1961 Owls relive days on the field

These boys of summer may be in the autumn of their lives, but they still had something of a spring in their step as they headed out to the mound between games of a double-header Saturday night at the Statesville High School ballpark.
A starting line-up’s worth of players from the 1961 Statesville Owls of the old Western Carolina League all had plenty of memories and enough stories to write fill a book.
There was the day Dickie Simpson hit a monstrous homerun that cleared the centerfield fence by such an incredible distance that describing it as a “tape-measure” blast would be to minimize its lure. Simpson’s shot would end up being compared with those hit by baseball legends Jimmie Foxx and Josh Gibson, who had made stops in Statesville during the once-popular barnstorming tours.
“That thing landed in a fork in the road out there somewhere, the V, where the road splits off,” recalled Vito Porta of Simpson’s bomb. Porta was the Owls' third baseman and he hit 10 homers himself that year. But the record books credit him with only nine.
“With one of my homeruns in Lexington, a kid got the ball and threw it back over the fence,” Porta said. “I was just jogging around the bases and they threw the ball in and tagged me out at home. I guess they gave me credit for a triple.”
Lexington and Statesville developed something of a rivalry that year: one that more than once ended up with boys being boys.One of the brawls nipped in the bud the promising pitching career of Walter Darton.
Darton, of California, was 4-0 on the year for the Owls and had gotten the call to move up to Triple A Dallas-Fort Worth Rangers and was sent to the hill for a tune-up game against Lexington.
Darton said he had struck one of the Lexington players out three times and, in the hitter’s fourth at-bat, may have come a little bit inside with what some might call “chin music.”“
The guy came running out at me,” Darton recalled. “The next thing I know, I’m on the ground.”
He had torn the ligaments in his pitching arm and his career as a pitcher was, for all intents and purposes, over. He never pitched in Texas.
But in the kind of strange circumstances that can only happen in minor league baseball, Darton was called on to call balls and strikes in a game against Salisbury. The umpires apparently got lost on the way to the game so one player was chosen from each team to ump. Darton got the plate assignment and is believed by some to be the first black umpire in the Western Carolina League and one of the first black umps in minor league history.
Darton, Simpson and Dave Best and one or two other players were African American at a time when segregation and Jim Crow were still the law of the land. The men recall going to movies at the old Playhouse Theater in downtown Statesville.
“The white players would head around to the front and go in and they sent us to the side to go upstairs,” Best said. “And then after a while they would yell up to us, ‘Hey did you guys make in’ and ‘What movie are you guys watching up there?’” added Darton.
Best also told of a deal offered by a local café in which a player could earn a free breakfast if he hit a ball to area where a sign advertisement for the café was located in centerfield, if the player ended up making a double.“I hit the sign 22 times that year,” Best said. “And I got zero free breakfasts. None of us got a free breakfast.”
Simpson said that his mother warned him when he left for North Carolina about segregation.
“She told me, ‘Don’t go down there and get yourself in trouble,’” said Simpson, whose baseball career included stints with six Major League teams over the course of seven seasons.
Two of the players from the ’61 Owls – Edwin “Squirrel” Thomas and Jerry Fox – live in Statesville and are regulars at games played by the current Owls.
Thomas was a better-than-average hitter and pitcher. In 1961, he hit .283 for the Owls and had a 12-5 pitching record.
“I was the oldest guy on the team,” he recalled. “And I ended up coaching when the coach got thrown out of the game, which happened quite a lot.”
George Bryson was a shortstop on the ’61 team but even as a young player he was interested in Hollywood. For much of the past 50 years he has been a stuntman and double for actors in television and movies.He said in one Western film he played both the cowboy and the Indian in the same scene.“It was right there – click-click. There’s the guy shooting the Indian and there is the cavalry or some officer shooting back at the Indian and they’re me.
”He said when he was asked to come back to Statesville, though, he quickly accepted.
“I had to come back,” he said. “I’m doing pretty well in my business but I had to come back and see it again. And I’m glad I did.”
Pitcher Alan Flitcraft went 5-1 for the ’61 Owls but one of those wins was a no-hitter against the Newton-Conover Twins.
“You get to be my age and you can’t remember what you had for lunch,” Flitcraft said. “But I still remember that game.”
The Owls and the Rangers were the only two minor league teams affiliated with the Los Angeles Angels in their inaugural season. The Angels had been granted an expansion franchise just months before the start of the 1961 season.
The players were assembled in part by Angels aficionado Stephen Smith with the help of local historians Steve Hill and Bob Moose.