Have you met Pete Walker?
C.R. Nelson/For the Observer-Reporter
C.R. Nelson/for the Observer-Reporter
By C.R. Nelson
If there were trading cards for star fast-pitch softball pitchers, Pete Walker would have one.
Standing by home plate holding a ball and glove with the pitchers’ mound behind him, it was a classic pose for that card, and Pete chuckled and nodded when he saw it.
“We didn’t have cards. We barely had equipment when we were kids. No uniforms. We’d share gloves. We lived over the hill from Fairall Church on a dairy farm, and I started playing for Fairall when I was 12 – second base. I was a tall kid. I have eight brothers, and all the boys but one played ball. We’d get a game going after church in the flattest pasture we could find.”
We were meeting today at Meadowlark Park in Waynesburg, touching base with a past that Walker, at age 81, still remembers with razor clarity – every pitch and player he swung at and threw against, team names he knows by heart.
Fast-pitch softball has become the forgotten game that small-town America of the 1960s and 1970s loved to play and drive hours to watch on long summer days. The diamond is smaller than regulation baseball, and the pitcher’s mound closer to the plate. Games run seven innings to win or go forever to break a tie. But it was the way the pitches came in that made it such a fast-paced, exciting game. A good pitcher’s arm was a blur of motion – windmill windups that delivered the ball wherever that good pitcher wanted, fast, slow, curve, over and under, low and high.
It was a game learned by kids who grew up playing, fell in love with the camaraderie and competitiveness and kept playing as working men in their prime, raising families and having this kind of fun after work.
“My arm never got sore. I could pitch five games in a row and do it again the next day. People were always asking me to pitch for their team. I had a hard time saying no.”
Walker remembers seeing his first fast pitcher in Brave as a kid of 13. “Huck Tennent threw whirlwind and struck out every player. I went home and nailed a bushel basket to the chicken coop and started throwing every night after milking.”
By the time he was 16, Walker was pitching for Fairall Church. “My first game, I struck out 17 and hit 14, but I got better.”
Along with playing in the church league, Walker would play for Brave, a team with the resources of the Brave Compression Station behind them. The field got lights in 1947, and every year there were two weeks of two games a night as June slid into July. Farmers stopped putting up hay, and twenty teams would come from all over Greene County to West Virginia and Maryland. The big playoff game the last Saturday night earned the winning team $200 and the losing team $100. Hotdogs were a nickel, hamburgers a dime and life was good.
Brave dominated in the early 1960s with pitcher Bob Burgman. Brave’s tournament was the biggest draw until the Waynesburg Lions Club Tournament began in 1964, bringing huge crowds to College Field and later the Fairgrounds for a slow pitch game, then two fast-pitch games under lights.
By this time, Walker was pitching and slugging for Guthrie Trucking. The Truckers were a dream team pulled together by Jack Rush of Guthrie Trucking and Jim Moore of the Greene County Messenger. It attracted the best and most competitive players from other local teams. Moore, who played as a kid and spoke sport as a second language, made sure every team in the county, from youth to fast-pitch, got their share of newspaper coverage. His son Bret would grow up to write “Rough and Ungentlemanly Tactics” – a two-volume history of sports in Greene County.
The Truckers were on a roll for six years, with a formidably tight infield and Walker on the mound. Teammate Marty Doney still remembers, “a team we played calling us Hoovers because we vacuumed up every ball they managed to hit.”
It wasn’t easy to get a hit off of Walker. His pitches could come in anywhere in the strike zone, sometimes unbelievably slow, sometimes a blistering changeup that left batters swinging at thin air. Those years of knocking the boards off the chicken coop had paid off.
Bret Moore’s Volume 2 captures the statistical details of the fast-pitch softball era and lists the teams that Walker can still tell stories about, pitch for pitch – Burns Esso, Red Star and Jefferson Hotel, the team Doney was pulled from to join the Truckers.
When the Waynesburg Lions Club hosted the Keystone Amateur Softball Association State Tournament in 1969, teams from Waynesburg, Brave and Brownsville were a quarter of the teams competing. Sal’s Lunch of Philadelphia proved unbeatable and went on to win the World Tournament in Fresno, Calif., but the next year the Truckers were back. With Walker pitching, they played locally and then took a three-game tour around Niagara Falls, winning against American and Canadian teams. They were on their way to winning the state title with only two losses for the season when fate slipped in. Walker fractured his ankle just before the tournament, and the team had to pick up Kenny “Geech” Cross from Monroeville and Brave’s John Edgar to hurl in Altoona, where that year’s state tournament was held.
The Truckers took the KASA trophy, and the community pitched in to raise the funds it would take to get them to Fresno and back.
A clipping in Doney’s scrapbook thanks the Jefferson Legion for sponsoring him, the “slugging second baseman,” with a $100 donation to help finance the trip.
The team lost a close 2-1 game to the eventual world winner Houston, Texas
but were back as the Triangle Truckers in 1971 with another great season.
Walker was back on the mound and was 16-1 when the team finished the season 23-7 to qualify for the playoffs. Walker pitched a perfect game in the semi-finals and was named the tournament MVP, but the team finished second after losing to Nazareth 2-1 in the finals.
Winning wasn’t everything but playing the game certainly was for Walker. As the seasons rolled by, there were always games, sometimes into West Virginia when fathers came home from work and jumped in cars with teammates and hit breakneck speeds to get there.
“I used to take my daughter Sally with me, and she’d fall asleep in the dugout while we played,” Walker admitted. “She did hear some words that kids aren’t supposed to hear, but she really loved going.”
Walker hung up his glove in 1984 after winning the 100 Tournament but was enticed back to the mound one more time while drilling wells in Virginia in 1985. “This guy comes in, said, ‘I understand you play fast-pitch softball. Well, I play in Missouri, and we have a tournament coming up.'” Walker started pitching and got his
arm back and, on Labor Day, helped win the tournament. “I was most valuable pitcher and most valuable player. I beat the cover off that ball.”
Son Pete Jr. played his share of baseball in college, but it would be Sally who was part of the cultural shift that turned fast-pitch softball into what it is today – a world-class game for girls and women.
Waynesburg’s six-team Girls Baseball League of 1974 played for a few seasons before becoming a fast-pitch softball circuit. Girls softball became a WPIAL sport in 1972 and caught on fast with girls who grew up watching their dads play on countless country fields from May until fall. Now it was their turn.
When Sally graduated from Waynesburg Central High School in 1978, her proud dad noted that “she got a full ride to WVU” and then went to the University of Illinois’ Laboratory High School to coach girls basketball and become the athletic director. After retiring, she now works for the National Collegiate Athletic Association as a regional advisor for the Softball Umpire Program, which trains and assigns post-season umpires. Walker also coordinates umpires for the Big Ten and Big Twelve college and university conferences.
So what was it like being Pete Walker’s daughter?
“I love it! Softball was my life. I followed him around to every game. He was a great player because he could pitch – and hit too. There was even a game when they needed another player, and I got to play right field. He said, ‘Charlie, get out there and play!’ That was pretty awesome. I was 15, and a guy saw me play and asked me to play on his women’s slow pitch traveling team. I’m very fortunate that the life I’ve lived has always involved softball.”