Sports – Alan E. Hunter

Baseball, Politics, Pop Culture, Presidents, Sports

Foul Ball!

June 3, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original publish date May 15, 2025.

https://weeklyview.net/2025/05/15/foul-ball/

Last week, I ran a story about Cleveland Indians phenom Bob Feller’s pitched foul ball that hit and injured his mother during a game against the White Sox at old Comiskey Park in Chicago. That got me thinking about other foul ball stories and legends I’d heard about. Growing up, I spent a lot of time at old Bush Stadium on 16th Street in Indy. My dad, Robert Eugene Hunter, a 1954 Arsenal Tech grad, had worked there as a kid selling Cracker Jack/popcorn in the stands during the Victory Field years. He recalled with pleasure seeing Babe Ruth in person there and could name his favorites from those great Pittsburgh Pirates farm club teams from the late 1940s/early 1950s. I can’t tell you how many RCA Nights at Bush Stadium he took me to back in the 1970s during the team’s affiliation with the Cincinnati Reds Big Red Machine. During those outings, nothing was more exciting than chasing foul balls.

Not all foul balls are fun adventures, though; some are crazy, and others are just plain scary. Growing up, I loved reading about the exploits of those players who played before World War I. Back in those days, baseballs were considered team property and quite expensive. Fans were expected to return any ball hit into the stands (including homeruns), and balls hit out of the stadium were meticulously retrieved. In 1901, the National League rules committee, as a way of cutting costs, suggested fining batters for excessively fouling off pitches. Beginning in 1904, per a newly created league rule, teams posted employees in the stands whose sole job was to retrieve foul balls caught by the fans. Fans had a keen sense of humor, though, and they would often hide them from the “goons” or frustrate the hapless employees by throwing them from row to row. Sometimes, the games of keep-away in the stands were more fun to watch than the ones on the field. But those early WWI stories mostly involved the exploits of the players, not the fans. There were some characters in the league back then. Some of them are long forgotten and some made the Baseball Hall of Fame.

One of my favorite players from that hardball era was a square-jawed eccentric left-handed pitcher from the oil town of Bradford, Pa. named George Edward “Rube” Waddell (1876-1914). Rube played for 5 teams in 13 years. His lifetime 193-143 record, 2,316 strikeouts, and 2.16 ERA landed him in the Hall of Fame. And if there were a hall of fame for flakes in baseball, Rube would have been a first-ballot electee. If a plane flew above the field, Rube would stop in the middle of a game. If Rube heard the siren of a firetruck, he’d drop his glove and chase it. He once left in the middle of a game to go fishing. Opposing fans knew that Rube was easily distracted so they brought puppies to the game and held them up in the stands to throw him off. Rival teams brought puppies into the dugout for the same reason, knowing that Rube would drop his glove and run over to play with them every time. Shiny objects seemed to put Rube in a trance. His eccentric behavior led to constant battles with his managers and scuffles with bad-tempered teammates. Even though he was a standout pitcher, Rube’s foulball stories came off his bat, not out of his hand.

On August 11, 1903, the Philadelphia Athletics were visiting the Red Sox. In the seventh inning, Rube Waddell was at the plate. Waddell lifted a foul ball over the right field bleachers that landed on the roof of a Boston baked bean cannery next door. The ball rolled to a stop and became wedged in the factory’s steam whistle, which caused it to go off. It wasn’t quitting time yet, but the workers abandoned their posts, thinking it was an emergency. The employee exodus caused a giant caldron full of beans to boil over and explode. Suddenly, the ballpark was showered by scalding hot beans. Nine days before, on August 2, another foul ball off the bat of Waddell hit a spectator, supposedly igniting a box of matches in the fan’s pocket and ultimately setting the poor guy’s suit on fire and causing an uproar.

Waddell’s 1903 E107 Card.

Still, a foul ball hit by the aptly named George Burns of the Tigers in 1915 is worth mentioning in the same breath. His “scorching” foul liner struck an unlucky fan in the area of his chest pocket, where he was carrying a box of matches. The ball ignited the matches, and a soda vendor had to come to the rescue, dousing the flaming fan with bubbly to put out the fire.

**Richie Ashburn Philadelphia Phillies.**

Richie Ashburn figures in many of the best foul ball stories in baseball lore. A contact hitter, Ashburn had the ability to foul off many consecutive pitches till he found one he liked. On one occasion, he fouled off fourteen consecutive pitches against Corky Valentine of the Reds. Another time, he victimized Sal “The Barber” Maglie for “18 or 19″ fouls in one at-bat. ”After a while,” said Ashburn, “he just started laughing. That was the only time I ever saw Maglie laugh on a baseball field.” Ashburn’s bat control was such that one day he asked teammates to pinpoint a particularly offensive heckler seated five or six rows back. The next time up, Ashburn nailed the fan in the chest. On another occasion, Ashburn unintentionally injured a female fan who was the wife of a Philadelphia newspaper sports editor. Play stopped as she was given medical aid. Action resumed as the stretcher wheeled her down the main concourse, and, unbelievably, Ashburn’s next foul hit her again. Thankfully, she escaped with minor injuries.

Another notable foul ball hitter was Luke Appling, the Hall of Fame shortstop with a career batting average of .310. As the story goes, Appling once asked White Sox management for a couple of dozen baseballs, so he could autograph them and donate them to charity. Management balked, citing a cost of several dollars per baseball. Appling bought the balls from his team, then went out that day and fouled off a couple dozen balls, after which he tipped his hat toward the owner’s box. He never had to pay for charity balls again, the legend goes.

1934 Cardinals The Gashouse Gang:
Pepper Martin, Terry Moore & Ducky Medwick.

Another great foul ball story involves Pepper Martin and Joe Medwick of the St. Louis Cardinals famous Gas House Gang teams of the mid-1930s. With Martin at bat, Medwick took off from first base, intending to take third on the hit-and-run. Martin fouled the ball into the stands, and Reds catcher Gilly Campbell reflexively reached back to home plate umpire Ziggy Sears for a new ball. Then, just for fun, Campbell launched the ball down to third, where Sears, forgetting that a foul had just been hit and that he had given Campbell a new ball, called Medwick out. The Cardinals were furious, but not wanting to admit his error, Sears refused to reverse his call, and Medwick was thrown out-on a foul ball!

The great Cal Ripken Jr. made life imitate art with a foul ball in 1998. In the movie The Natural, Roy Hobbs lofts a foul ball at sportswriter Max Mercy, as Mercy sits in the stands drawing a critical cartoon of the slumping Hobbs. Baltimore Sun columnist Ken Rosenthal faced a similar wrath of the baseball gods after he wrote a column in 1998 suggesting that it might be time for Ripken to voluntarily end his streak, at that point several hundred games beyond Lou Gehrig’s old record, for the good of the team. Ripken responded by hitting a foul ball into the press box, which smashed Rosenthal’s laptop computer, ending its career. When told of his foul ball’s trajectory, Ripken responded with one word: “Sweet.”

Another sweet story involves a father and son combination. In 1999, Bill Donovan was watching his son Todd play center field for the Idaho Falls Braves of the Pioneer League. Todd made a nice diving catch and threw the ball back into the second baseman, who returned it to the pitcher. On the next pitch, a foul ball sailed into the outstretched hands of the elder Donovan. “I was like a kid when I caught it,” said the proud papa. “It made me wonder when was the last time that a father and son caught the same ball on consecutive pitches.”

One day in 1921, New York Giants fan Reuben Berman had the good fortune to catch a foul ball, or so he thought. When the ushers arrived moments later to retrieve the ball, Reuben refused to give it up, instead tossing it several rows back to another group of fans. The angered usher removed Berman from his seat, took him to the Giants’ offices, and verbally chastised him before depositing him in the street outside the Polo Grounds. An angry and humiliated Berman sued the Giants for mental and physical distress and won, leading the Giants, and eventually other teams, to change their policy of demanding foul balls be returned. The decision has come to be known as “Reuben’s Rule.”

While Berman’s case was influential, the influence had not spread as far as Philadelphia by 1922, when 11-year-old fan Robert Cotter was nabbed by security guards after refusing to return a foul ball at a Phillies game. The guards turned him over to police, who put the little tyke in jail overnight. When he faced a judge the next day, young Cotter was granted his freedom, the judge ruling, “Such an act on the part of a boy is merely proof that he is following his most natural impulses. It is a thing I would do myself.” The tide eventually changed for good, and the practice of fans keeping foul balls became entrenched. World War II was another time when patriotic fans and owners worked together to funnel the fouls off to servicemen. A ball in the Hall of Fame’s collection is even stamped “From a Polo Grounds Baseball Fan,” one of the more than 80,000 pieces of baseball equipment donated to the war effort by baseball by June 1942.

**Marine Private First Class George Benson Jr.**

One of those baseballs may well have been involved in one of the strangest of all foul ball stories. In a military communique datelined “somewhere in the South Pacific,” the story is told of a foul ball hit by Marine Private First Class George Benson Jr., which eventually traveled 15 miles. Benson’s batting practice foul looped up about 40 feet in the air, where it smashed through the windshield of a landing plane. The ball hit the pilot in the face, fracturing his jaw and knocking him unconscious. A passenger, Marine Corporal Robert J. Holm, muttering a prayer, pulled back on the throttle and prevented the plane from crashing, though he had never flown before. The pilot recovered momentarily and brought the plane to a landing at the next airstrip, 15 miles away.

In 1996, at the age of 71, former President Jimmy Carter made a barehanded catch of a foul ball hit by San Diego’s Ken Caminiti, while attending a Braves game. “He showed good hands,” said Braves catcher Javy Lopez.

With foul balls by this time an undeniable right for fans at the ballpark, what are your actual chances of catching a foul ball at a game? Well, to start with, the average baseball is in play for six pitches these days, which makes it sound as though there will be many chances to catch a foul ball in each game. While comprehensive statistics are not available, various newspapers have sponsored studies which, uncannily, seem quite often to come down to 22 or 23 fouls into the stands per game.

That seems like a healthy number until you look at average major league attendance at games. In the year 2000, the average game was attended by 29,938 fans. With 23 fouls per game, that works out to a 1 in 1,302 chance of catching a foul ball. With numbers like that, no wonder it feels so special to catch a foul ball. Nevertheless, those who yearn to catch a foul ball can improve their chances. I have listed some tips to help you bring home that elusive foul ball. Good luck!

ABA-American Basketball Association, Black History, Indianapolis, Sports

The Dust Bowl Indianapolis Indiana.

February 9, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Published November 14, 2024.

https://weeklyview.net/2024/11/14/the-dust-bowl/

This column first appeared on March 9, 2012.

https://www.digitalindy.org/digital/collection/twv/id/2583/rec/145

**Oscar Robertson Crispus Attucks High School.**

It cannot be denied that Basketball is connected to our state like a child to its mother. Whether you played it, watched it, or avoided it, you cannot deny that basketball is what Indiana is known for. Go ahead and make your argument for the Indy 500, but you can’t play Indy 500 in your driveway in the pouring rain or by the light of the moon.

For most Hoosiers, basketball conjures up images of Bobby Plump sinking a last-second jumper, Reggie Miller raining 3-pointers from never-never land, or Neto, Roger, Mel, Freddie, Big Mac, Dr. Dunk, and Billy tearing through opponents toward another ABA title. Still, others believe that Indiana basketball is best defined by the greatest all-around pre-Michael Jordan player to ever lace up a pair of Chuck Taylors, Oscar “The Big O” Robertson.

**Crispus Attucks High School State Champion Basketball Team.**

Any Hoosier basketball fan recalls those great Robertson-led Crispus Attucks high school teams that won back-to-back state championships in 1955 and 1956. For those readers unfamiliar with Crispus Attucks, it was the only all-black high school in Indianapolis. That 1955 team gained fame by becoming the first all-black school in the nation to win a state title as well as becoming the city of Indianapolis’ first state champion. Robertson led Crispus Attucks to another championship in 1956 and became the first Indiana high school team to complete an entire season undefeated. Okay, okay, you remember all that. But do you remember the Dust Bowl?

**1980 image of Lockefield Gardens looking south. The Dust Bowl would have been near the top and center of this image at the south end of Lockefield** Image Courtesy IUPUI University Archives.

In the 1950s, the city had THE toughest basketball proving ground in the country, known as “The Dust Bowl.” Located near Indiana Avenue in Lockefield Gardens (the first public housing project in the city built by the WPA in the 1930s), it was a makeshift basketball court carved out of a flat, grassless vacant lot. It earned it’s colorful nickname due to the huge dust clouds that would kick up every afternoon at 3 p.m. The brown cloud would envelop the area in a thick choking blanket of fine windswept dirt. The failed social experiment known as Lockefield Gardens consisted of a 748-unit housing project bounded on the north by Indiana Avenue, on the south by North Street, on the east by Blake Street, and on the west by Locke Street. During the dark days of segregation, it was home to many poor black and minority families. Today, much of the area is part of the IUPUI campus.

When no regulation basketball could be had, kids flocked to the court with tightly wound socks in place of a real basketball. Because Robertson’s family could not afford a basketball, he developed his shot by tossing tennis balls and rubber band bound rags into a peach basket behind his family’s home. This temporarily packed earth court would spawn the prototype player for a new breed of urban hoopsters. Until this era, basketball in Indiana was mostly the domain of rural, white farm boys shooting from grass surfaced courts at metal hoops nailed to the sides of barns. The Dust Bowl changed all that and a more innovative, fast paced aggressive game was born. It was here that future high school all-star, College All-American and NBA MVP Oscar Robertson learned to play the game. The Big O would change the sport, and race relations in his home city, forever.

Although undoubtedly a painful memory for Hoosiers of that era, Robertson and his Crispus Attucks teammates broke down the “air of superiority” that most white hoops fans felt towards their all-black school opposition. There was a feeling that Attucks could never compete with traditional white dominated powerhouse teams from Muncie, Evansville and Ft. Wayne. Keep in mind, the tiny Milan team led by Bobby Plump had won the state championship the year before in 1954, ending the small schools versus big schools argument. (Robertson played on the Attucks team that Milan beat in the state semi-finals that year.) Now Attucks came along to break the color barrier.

But it all started at the Dust Bowl. The rules were simple; winners stayed, losers walked. Robertson’s relationship with the Dust Bowl started early. Born on November 24, 1938, in Charlotte, Tennessee, he moved with his family to Indianapolis when he was four and took up basketball at the age of 6. He was too young and too small to do anything but watch the older, bigger kids take to the court to battle each other from the late afternoon into darkness of night. So he played during the only time allowed him, every day after school from 3 to 5:30 p.m. when the big kids started to make their way over. The court was vacant because of the dust clouds and the heat of the late afternoon sun. If he was lucky, he could retake the court in the darkness hours after most of the players had gone home. The Big O’s routine continued for several summers, watching, working and waiting for his chance to play.

The older players that dominated the Lockefield Gardens courts were well known by area residents. They developed natural cliques and often teamed up together. These cliques were very hard to penetrate. It was considered a high honor to be asked to substitute into these scrimmages, if only for a few plays. While still in junior high, Robertson learned to make the most of these rare opportunities and by the summer before his freshman year, he was fast becoming a Dust Bowl fixture during the evening’s main games.

**Robertson at Crispus Attucks High School, Aug. 13, 1958.**
George Tilford/IndyStar File Photo.

The 6-foot-5, 220-pound Robertson led his teams to two high school state championships, two final fours at the University of Cincinnati, a Gold Medal at the 1960 Olympics, and one NBA Championship in the 1970-71 season. His pro career included a league MVP award, 12 All-Star appearances, and 11 appearances on the elite All-NBA Team in just 14 professional seasons. He remains the only player in NBA history to average a triple-double for an entire season. But in our city, he is remembered most for the feats he accomplished at the Dust Bowl.

*Winners of the Douglass Park Dustbowl Tourney, 1966*.
**Credit:** Indianapolis Recorder Collection, Indiana Historical Society

For the quarter century following the Big O’s departure from Indianapolis, although the Lockefield Gardens complex was demolished in 1976, the Dust Bowl remained a Hoosier city hoops hotspot until IUPUI took over the property in 1983. The legend of Oscar Robertson grew and his shadow cast influence over every game played thereafter. Robertson’s time spent at the Dust Bowl was the most productive of his accomplished life. It was there that he learned to play the game that would change the Hoosier landscape forever.

For his outstanding achievements, Robertson was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1980 and was voted one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History in 1996. The United States Basketball Writers Association renamed their college Player of the Year Award the Oscar Robertson Trophy in his honor in 1998, and he was one of five people chosen to represent the inaugural National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame class in 2006. After the 1983 demolitions, only the units along Blake Street and Locke Street (now University Boulevard), remained. The remaining structures were placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, there are Dust Bowl residents who can recall how Oscar’s mom used to yank him off the darkened court near midnight. Neighbors remember the echoes of the solitary bounce of a basketball like a clock in the nighttime, keeping them from sleeping. Invariably, upon investigation, young Oscar would be found out on the court alone, practicing; always practicing. A rumor persists to this day that if it got too late, residents of the Dust Bowl would shoot BB guns at the backboard; a signal that it was time for Oscar to go home.

ABA-American Basketball Association, Sports

Wendell Ladner. The ABA’s Brawling Burt Reynolds. Part 2.

February 2, 2025February 7, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original publish date January 26, 2023. https://weeklyview.net/2023/01/26/wendell-ladner-the-abas-brawling-burt-reynolds-part-2/

I grew up a gym rat. I’ve mentioned before how my parents used to take me down to the Fairgrounds, drop me off at the player entrance at the State Fairgrounds Coliseum, and leave me there for an hour or so while they traveled over to the TeePee Restaurant for pie and coffee. That’s when this reporter, then a 10-year-old with a Hollywood burr, first encountered a muscular, burly 6-foot-5, 220-pound guy who was a dead ringer for Burt Reynolds. His name was Wendell Ladner, and even though for much of his career he wasn’t even a starter, he always hustled, threw himself after any loose ball, and elbowed his way to every rebound. He was an important cog for a New York Nets team that won an ABA championship and a Kentucky Colonels team that thumped up on my beloved Indiana Pacers often enough that I held a grudge. But he was always nice enough to stop, smile, and talk for a minute to a shy buck-toothed kid when I asked him for an autograph.

Things changed for Wendell Ladner midway between the 1972-73 season when he joined Southport High School’s “Little” Louie Dampier, “The Horse” Dan Issel, and the “A-Train” Artis Gilmore as a member of Pacer’s arch-rival Kentucky Colonels. His numbers weren’t his best with the Colonels, falling to 7.3 ppg and 4.9 rpg the first season and 9.9 ppg and 7.9 rpg that second season. Despite those numbers, he quickly became one of the most popular players on the Colonels roster — “expecially” with the ladies. However, if you were ever privileged enough to see a Pacers vs. Colonels game in person back then, you know that Colonels fans are tough. So Wendell had to win the male fans over first.

Today, they would call Wendell Ladner a “defensive specialist” for the Colonels. But what that really meant was Ladner was an enforcer whose job it was to hack the hell out of anyone who dared foul Dan Issel or Artis Gilmore. He was involved in more than one Pacers fistfight during his tenure with the Colonels. While fight stats in the ABA were never kept, I would be willing to bet that Ladner got in a “spirited scuffle” with players on every team in the league. Rumor has it that the Dallas Cowboys once invited Ladner to try out for the team. Colonels minority owner Bill Boone called him “the toughest SOB I’ve ever seen . . . a rebounding fool and hatchet man.”

During the 30th ABA reunion in 1997, Bob Netolicky and I traveled down to do a radio show in Louisville with longtime Colonels trainer Lloyd “Pink” Gardner. After the show, we retreated to the radio station breakroom for some after-hour storytelling. Pink was the team trainer for all nine seasons of the ABA (1967-1975) so he knew everyone. He remembered Wendell’s habit of fussing over his hair constantly. Pinky said, “Wendell had a habit of never adding the ‘ed’ suffix to his words when he talked. He’d say things like ‘I don’t want to get my hair all mess up.’ or ‘I’m going out tonight so I gotta get all dress up.’ One night Ladner had a terrible game, lost us the game actually. Dan Issel came into the locker room and saw Wendell primping in the mirror with his hairbrush getting ready to scoot out for a hot date. Dan yelled, ‘Watch out everybody, Wendell’s game was all foul up so don’t say nothin’ to him or you’ll get him all peeve off.’ (Only Issel didn’t say foul or peeve if you know what I mean.) Next thing you know Issel and Ladner were throwing punches while the whole locker room was rolling on the floor laughing.”

**1972-73 Kentucky Colonels. Lloyd Gardner back row far left. Wendell Ladner back row 2nd from right.**

In his book Kentucky Colonels: Shots from the Sidelines, Pink explained: “Wendell always played with reckless abandon, always diving after loose balls, jumping over press tables, always hoping that he would come down in the lap of some beautiful lady.” Pink recalled one game “with 3:09 left in the game and the Colonels with a sizable lead, Wendell went airborne over the Cougars bench, crashing into a five-gallon glass water cooler.” The bottle smashed to the floor and Wendell landed on the shards of broken glass. He jumped up quickly and tried to get back to the floor, but the trainer stopped him because he was bleeding profusely from gashes in his arm. Pink continued, “He wanted to go back out and play. Dr. Rudy Ellis said no. We took him to the hospital and stitched him up, 37 stitches in all.

**Lloyd Gardner (left) wrapping Wendell Ladner’s lacerated arm.**

It was April 21st, 1973, game 6 of the ABA Eastern Division finals against the Carolina Cougars at Freedom Hall and the Cougars were up in the series 3 games to 2. Play was stopped while Wendell was led to the locker room dripping in blood while the crowd watched in stunned silence. Thirty minutes later, here comes Ladner sprinting back to the bench, a bandage encasing his left forearm. The Colonels were losing and Ladner begged to re-enter the game, but sanity prevailed and Mr. Excitement was placed at the end of the bench for his own protection.” Pink noted, “but Wendell never missed a practice or game.” Kentucky would win that game and then another to take the series. But they lost the ABA Championship to the Indiana Pacers 4 games to 3. The Pacers became the first team to win a third ABA championship while the Colonels became the first team to lose two separate ABA championship series. Complete disclosure: The Pacers would eventually lose two, too.

**Wendell Ladner talks to reporter Kay Gilman.** Getty images.

Also in 1973, Wendell pulled off the stunt he is most remembered for to this day. Ladner did his best imitation of Burt Reynolds infamous Cosmopolitan magazine nude pose in a shirtless beefcake poster that sold out in hours. Wendell is posed stretched out on the Colonels’ locker room bench at Freedom Hall in Louisville wearing only his “tighty-whitey” home uniform trunks (players didn’t wear the baggy trunks they wear today) with a Red, White, & Blue ABA basketball strategically positioned to hide his naughty bits. Ladner flashed a million-dollar smile for the female Colonel faithful. Oh, and the poster has a “Best Wishes” facsimile autograph in the upper right corner. After that poster came out, Ladner really played up to that image. During timeouts, women jockeyed for position behind the Colonels bench to giggle and shout sweet nothings to their favorite as he brushed the hair away from his eyes and smiled back at them.

The next season (January of 1974), Ladner was traded to the New York Nets, a trade KFC magnate and Colonels owner John Y. Brown, Jr. later said he regretted. The Colonels traded Ladner and Mike Gale to the Nets for John Roche, pronounced “Ouch” by Colonels fans. At the time of the trade New York trailed Kentucky in the Eastern Division standings, but after adding Ladner, the Nets surged past the Colonels to win the Eastern Division championship and the 1974 ABA championship beating his old team. During that series, Ladner and his old teammate Dan Issel exchanged punches in one game: Issel wound up with three stitches under one eye.

Former ABA Virginia Squires and Cincinnati Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman called it “the worst trade ever in professional basketball.” Maybe not the worst pro basketball trade ever, but it sure was a bad one. The next year, Little Louie Dampier busted his hand wide open during a game and asked Colonels team doctor Rudy Ellis to stitch up his hand “in a hurry so I can get back into the game” to which the Doctor replied, “I thought Wendell Ladner was the only person that crazy.” In New York, Ladner’s job with the Nets was to protect Julius Erving. Dr. J called Wendell his wackiest teammate ever because “he wanted to be Burt Reynolds with a basketball”.

After winning his one and only ABA Championship, on June 24, 1975, Ladner boarded Eastern Air Lines Flight 66 from New Orleans to New York City. The plane, a Boeing 727 trijet tail number N8845E, departed from Moisant Field (Louis Armstrong International Airport today) without any reported difficulty at 1:19 PM EDT with 124 people on board, including 116 passengers and a crew of 8. A severe thunderstorm hit JFK airport just as Flight 66 was approaching the New York City area. At 3:52, the approach controller warned all incoming aircraft that the airport was experiencing “very light rain showers and haze” with zero visibility and that all approaching aircraft would need to perform instrumental landings. At 3:53, Flight 66 was approaching Runway 22L. 6 minutes later, the controller warned all aircraft of “a severe wind shift” on the final approach, the aircraft encountered a microburst or wind shear environment caused by the severe storms.

**The wreckage of Eastern Airlines flight 66 after it crashed on approach to JFK Airport. (AP)**

The plane continued its descent until it began striking the approach lights approximately 2,400 feet from the start of the runway. Upon the first impact, the plane banked to the left. It continued striking the approach lights until it burst into flames and scattered the wreckage along Rockaway Boulevard, which runs along the northeast perimeter of JFK airport. Of the 124 people on board, 107 passengers and six crew members (including all four flight crew members) were killed. The other 11 people on board, including nine passengers and two flight attendants, were injured but survived. Wendell Ladner was not among them.

Ladner died at the age of 26. His body was identified by medical examiners only because he was wearing his charred Nets ABA championship ring. At the time, the crash was the deadliest in United States history. For many years, the Nets included his name and uniform number in their list of retired numbers, though Ladner’s No. 4 did not hang in the rafters with the other retired numbers. Out of respect to Ladner, Fritz Massmann, Nets trainer from 1970 to 1992, never issued No. 4 to any other player for 17 years after Ladner’s death. When Fritz retired, the New Jersey Nets issued Wendell’s number 4 to Rick Mahorn which he wore for the next 4 years.

Wendell Ladner finished his 300-game ABA career with 3,474 points and 2,481 rebounds. He also played in 40 ABA playoff games and a pair of ABA all-star games. Ladner also has a road in Perkinston, Mississippi, named after him in his honor. The crash of Flight 66 led to the development of the first low-level wind shear alert system by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in 1976. The accident also led to the discovery of downbursts, a weather phenomenon that creates vertical wind shear and poses dangers to landing aircraft, which ultimately sparked decades of research into downburst and microburst phenomena and their effects on aircraft. ABA fans might find it ironic that the term for the natural phenomenon that took Wendell Ladner’s life became known as a microburst. If Mother Nature had nicknamed this masculine mauler from the Magnolia State herself, she quite likely would have reserved the name microburst for him. Because, make no mistake about it, Wendell Ladner was a true force of nature.

ABA-American Basketball Association, Sports

Wendell Ladner. The ABA’s Brawling Burt Reynolds. Part 1.

February 2, 2025February 7, 2025 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

Original publish date January 19, 2023. https://weeklyview.net/2023/01/19/wendell-ladner-the-abas-brawling-burt-reynolds-part-1/

**1973-74 ABA Champion New York Nets. Wendell Ladner # 4 standing baw row 3rd from left.**

Rhonda and I headed down to the Indiana State Fairgrounds for the Greater Indianapolis Garage Sale this weekend. We hadn’t been to that show in a couple of years, mostly due to Covid-19 concerns. We enjoy that show simply because it is one of the true flea market-style gatherings left in the Circle City. We always find something. It might be a tchotchke for the kids or a treasure for the wife, you never can tell. Me, I like diving into boxes of old paper. You never know what you’re going to find.

This time, as I thumbed through a box of old paper goods and tickled my way past maps, old greeting cards, receipts, family photos, and travel brochures, I found a hidden treasure. A treasure to my eyes anyway. Folded up into quarters wedged between a couple of totally dissimilar items was a photo of the 1973-74 ABA New York Nets. I was (and always will be) an Indiana Pacers kid. But I always had a healthy respect for three rival teams: The Kentucky Colonels, Utah Stars, and the New York Nets. It always seemed that when the Pacers weren’t winning championships, it was because of one of those damned teams stole one from us. It was a thrill to find the photo just a few hundred yards away from the building where they actually played.

**State Fairgrounds Coliseum. Home of the ABA Pacers.**

So here they were, dressed in those classic home white uniforms with the stars and stripes ribbon bursting out of their heart and flowing down the side. Julius “Dr. J” Erving was front and center (right where he should be) flanked by Billy “Whopper” Paultz, “Super John” Williamson (who spent some time as a Pacer), Mike “Sugar” Gale, Willie “Rainbow” Sojourner (who gave his teammate the nickname “Dr. J”), Larry “Mr. K” Kenon, Bill “Cyclops” Melchioni, Brian Taylor (who didn’t have a nickname but was so good he deserved one) and a teenaged clubhouse boy named Allan Trautwig. Yes — the same Al Trautwig from MSG Network, ABC, NBC, NBC Sports Network, and USA Network and the pre-game/post-game shows/sometime play-by-play man for the New York Knicks and Rangers during his Emmy Award-winning career.

But the man in that photo that drew my interest was standing in the back row, third from the left. It was “Mr. Excitement” Wendell Ladner. If you are a fan of the ABA, you remember Wendell Ladner. Ladner was born on October 6, 1948, in Necaise Crossing, a tiny, unincorporated town in Hancock County, Mississippi, the far southwest corner of the state. Ladner’s birth seems to be the only noteworthy thing that ever happened there. Ladner played prep ball for the Hancock North Central High School Hawks in Kiln, Mississippi. The school opened in 1959 and for a quarter century, Wendell was the school’s star athlete until Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre came along in 1985.

Legendary ABA beat writer (and friend) Jim O’Brien was one of the first to recognize Ladner’s talent. Writing about him in 1972 in the book ABA All-Stars, O’Brien said, “Ladner likes to talk about his town, which he says had about 600 people living in it. The nearest big town was Gulfport, about 32 miles away. ‘None of my friends had driver’s licenses, so without transportation, we couldn’t go to town very often. I’d never been around a town a lot. Necaise Crossing, to me, was a lot of fun. I grew up there and might’ve played basketball from the time I was 9 ‘til I was 17 and went away to college. We’d shoot basketball all day and into the night. We didn’t have any lights, so we’d go out into the woods with axes and cut us some logs. It was no big thing. We’d cut up oak trees that had fallen. We’d chop them up good, and use the splinters to start the fire. We’d have one big fire and it’d light the area so we could play. The only other thing you did was milk cows and ride horses. We raised hogs, too. My family had a dairy barn. We had no heat in the house, except for the big fireplace, and no bathroom. We’d get a wagonload of wood and pile it by our house. We were over at our grandmother’s house killing hogs one day when our house burned down. Some ashes hadn’t gone out, my sister said, and they started a fire again and it caught on some drapes and the whole place went up in smoke.’”

Of his college years, Ladner told the sportswriter, “‘I never watched my weight in college. I just ate all the time. I never trained like I should have. This is a lot different from college. It’s a lot rougher. In college, I had to go against guys my size, but now most of the people I play against are a lot bigger.’ O’Brien added, “That’s how he got started. Now Ladner would like to improve his play and help the Pros to build a winner in Memphis. ‘I think I’ll be a lot better,’ he said at the start of his second season in the ABA. ‘I’m still making too many fouls and lots of mistakes, but I know when to take a shot now. You know, I really was surprised I had a rookie season like I did. I just wanted to make the team. I didn’t think I’d make it. But in the first exhibition game, I scored 17 points and grabbed 15 rebounds, and it surprised me that I could do something like that. The biggest surprise, of course,’ he continued, ‘was making the All-Star team. It was an honor to make it…the only rookie on the West team. That was a big thrill.’ Brute strength and a desire to excel are among his most recognizable traits. He has good basketball instincts and is unusually quick for a man his size. ‘I like the way he rebounds and gets the ball out in a hurry,’ said (coach) Babe McCarthy. ‘He could be a big asset in a fast-break attack.’ ‘I’m not going to live on my first-year reputation,’ Ladner told us. ‘I have to prove it this year again and get back into that All-Star game.’”

Ladner was a star at the University of Southern Mississippi from 1966 to 1970 averaging 20.5 ppg and 16.5 rpg for his career. His 1,256 career rebound mark is still the second-highest in USM history and the highest among 3-season players. His SMU career stats: 650 out of 1,410 Field Goals, and 261 out of 390 Free Throws for a total of 1,561 points place him 11th all-time in scoring at Southern Miss and his career scoring average of 20.5 is still the best in school history. He owns 14 of the top 16 rebounding performances in Southern Miss history including a school record 32 rebounds against Texas-Pan American, 31 against Old Dominion, and 30 against Louisville during the 1969-70 season. Ladner was drafted in the second round of the American Basketball Association draft by the Memphis Tams and was signed prior to the NBA draft, where he was projected to be one of the top 20 prospects.

From 1970 to 1973, Wendell played for the Memphis Pros, Carolina Cougars, and Memphis Tams, all utterly forgettable teams. Ladner was named to the 1971 ABA All-Rookie team, and selected to the ABA all-star game his rookie season alongside Dan Issel and Charlie Scott, the ABA’s Co-Rookies of the Year. That year, on January 24, he set his career-high points total of 34 in a Memphis win over The Floridians. During those years, the 6 ft. 5 inch, 220-pound power forward developed into one of the league’s toughest enforcers while averaging 16 points and 10 rebounds per game. Unsurprisingly, he also averaged over 4 fouls per game during that time, leading the league in 2 out of his first 3 seasons, in both of those foul-leading seasons, he made the all-star team. He was the enforcer for five ABA teams during his career, which lasted from 1970 to 1975. His job was to protect his star teammates like Dr. J and Dan Issel by roughing up anyone he viewed as playing too rough.

Early in the 1971-72 season, playing against the Nets in New York, Ladner was ejected from the game during an overtime period for what an official termed “a malicious foul” on superstar Rick Barry. Ladner said it was necessary for him to play Barry aggressively, but insisted he didn’t mean to hurt him. “I sure wouldn’t want to break his leg and put him up in bed with his family,” said the good old boy from Mississippi. He said it wasn’t a dirty play, and even stopped by the Nets dressing room to explain it to Barry. “I know one thing,” said Barry. “If you were trying to hurt me, you would have done a better job of it.”

One of the great stories about Ladner involves a former ABA player named John Brisker whom I profiled years ago in a Weekly View story that actually led to my appearance in a Beyond the Paint documentary on ESPN (I appeared sandwiched in between Rick Barry and Julius Erving no less!). Ladner regularly squared off against Brisker, widely considered to be the meanest, roughest, toughest player in the history of the ABA. Legend claims that Ladner once marched into the Pittsburgh Condors’ locker room before the game started yelling, “Hey, John, you wanna fight right now or wait for the game?” Brisker and Ladner often beat each other bloody on the court, only to hang out together at a local bar afterward. Those were the kind of stories that made Wendell Ladner a legend and Wendell Ladner was the kind of player that made the ABA legendary.

Next Week: Part 2

Criminals, Indianapolis, Pop Culture, Sports

John Dillinger the ballplayer.

May 22, 2021 Alan E. Hunter- Irvington

**John “Jack Rabbit” Dillinger and the Mooresville “AC’s”**

Original publish date: April 8, 2021

Despite John Dillinger’s meteoric rise to infamy and spectacular headline grabbing death, his Indianapolis boyhood was unexceptional. He attended public schools for eight years in the Circle City and was a typical student. His teachers recalled that he liked working with his hands, was good with all things mechanical and liked reading better than math. He liked hunting, fishing, playing marbles, the Chicago Cubs and playing baseball. He was energetic and got along well with others (although he often bullied younger children), was cocky and quick witted. Dillinger quit school at age 16, not due to any trouble, but because he was bored and wanted to make money on his own.
During World War I, Dillinger tried to get a job at Link Belt in the city but was rejected because he was too young. Instead, he took a job as an apprentice machinist at James P. Burcham’s Reliance Specialty Company on the southwest side of Indianapolis and worked nights and weekends as an errand boy for the Indianapolis Board of Trade. All the while, Dillinger played second base on the company baseball team. One slot on Dillinger’s resume included a four day stint with the Indianapolis Power & Light Company drawing the hefty sum of 30 cents an hour. Just long enough for the “ringer” to help the IPL team win a league title.
In his spare time, Dillinger hung out at the local pool hall where he drank and smoked with the older men and cavorted with the local prostitutes. One of the regulars later recalled, “John would come in, hang up his hat and play pool at a quarter a game. He wasn’t very good, and he frequently lost. When he would lose two dollars, he’d put back the cue, get his cap, and walk out without a word. Never gave anyone any trouble and never said much.”

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In 1920, his father, John Dillinger Sr., believing that the city was corrupting his son, sold his eastside Indianapolis Maywood grocery store property and moved his family to Mooresville. For the next 3 years, young Dillinger split his time between Moorseville, Martinsville and Indianapolis, traveling by interurban or motorcycle nearly every day. The athletic Dillinger quickly caught on with the semipro Mooresville Athletic Club’s “Athletics” baseball team. His reputation on the local sandlots and his quick speed earned him the nickname “The Jackrabbit”.
The 5-foot-7, 150 pound middle infielder batted leadoff and led the Athletics in hitting, for which the team’s sponsor, the Old Hickory Furniture Company, gave him a $25 reward on their way to the 1924 league championship. His game was so tight that other local teams began to pay him to play ball for them and throughout that summer the cash poured in.

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Dillinger’s younger sister Frances, who passed away in 2015, insisted that her brother was good enough to draw Major League scouts to tiny Martinsville just to watch him play. Flush with confidence and blinded by the glare of an obviously bright future, Dillinger married Beryl Ethel Hovious in Mooresville on April 12, 1924. The couple moved into his father’s farm house but within a few weeks of the wedding, the groom was arrested for stealing 41 Buff Orpington chickens from Omer A. Zook’s farm on the Millersville Road.
Though his father was able to work out a deal to keep the case out of court, it further strained his relationship between them. Dillinger and Beryl moved out of their cramped bedroom and into Beryl’s parents’ home in Martinsville. There Dillinger got a job in an upholstery shop. All the while, Dillinger continued to play baseball. In between calling balls and strikes during AC Athletics games, umpire Ed Singleton (a web-fingered local drunk and pool shark 11-years his senior) was in the young shortstop’s ear. Singleton said he knew an old man, Frank Morgan, who carried loads of cash in his pockets around the streets of Mooresville.

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Beryl Hovius and John Dillinger

On September 24, 1924, the young and impressionable Dillinger accompanied Singleton on what turned out to be a botched stick-up. After ambushing Morgan with a heavy iron bolt wrapped in a cotton handkerchief and knocking him unconscious, Dillinger fled the scene, thinking he had killed his victim. Turns out the bolt was not heavy enough to render an unconscious blow so Dillinger pistol whipped the old man in the face. The gun went off, firing harmlessly into the ground, unbeknownst to the young hoodlum. The robbery netted just $50 ($750 in today’s money).
Upon hearing the gunshot, Singleton panicked and drove away with the getaway car, stranding Dillinger, who ducked into a pool hall a few blocks away. Dillinger was arrested the next day at his father’s farm and held in the county jail in Martinsville. His father visited him there and told “Junior”, “Johnnie if you did this thing, the only way is to own up to it. They’ll go easy on you and you’ll get a new start.” Dillinger, who did not have a lawyer, pled guilty and received a 10-year prison sentence. His accomplice Ed Singleton hired a lawyer and received just 5 years. John Dillinger had launched himself into the big leagues of professional crime. But again, baseball would play a pivotal role in the young outlaw’s life. z pendleton
While incarcerated at the Indiana Reformatory in Pendleton, Prison officials recognized his superior ball playing skills and quickly recruited him for the prison ball club. On July 22, 1959, the 25th anniversary of Dillinger’s death, the Indianapolis News ran an article on Dillinger the ballplayer by “Outdoor Columnist” Tubby Toms. “His play was marvelous, both in the field and at bat… He might have been a Major League shortstop the caliber of a Pee Wee Reese or a Phil Rizzuto.” Tubby further mentioned an interaction between Governor Harry G. Leslie and Dillinger. Leslie, who has been detailed in a couple of my past columns, was a legendary athlete at Purdue University. Leslie always made it a point to stop and linger on visits to watch the prison ballplayers in action.
Tubby, who was the News Statehouse reporter at the time, recalls a 1932 visit to the prison with Governor Leslie when both men watched the reformatory’s baseball team take on a local semipro club. The two men couldn’t take their eyes off the shortstop whom fellow inmates were calling “jackrabbit”. Governor Leslie strongly believed in the rehabilitative power of organized competition and took a keen interest in inmates who applied themselves and excelled. So it wasn’t unusual that Dillinger captured his attention.

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Governor Harry Leslie

Later that day, as fate would have it, Governor Leslie presided over Dillinger’s parole hearing. After Dillinger was once again denied parole, the dejected outlaw asked a question of the board. “I wonder if it would be possible to transfer me to the State Prison up at Michigan City? They’ve got a REAL ball team up there.” The Governor then said, “Gentlemen, I saw this lad play baseball this afternoon, and let me tell you, he’s got major league stuff in him. What reason can there be for denying him this request? It may play an important part in his reformation.” His request was granted and to this day, his official records state that he was sent to the big house “so he can play baseball.” It was at Michigan City where John Dillinger, under the tutelage of more seasoned cons, learned how to be a bank robber.
On May 22, 1933, Governor Paul McNutt released Dillinger from State Prison. Within a month, he held up the manager of a thread factory in Monticello, Illinois. A month after that, he held up a drugstore in Irvington. From there, he graduated to robbing banks. Dillinger followed his beloved Cubbies for the rest of his short life. Legend states that he even attended a few games at Wrigley Field while perched atop J. Edgar Hoover’s most wanted list. In fact, while playing toss in the outfield before a game in August of 1933, the bank robber was pointed out to outfielder Babe Herman as he sat with a group in the left field box seats. Cubs Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett often recalled how Chicago police routinely knew that Dillinger was in the crowd of Cubby faithful at Wrigley Field but never turned him into the G-men. Cubs all-star Woody English was once stopped on his way to the ballpark because he drove the same model of car as the outlaw did.
In a letter to his niece Mary, with whom he used to play catch, Dillinger said he was going to try and head east to see the Giants play the Senators in the 1933 World Series. Unfortunately, he was arrested on Sept. 22, 11 days before the start of the Fall Classic. He did, however, make money betting on the Giants, who won the series in five games. The 1933-1934 hot stove season was a busy one for Dillinger. He busted out of two jails and on June 22, 1934, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI officially dubbed him Public Enemy No. 1. Dillinger responded by hiding out in plain sight in the city of big shoulders. He went to movies, partied at night clubs, toured the Chicago World’s Fair (more than once), and took in several Cubs games. Dillinger almanac

After a near fatal, botched plastic surgery in May of 1934, Dillinger dyed his hair, grew a mustache, and sported dark sunglasses to attend games at Wrigley to test out his new look out. One of Dillinger’s known hideouts in Chicago was an apartment at 901 W. Addison St., just two blocks east of Wrigley Field. On June 8th, Dillinger watched as his Cubs witness from the season before, Babe Herman, hit a 2-run homer in a loss to Cincinnati 4-3. In a story that made newspapers nation-wide, Dillinger watched from the upper deck as again Babe Herman drove in a pair of runs during a June 26th game as the Cubs defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers 5-2.
Mailman Robert Volk, who was in the garage in Crown Point on March 3, 1934 when Dillinger broke out of jail, instantly recognized the arch-criminal and the robber recognized him too. The outlaw got up and sat down next to the terrified man. After sitting in chilled silence for a while, Volk shakily said “this is getting to be a habit”, to which America’s most wanted bank robber replied “it certainly is.” Dillinger smiled and shook the mailman’s hand, introduced himself as “Jimmy Lawrence”, and left during the 7th inning stretch.

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Despite this close call, Dillinger returned to Wrigley again on July 8th to watch the Pirates get pounded by his Cubbies 12-3 (for the sake of continuity, Babe Herman went 1 for 5 in this one). After the blowout, the Cubs left on an extended road trip. They were still on the road against the Phillies on July 22 when Dillinger decided to catch a movie at the Biograph Theatre. The White Sox were in town that afternoon playing a double-header against the Yankees. The Bronx Bombers ‘moidered” the north-siders in both contests. Had Dillinger been a White Sox fan he might have avoided his date with destiny and lived to die another day. He might have been in the bleachers to catch Babe Ruth’s 16th homer that day. Instead he caught a hail of bullets in a damp Chicago alleyway. According to the Cook County coroner, the jackrabbit was only three pounds above his old playing weight.

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