 1917 to 1920. In his junior year, he pitched a no-hitter against the University of Texas, and was a football All-Southwest Conference back in 1919 and 1920.
Following in the footsteps of his brother Graly, Higginbotham left Texas A&M in 1920 to start a career in professional baseball.1 He was signed by the St. Louis Cardinals and attended spring training in 1921 at Orange, Texas, before being assigned to the Paris Snappers of the Class D Texas-Oklahoma League. Batting in the number two spot for fiery manager Earl “Red” Snapp, the young second baseman hit .301 and led the league with 53 stolen bases.
Higginbotham was back with the Snappers in 1922, and his brother Graly was in the same league as player/manager with the Sherman Red Sox. Higginbotham, who played shortstop that year, batted .315 in 96 games, leading the league with 36 doubles, as the Snappers clinched their second successive league title in a season that ended August 6, due to a railroad strike. One advantage of the early season finish was that Higginbotham was called up by the Fort Worth Panthers of the Class A Texas League. On August 25, 1922, he made his first appearance for the Panthers, playing shortstop and going hitless in two trips to the plate. He played one more game before the end of the season.
Higginbotham, however, turned his back on professional baseball after 1922. It was a time when there was often more money to be made with semi-pro teams, and he played with Thurber of the West Texas Oil Belt League during the summer, while coaching football at Austin College in the winter. In 1927, he accepted a position as freshman athletic coach at Texas A&M, and in 1928, aged 29, he made a surprising return to professional baseball. Red Snapp — his manager at Paris back in 1922 — was manager and part-owner of the San Angelo Red Snappers of the newly-formed Class D West Texas League, and encouraged Higginbotham to join the club. Batting in his familiar number two spot, but playing the outfield rather than the infield, he played 81 games and hit .286 with 10 home runs as the Red Snappers clinched the league title. They went on to defeat the Abilene Aces, three games to two, in the playoffs, before stumbling against the Palestine Pals of the Lone Star League in a dual championship playoff series. On September 2—in a game against the Pals that was to be one of Higginbotham’s last games in professional baseball — he hit three singles.
Higginbotham continued to coach freshman football and varsity baseball at Texas A&M, and produced two championship baseball teams including the school’s first ever Southwest Conference title in 1931, and another in 1934. In 1936, Southern Methodist University in Dallas began playing baseball again, after having dropped the sport during the early Depression years, and Higginbotham was hired to coach the team as well as the freshman football team.
He remained at Southern Methodist until April 1943, when, at the age of 44, he enlisted in the Navy. Lieutenant Junior Grade Higginbotham was stationed at Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, but two weeks after his arrival he underwent an emergency abdominal operation at the naval hospital. Higginbotham never recovered from the surgery. He died on May 23, 1943 and is buried at West Hill Cemetery in Sherman, Texas.
“I have met many of his former Southern Methodist players,” said his grandson Scott Higginbotham, “and have heard nothing but great things. They tell me he was strict, and extremely fair. All had the highest respect. I would have loved to have known him.”
Roswell Higginbotham was buried in Sherman, Texas, and survived by his wife, Margaret, and their son, Bobby. In 1973, he was elected to the Texas A&M Athletic Hall of Fame.
While more than 500 ballplayers have lost their lives in military service not all have been isolated incidents. On a number of occasions, a military baseball team, usually in transit from one place to another, has suffered fatalities. Here is the sixth of a seven part series describing some of these tragedies.
Dutch Harbor Tragedy - 1947
In August 1947, the Dutch Harbor Army-Navy all-star softball team. (made up of seven Navy players from the Dutch Harbor Naval Operating Base, Alaska, and six Army players from nearby Fort Mears) were playing in an Alaska-wide tournament held at Kodiak on Kodiak Island. Team players included Y2C William R. Loftus (an amateur outfielder from Omaha, Nebraska), T/5 Delmar E. Nowak of Alpena, Michigan, T/5 Angus MacKay of Detroit and M/Sgt. Jacob R. Swander (a 12-year Army-man from East Altoona, Pennsylvania). Swander's 3-year-old son had been scheduled to make the trip with his father because the team's catcher had a broken thumb and couldn't play. At the last minute, the catcher decided to go and Swander's son lost his seat on the plane to Kodiak Island.
After the tournament finished, the 13-man team left Kodiak on August 6, at 0626 hours to make the 600-mile journey to Dutch Harbor aboard a U.S. Navy Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina flying boat. The PBY had a crew of five plus two other Navy passengers as well as the team. Pilots Lt (jg) William H. Zeigler and Lt (jg) Nave A. Fuliehan made their last report at 1045 hours about 150 miles from Dutch Harbor. After that, the PBY was never seen or heard from again.
A major search was conducted in the hope that the plane might have made a safe landing in sheltered waters along the route, with its radio damaged. Joining the search were transient aircraft and military planes from Fort Randall, Fort Richardson, Kodiak and Adak. The Navy cargo ship USS Sussex, enroute to Adak, was sent to the area to direct the surface operations, in which Coast Guard vessels and the Navy fleet tug USS Potawatomi participated.
All searches failed to locate anything that might indicate what happened to the PBY. A year later, with still no trace of the plane or passengers, all 20 passengers were declared dead. Ironically, many of the Navy personnel were due to have been discharged from service three weeks after the tournament. Some years later, wreckage that washed ashore at St. George Island, Alaska, is believed to have come from this plane.
"As long as the game endures, it will bow in silent tribute to William John Hebert and others like him who have died in order that we might live in freedom."
The Sporting News, November 19, 1942
William J. "Billy" Hebert was born in Stockton, California on December 20, 1919 - the only child of Mr and Mrs George Hebert. The scrappy little infielder's diamond talents were first showcased with the Karl Ross post American Legion team. In 1936, his final year in American Legion ball he captained the team.
Hebert was a confident young man who believed in his abilities, and despite being only 16 he managed to convince San Francisco Seals' manager Lefty O'Doul to give him a tryout. Although Hebert was told to come back after he graduated from high school he made a favorable impression. "I saw a kid today who will make a star some day," Seals' publicist and former major league pitcher Walter Mails told the San Francisco Examiner after Hebert's tryout.
In the winter of 1937, Hebert traveled to San Francisco to play in the Seals Stadium League - a high level semi-pro league that played on Sundays and featured many players with professional experience. Hebert played second base and led off for the Dan P Maher club, a team sponsored by a local paint company. "I never saw a ball player who had such a dirty uniform," recalled Pete Deas, the team's shortstop, in an interview with baseball author Tony Salin. "He chewed tobacco and he'd spit tobacco juice on his hands and rub it on the front of his uniform. He always seemed to be sliding into a base or diving for a ground ball. He was one of the first guys I ever saw who would slide head-first into a base."
Hebert had an impressive season and in 1939 Cincinnati Reds' scout Bob Grogan signed him to a professional contract. He was to get $75 a month. The second baseman was assigned to the Ogden Reds of the Pioneer League where fellow middle-infielder Pete Deas from the Dan P Maher team would also play. "We were a good combination," Deas told Salin. "We worked well together - double plays, force plays, who would cover second on steals, things like that."
The home opener for Ogden was a 26-15 pounding of Salt Lake City. Hebert was 4-for-6 that day with a triple and a grand slam. He finished the year with a .302 batting average and 52 RBIs. "We had a friendly bet about who would have the highest batting average," Deas explained to Tony Salin. "I hit .300. So I paid him the money." The bet was for one dollar.
In 1940 Billy Hebert's contract was picked up by the Oakland Oaks. He played through spring training but was released before the season began. He did not play orgainized baseball in 1940 but found time to fall in love and get married. Hebert would be divorced before he entered military service.
Hebert was signed by the Merced Bears of the California League for the 1941 season. He had an exceptional year batting .328 in 130 games to lead the team. He led the league in double plays by second basemen and a bright future in baseball seemed to be on the horizon for the 21-year-old.
But shortly after the season ended Hebert entered military service. Like his father, Billy Hebert was a metalsmith, and this was a trade urgently needed by the armed forces. Hebert joined the Navy and trained at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California before moving on to the Naval Air Station at Norfolk, Virginia. On July 14, 1942, Aviation Metalsmith Third Class (AM3C) Hebert left for the Pacific.
Guadalcanal is situated in the middle of the long Solomon Islands chain, northeast of Australia. The location of the Solomons made them key to Japanese plans for cutting off shipping between the United States and Australia. In 1942 the Japanese started occupying all of the islands, Guadalcanal was to be a major air base that would constantly threaten Allied shipping. The Allies, aware of the Japanese plans, decided to occupy Guadalcanal first and a muddy airstrip was captured from unarmed Japanese construction workers and renamed Henderson Field. The airfield would be the main focus of the Guadalcanal campaign.
AM3C Hebert was assigned to Henderson Field to help keep Naval airplanes serviceable. It was a dangerous place to be and repeatedly came under attack from the Japanese. When the battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Kongo and Haruna, bombarded Henderson Field the night of October 13/14, their 14-inch shells all but destroyed the place and most of its airplanes. It was probably during this bombardment that Billy Hebert sustained the injuries from which he died on October 21, 1942.
"The Stockton, Cal., lad won't answer the umpire's call when it sounds again throughout the land," wrote The Sporting News on November 19. "But his memory will be cherished long in the annals of the game as the first to lay down his life so that both his country and the sport to which he dedicated himself might survive."
Many were saddened by the death of Hebert. "I was in Milne Bay, New Guinea, during the war when I heard he'd died," says his former double play partner Pete Deas. "Mother and Dad sent me the clipping. They figured I'd want to know. It was a shock. Very sad."
Frank Enright, a boyhood friend of Hebert's, was in North Africa serving as a private in the Army engineers when he heard the news. He sent a letter to the Stockton Record.
"Billy Hebert is the kind of man who should be remembered at home. I would like to see a plaque erected in his memory at Oak Park where he played so many Legion ball games. I am enclosing $10 to start the ball rolling. I would make it more only I haven't got it."
Another friend, Dario Bella, serving with the Navy at Farragut, Idaho, added $5 and soon the sports commission of the Stockton Chamber of Commerce organized a drive to erect a flagpole and bronze memorial tablet in centerfield at Oak Park in honor of Hebert. The Chamber encouraged $1 donations from friends to fund the $250 project. Within a few weeks they had more than $700.
On Memorial Day, May 30, 1943, in a moving ceremony, the flag was raised on a new flagpole in centerfield at the Oak Park ballpark to the sound of the Army Air Force band from Stockton Field. A bronze plaque, lovingly crafted by Billy's father, was unveiled at the base of the flagpole. "It will remain as a permanent record of a war hero's sacrifice," wrote John Peri, the Stockton Record's sports editor. The ceremony was followed by a game between Hebert's old American Legion post team, Karl Ross and the Bill Erwin post team from Oakland.
In 1951, Oak Park was renamed Billy Hebert Field. It burned down two years later and the new ball park, still called Billy Hebert Field, is the one that stands today in the grounds of Oak Park. But in 1967, when the fences were moved in, the memorial to Hebert was hidden - 24 years after Hebert's death no-one really noticed. Not until 1992, when two of Hebert's old friends, Joe Souza and Rab Longacre discovered the plaque overgrown by weeds did a new drive start to have it relocated. On November 11, that year, the plaque George Hebert had inscribed for his dead son was relocated in front of the grandstand.
Billy Hebert, the first professional baseball player to be killed in WWII, is buried at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.
His .408 batting average for the Olean Oilers in 1940, made Herb Fash a fan-favorite. But a freak accident aboard an aircraft carrier would claim his life five years later.
Charles H. "Herb" Fash was born in East St. Louis, Illinois and was at East St. Louis Senior High School before enrolling at St. Louis University. For three years with the Billikens basketball team under coach Mike Nyikos (former Notre Dame star), Fash was an all-Missouri Valley selection and held the conference record for foul shots. Captaining the team in his senior year he played 20 games and scored 174 points.
At 6-foot-2, Fash was also an outstanding first baseman and broke into professional baseball with the St. Louis Cardinals’ organization immediately following graduation in 1936, joining the Union City Greyhounds of the Class D Kitty League. Fash batted .263 with 44 RBIs in 101 games in his rookie year and was brought up to the Columbus Red Birds of the Class AA American Association at the end of the season. He was assigned to the Decatur Commodores of the Class B Three-I League in 1937, where he played 26 games and batted .315, before being assigned to the Daytona Beach Islanders of the Class D Florida State League. In 25 games with the Islanders he batted .247.
Not surprisingly, Fash also played professional basketball during the winter of 1937–1938 with the traveling New York Shamrocks, a team that played every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
The big first baseman was with the Taft Cardinals of the newly formed Class D Texas Valley League in 1938, where he batted .345 with 14 home runs, an impressive 132 RBIs and a league-best 54 doubles to earn honorable mention on the league all-star selection.
With all teams failing to break even in 1938, the Texas Valley League disbanded after its inaugural season, and Fash split the 1939 season between the New Iberia Cardinals of the Class D Evangeline League and the Mobile Shippers of the Class B Southeastern League, batting .283 in 76 games for the Cardinals and .337 in 47 games for the Shippers.
Fash joined the Brooklyn Dodgers’ organization in 1940, and was with the Fayetteville Angels of the Class D Arkansas-Missouri League as a 24-year-old player-manager. He was batting .356 when the league collapsed on June 30, and the Dodgers sent him to the Olean Oilers of the Class D PONY League, where he became a fan-favorite with the upstate New York state team. His superb .408 batting average and excellent defensive play in 66 games helped lift the Oilers from the basement of the league to the top spot, and he was described by the Olean Times-Herald as “the most popular man to wear an Oiler uniform.” The Oilers went on to beat the Hamilton Red Wings, three games to one, in the playoffs and clinched the championship by defeating Batavia, four games to two.
Fash was sold to Elmira of the Class A Eastern League in September 1940 but was with Durham Bulls of the Class B Piedmont League for 1941. With the team on its way to a championship season; he was batting .253 when he broke his leg sliding across home plate in July.
Fash entered military service with the Navy the following year and served as a lieutenant junior grade on the aircraft carrier USS Hancock (CV-19) in the Pacific. In January 1945, the Hancock’s planes struck blows at Luzon in the Philippines and Formosa (now Taiwan).
On January 21, 1945, at around 1:30 P.M., a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, returning from a sortie, made a routine landing on the Hancock, taxied and disintegrated in a blinding explosion as one of its 500-pound bombs detonated. Fifty-two sailors were killed — including Herb Fash. He was buried at sea and is remembered at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
While more than 500 ballplayers have lost their lives in military service not all have been isolated incidents. On a number of occasions, a military baseball team, usually in transit from one place to another, has suffered fatalities. Here is the first of a seven part series describing some of these tragedies.
Tragedy of the USS Maine - 1898
In Florida in December 1897, the baseball team of the battleship USS Maine defeated a team from the cruiser USS Marblehead, 18-3, to earn the title Navy baseball champions. Led by engine stoker and pitcher William Lambert of Hampton, Virginia, the only black player on the team who was described as “a master of speed, curves, and control,” the team’s next game was scheduled with an all-star squad in Havana, Cuba.
On February 15, 1898, Marine Corps Fifer C.H. Newton, the ship’s bugler and the ball team’s third baseman, blew taps as the Maine bobbed listlessly in Havana Harbor. Shortly afterwards, the Maine blew up, killing 261 of the crew and all but the baseball team’s right fielder, John Bloomer. In addition to Newton, the bugler, the ballplayers killed that evening were Ordinary Seaman William H. Gorman (second base) of Boston, Landsman Charles Hauck (centerfield) of Brooklyn, Landsman William L. Hough (first base) of New York, pitcher William Lambert, Apprentice First Class Benjamin L. Marsden (catcher) of Jersey City, New Jersey, Landsman John Merz (shortstop) of Brooklyn, and Landsman William H. Tinsman (leftfield) of East Deering, Maine. Also killed were the team’s manager Gunner’s Mate First Class Charles F. W. Eiermann of New York, and Seaman Leon Bonner of New York, the manager’s assistant. In addition, to lose his life aboard the Maine that night although not a member of the ship’s team was Yeoman Third Class John H. Shillington of Chicago, who had played shortstop with Notre Dame.
Two months after the loss of the USS Maine, April 25, 1898 saw the start of the Spanish-American War, during which the rallying cry, “Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!” was frequently heard.
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