Couple Recalls Baseball Wedding

Walter Brown can’t say he never made it to first base with his wife of 50 years. Actually, Brown made a home run.

The major league baseball player from Bemus Point and the former Frances R. Burroughs of Mayville were married at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 23, 1939, on home plate at Laird Park field in Kilgore, Texas, before the start of the Kilgore Boomers – Henderson Oilers game.

Brown was under contract as a right-handed pitcher for the Boomers, a farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals.

A Kilgore newspaper clipping of the event, found in the Brown’s scrapbook at their Bemus Point home, reads “Kilgore Twirler Marries Hometown Sweetheart at Home Base.”

“That was his nickname in the East Texas League,” says Mrs. Brown.

The Kilgore baseball club footed the wedding bill, she says, noting her bouquet was shaped to resemble a baseball diamond.

“It was all white gardenias,” she said.

Mrs. Brown says her brother, Chet Burroughs, took her to Kilgore and gave her away at the wedding.

“He wanted to watch Brown pitch the night before,” she says.

Describing her wedding ceremony she says, “We walked from the pitcher’s mound to home plate where I was married.”

Burroughs was best man and his fiance, Pauline Anderson, was maid of honor.

After they were married, the Boomers made an arch of bats with the Oilers and the Browns were escorted into the grandstand.

“There were 3,500 fans in the bleachers and I didn’t know one of them,” she says. “They had three box seats saved for us. There were gifts like you wouldn’t believe.” There was also a three-tiered wedding cake and a sign that read “The Browns Choose Buick.”

“The coach said he didn’t know whether to let me play,” says Brown who became a spectator that day. After the game. Mrs. Brown says there was a brand new Buick waiting for them outside the stadium.

“They took us out to a nightclub where we had champagne and dinner and brought us back to the hotel. We had the bridal suite for a week,” says Mrs. Brown.

Asked how he came into professional baseball, Brown, who pitched for his school team, says after graduating from Bemus Point High School in 1933, he didn’t find much employment available.

Wanting to play baseball, he says he wrote to the St. Louis Cardinals and found a place in the league in 1935.

“They told me if I qualified, they would pay my travel expenses,” he says, explaining that he was invited to the tryouts.

“There were 300 in the training camp” noted Mrs. Brown. Each week they eliminated people “When they finished, there was a white and a brown team left,”she says.

“We ended up playing in the same league,” Brown says, adding that his first contract with the Cardinals was in Bentonville, Arkansas. The next three years took him to Daytona Beach, Fla., Union Springs, Ark., and Columbus, Ga., until he ended up in Kilgore 1939.

“It was tough, a lot of work and a lot of moving around,” says Brown, who had to train and exercise to keep in shape.

That year, Brown says, the team won the Texas League playoffs and the next year he was back in Columbus. Mrs. Brown traveled with him until they had their first child in 1942. She then moved back to Chautauqua County.

“I lived with my parents in Mayville,” she says, until the couple bought a home in Bemus Point in 1945, at which time Brown was drafted and played ball while serving in the U. S. Navy.

Brown came back home the next year, he says, “when my third son was born.”

He says the highlight of his career came the year he played with the St. Louis Browns National League team.

“I think my turning point was in 1947 when I pitched a no-hitter against Casey Stengel,” says Brown.

He says he became a relief pitcher after that.

“Some weeks I pitched every game,” he says.

Brown was one of the first 10 people to enter the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame when it was organized in 1982.

“I was inducted with Russ Diethrick,” he says.

After retiring from baseball, he worked for the New York State Department of Conservation fish hatcheries at Prendergast Point for 25 years. While at the fish hatchery, Brown says he played semi-pro baseball.

At 74, he still takes part in local baseball activities.

“Just two weeks ago, I threw the first ball for Little League in the Town of Ellery,” he says.